Matt Best always figured he had a future in marketing.

But it wasn’t until he took the lead role on a class project at Red River College that he knew for certain he could make a career of it.

“When I got to Red River College, I quickly realized that marketing was one of my passions,” says Best, 24, a former Winnipeg resident who now calls Calgary home. “After having the opportunity to work on the Entrepreneurship (program) practicum as the leader of my marketing group, I also realized that I was good at it.”

These days, Best works as Coordinator of Consumer Engagement for TrojanOne, a Canadian marketing agency with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. In addition to running the Calgary office, Best also contributes to marketing efforts for a roster of blue-chip clients, among them Canadian Tire, Mattel, Coca-Cola and Bank of Montreal.

“We’re pretty much your one-stop-shop for everything,” says Best of TrojanOne, a company he first became involved with through an internship with the University of Lethbridge (where he’s currently pursuing a degree in Marketing). “Our vision is to get our clients promoted, so that’s what we strive for in everything we do.”

Raised in Charleswood — where he was active in sports like hockey, golf and lacrosse — Best got his first taste of the marketing world through high school business classes he enrolled in as a teen. He spent a year in Vancouver after graduating Grade 12, but returned to Winnipeg in time to sign up for RRC’s Business Administration program in 2006.

He credits the program — in particular, the Entrepreneurship stream, which requires participants to launch their own mock businesses (complete with business plan and year-end trade show demonstration) — with outfitting him with the tools he needed to survive and even thrive in the fast-paced world of business marketing.

In Best’s case, the product of his (group) Entrepreneurship project was a hybrid limousine company called A-Plus Limousines. He says the project — in which he and his teammates carried out various aspects of the business development process, usually at the same time they were being explored in class — is much closer to the real world than he realized at the time.

“We had to show all our financials — whether things were financially feasible or not, pretty much down to every last detail,” he says. “Now that I have to go out and do budgets for work every day, I realize that what we were doing was pretty high-level stuff.”

The program’s focus on group work also proved helpful, Best says, since so much of his current work is of a collaborative nature.

“You work quite closely as a team out here, so you do a fair bit of brainstorming,” he explains. “In all marketing, I find there’s a lot of brainstorming, where someone thinks of something, which in turn triggers something in your brain, and within half an hour, you have a high-level idea written down.”

Once he’s got his Marketing degree in hand, Best hopes to continue working in larger markets — preferably in sports marketing and branding. But wherever he winds up, he’s sure he’ll be well-prepared, thanks to the training he received at Red River College.

“You don’t always notice how it’s helping you in the short-term, but it really does set you on the right track,” he says.

Click here to learn more about RRC’s Business Administration program.

Click here for more information about TrojanOne.