When layoffs come, many people focus on what they have lost. But Shawn Mahoney wants them to see what they still carry with them: the skills, experience and value that stay even when a job ends.
In Alberta, where entire industries keep shifting, that mindset matters.
“I think one of the hardest things is probably identity,” says Mahoney, co-founder and CEO of Spare Parts & Gasoline, in a sit-down interview with Digital Journal at Inventures 2025.
“People blur their personal identity with their organizational identity, and depending how long or how much you believed in the identity [of the] organization, that can be extremely painful to separate.”
Mahoney knows that struggle firsthand.
His Calgary-based consulting firm was built after more than 1,500 Calgarians lost their jobs at a large oil and gas company two years ago.
That upheaval sparked Life After BigCo (LAB), a grassroots community and set of ideas he’s helped grow. LAB supports people who need to redefine what they bring to work when the company badge no longer defines them. The community encourages people to share what they know, learn from each other’s stories and try out new ideas before they fully commit to a path.
And this work cuts to the heart of how Alberta’s economy is changing.
As new industries emerge and old ones shift, success depends not only on creating startups but on helping people find the confidence, skills, and community they need to navigate uncertain ground.
Mahoney argues that resilience is about people as much as policy or investment. This idea ties back to a larger goal: helping people adapt well to change strengthens the entire economy by connecting talent with opportunities that might have been overlooked.
[Watch the full interview below]
BigCo’s layoffs lead to startup success
LAB didn’t start with a blueprint.
It emerged when Mahoney and his peers noticed that mass layoffs weren’t just corporate losses, they were feeding a pipeline of new ventures. Suddenly, people who never saw themselves as entrepreneurs were founding companies or joining early-stage teams, bringing their deep knowledge of scale, structure, and process along for the ride.
“One of the things that we learned was with the transitions of the people leaving these larger companies, [is] startups were actually having more success,” he says. Mahoney said that when his team shared that with the community, things changed.
“Instead of feeling like they were discarded, they were actually part of something that was important in our community,” he said.
That sense of starting over is becoming more common.
The traditional model of a career spent at one employer is fading across Canada. According to a Harris Poll, more than half of Canadian job seekers have already switched careers at least once (56%) and one third of Gen Zers (31%) and Millennials (28%) say they have already switched careers multiple times.
Workers are more mobile, but the loss of the ‘herd’ that big companies provide can shake a sense of identity and value.
For Mahoney, helping people see the worth of their experience, and what they may need to unlearn, is key to turning exits into fresh starts.
[Watch the full interview below]
The value in unlearning BigCo ways
Spare Parts & Gasoline’s work looks at the gap between habits that are assets in big companies, and what’s needed to work well in smaller, faster-moving ones. He says people coming from large firms often don’t realize how valuable their experience with strategy and systems can be.
“There’s a lot of structures and things that are well thought out in big organizations,” he says. “Something that you took for granted such as water that you just swam in, is actually really helpful to companies that are trying to navigate their way up to a larger company.”
But some skills don’t transfer so easily.
Smaller teams rely on speed, flexibility and low-cost experimentation, which can be uncomfortable for people used to more established ways of doing things. Mahoney says where the real work happens is in letting go.
“You have to unlearn,” he says. He points out that the pace of work is much faster in a five-person company than in a company of 5,000. For Mahoney, it comes down to reframing how people tackle problems and encouraging more creative solutions, instead of sticking with old ways just because they’ve always been done that way.
“There’s many ways to solve these problems,” he says.
[Watch the full interview below]
Finding your people when familiar ground is gone
At its core, LAB is not a service or a traditional network. It’s a collective mindset that says experienced professionals can still build new things together. It is not a formal program or service. Instead, it is an informal space where people can build confidence together.
From informal meetups to peer support, the community tries to show people they are not alone, even if the safety net of a steady paycheque is gone.
“When we lean into this work, we think it’s community work, and that’s why it’s important — because a rising tide raises all boats,” Mahoney says. “When we help people see options, become more resilient, have more perspectives, it helps both large enterprise and the startup community.”
Mahoney believes that as technologies like AI drive constant disruption, the biggest advantage Canada can claim is its people’s ability to adapt. For him, the fight worth having is not about clinging to old identities but building new ones — and doing it together.
“I just think we’re going to be [in] unrelenting change, and so our job is to get really good at change, really good at resilience,” he says. “Fight, and not in the sense of creating combats like we’re seeing in the world today, but in the sense of fight for our place.”
Watch the interview:
