Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Gord Baizley, chief strategy officer for Vision Critical, talks about how he managed to keep the marketing research technology company founded by Andrew Reid, son of Canadian pollster Angus Reid, on track to reach its $100 million revenue goal.
“I had done a joint law-MBA degree, and I worked at a little boutique investment banking firm, then practised law for a couple years. I tripped over Vision Critical, which was at the time a small but emerging opportunity, and I was hired in the senior finance role that eventually evolved into the CFO role.
“We’re a software as a service business. Long before it was clear that all market research and consumer feedback would be online, Andrew [Reid] was pushing online technology. The early adoption of the SaaS [software as a service] model was important. It gave us a lot of predictability around revenue.
“At the corporate or back end of the business, the challenge has always been keeping up with the growth. We were always growing quickly, adding a lot of people in different jurisdictions around the world, and that creates a lot of back-end complexity.
“As a high-growth company, you can get ahead of yourself. There are always things to invest in, and if you’re investing in things too much, it would be easy to get out over top of your skis, which we never did. We had an experienced board and CEO who knew you had to invest in the back end when the business started to grow, so we did that and never got behind.
“We had to keep ourselves capitalized and organized appropriately. We’ve had a pretty nice linear growth trajectory. When I joined in 2005, we were a 35-person, $2 million company, and we’ll be up in the $100 million range and 600 people (half in Vancouver) and 15 offices this year.
“We grew right through [the 2008-09 recession], and we grew for a couple of reasons. One, market research is a little bit counter-cyclical, because when there’s a little bit of pain, clients have got to get closer to their customers.
“But even more so, our value proposition is pretty compelling: We could get a lot of customer feedback and do a lot of market research very cost effectively and very quickly. When times were tough, that resonated.
“In the earlier days, it was funded through high-net-worth individuals. Telus Ventures was in for a little bit early on. They’ve been a long-standing partner. And along the way we’ve had some debt, and most recently we closed a $20 million equity financing with OMERS Ventures last August. That’s been the first real material institutional injection that we’ve had.
“Looking ahead now, our challenges are how do we meet the market demand that’s coming and how can we grow faster. Growing from zero to $100 million is one thing, but how do you grow from $100 million to $500 million?” •
