Gathered in Halifax’s Park Lane Theatre, the Startup Empire attendees watched the screen. A movie wasn’t playing, but the conference’s presenting entrepreneurs explained their business strategies in a way that mirrors the movie-viewing experience: you see it in one place, but it is all around the world. 

Yesterday, Volta Labs presented Startup Empire, which concentrated on startup growth and scale. However, attendees were at all stages of their startups: ideation, implementation and growth.

Anna Foat knows how important growth is to startups: she was hired as one of the first salespeople at Research in Motion, which is now BlackBerry. Foat has worked for both big and small companies, and her consulting firm, Big Dog Sales Consulting, helps startups with their growth.

Foat left the big corporation world because of the passion and innovation seeping out of the startup world. However, she sees that big corporations have an advantage over startups: execution. Big corporations consistently execute large-scale productions.

“If startups can learn from the big corporations, there’s no stopping them,” she said. “But hold tightly on to the pieces of your culture that make you different.”

All the speakers following Foat exemplified this point. Marcel LeBrun, senior vice president and general manager at SalesForce Radian6, said he never thought regionally in his 12 years of working with startups. Kyle Racki never gave up when he was creating Proposify, which streamlines proposals in the cloud. Again and again, entrepreneurs spoke about the importance of big thinking—even if seems beyond reality.

Howard Lindzon Skyped into the conference from New York to tell the Startup Empire attendees why seeing beyond current reality is good. Lindzon has been saying it’s a good time to start a business for a long time, even during the 2008 recession—and he owns and founded StockTwits, a social network for traders and investors.

“Think of a business as risk,” he said. “Think of how you can create a crack in the industry.”

Speakers also handed out more practical advice. Dawn Uhmla of Innovacorp, Nova Scotia’s largest early stage venture capital organization, moderated a panel with several of the aforementioned speakers about sales to create growth within a startup. Panel members generally agreed that hustling and hardworking salespeople are necessary to create growth in a company.

The day ended with an interview with Michael Donovan, chairman for DHX Media. He demonstrated how the movie business is a great example for startups: starting small with a global mindset. Donovan began his show business career in Halifax, where he founded his production company, Salter Street Films, which produced shows such as “This Hour has 22 Minutes.” He then became CEO of DHX Media, the fourth largest animation production company in the world.

Donovan said it wasn’t hard for him to imagine going global with DHX—which now has offices in London, L.A. and Toronto, amongst others—because being in Halifax forced him to constantly travel to speak with buyers. There’s not much of a difference between flying from Halifax to L.A. or Barcelona.

“Face-to-face is even more important today,” Donovan said. “Face-to-face is critical.”