Bench’s first headquarters were little more than a Vancouver apartment shared among its four co-founders.
It only needed Kraft Dinner cooking on a radiator and a bookshelf made of cinderblocks and unfinished plywood for it to be a true bachelor pad for techies.
“The first few years was … figuring out what we wanted to be when we [grew] up,” CEO Ian Crosby told Business In Vancouver.
The “we” Crosby refers to is Bench itself, which specializes in software that automates bookkeeping tasks. He said there was a lot of experimentation with its products before the firm landed on something that connected with small business owners looking to unload unwanted bookkeeping duties.
“Now the focus is, ‘Great – let’s take that to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people,’” Crosby said.
And one surefire way of coming to grips with a startup’s impending adulthood might be international recognition and tens of millions of dollars in investment. In January 2016, Forbes named Crosby to its annual 30 Under 30 list. And by May of that same year the company closed a US$16 million round of funding, bringing to US$33 million the total amount of capital raised.
“It definitely helped with hiring,” Crosby said, adding that over the last year, Bench has bolstered its executive team with four new vice-presidents handling duties that range from business development to product and strategy.
Despite the injection of new capital and growth in head count (it has added 220 employees in less than five years), Crosby is quick to assert that the company’s culture hasn’t changed much since he and his co-founders were sharing that apartment in the early days.
Bench’s “guiding light,” he said, has been a focus on the customer experience and not “acquiescing to corporate overlords.”
While Bench’s growth has been swift, one city over in Richmond, ZE PowerGroup Inc. has been relishing a different kind of growth in the midst of a turbulent energy and commodities cycle.
Since its launch in the mid-1990s, ZE PowerGroup has been collecting and managing data from across the globe to measure variables – weather, commodity prices or even stream flows – that could affect power prices.
However, the 2014 oil shock ushered in a downcycle for the sector that tech companies like ZE PowerGroup haven’t been immune to.
But 2016 was a solid year for the company, all things considered, said founder and CEO Zak El-Ramly.
“It’s definitely affected some of our clients and it made them more price conscious,” El-Ramly said.
But those same price-conscious clients looked at cutting costs the past year by contracting ZE PowerGroup to complete services they otherwise would have done in-house.
“On one side you get a reduction in services, but on the other side you get an enhanced increase in different, other kinds of services,” El-Ramly said.
The strategy to focus more on cloud services helped revenue grow in the last fiscal year by 23% compared with the same period a year earlier (the company, which is privately held, did not reveal its total dollar amount for revenue).
The pace of growth isn’t the only thing setting ZE PowerGroup apart from Bench. Its business strategy also stands in marked contract to that of the other company.
El-Ramly said ZE PowerGroup has never borrowed any money, so all growth is self-financed from recurring revenue.
“Our growth is not necessarily astronomical, but more stable.”
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