Avoid burnout - get new experiences

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Float or Founder episode 20: Erica Pearson

How do you retain good employees, prevent burnout, take unused vacation days off the balance sheet? How do you get employees to actually take their acrued vacation days? Adopt a wellness program that gets over 80% opt in that provides employer-matched vacation savings.

Erica Pearson is the founder and CEO of Vacation Fund. She shares how she started off with a scrappy and manual MVP to prove the concept, strategies for how a new founder can take time off (as best as possible!), and pitching as a first-time founder. She shares about the importance of living as many experiences as possible for a fulfilling life and how that mission fuels her team and her company.

About Erica Pearson

Founder and CEO of Vacation Fund

Erica is changing how companies handle offering vacation benefits to their employees through her company, Vacation Fund. For companies in competitive industries looking for a cost-effective strategy to retain talent and boost the company’s reputation, Vacation Fund is an employer-matched vacation saving platform that allows employees to direct a portion of their paycheque into a separate Vacation Fund Account, and allows the company to match a portion of the contribution. This helps companies attract talent faster, keeps employees productive and engaged by helping them regularly recharge, and allows companies to retain people for as long as possible by helping them live their lives to the fullest.

After 4 years competing as a varsity athlete, and simultaneously earning her Bachelor of Commerce degree at Queen’s University, Erica spent several years on the RBC Capital Markets trading floor in Toronto. She held Analyst positions within Debt Capital Markets, Foreign Exchange Institutional Sales, Institutional Equities Trading, Money Market Sales, and Interest Rate Derivative Solutions. Erica then worked as an Analyst for the CEO Office of Investor and Treasury Services. At the end of December 2016, she informed RBC of her intention to resign to start her own company. The idea for Vacation Fund was born from Erica’s upbringing. Her family was very frugal, but prioritized spending time and money on travel and experiences. By the time she turned 22, Erica had visited over 40 countries. Vacation Fund started out as an automated savings tool to help people save for their bucket list trips.