AQ's Blog & Grill Alan Quarry

Uvaro: Helping professionals have more fulfilling careers
In this episode, Donna talks about the ‘Why Not’ approach that has led her through much of her entrepreneurial career. Taking advantage of opportunities as they come and following your interests to see where they might lead. With Uvaro, Donna and her co-founders saw a hole within the tech industry and came up with a brilliant way to fill it. Learn all about Uvaro, their platform, what they do, and how they got to where they are today.

In this episode, Mallorie talks about the $24M CAD Series B funding that the company has just secured as well as the importance of maintaining the mindset of a start-up. To always be innovating and looking for opportunities within the industry is a crucial component to growing and scaling any business.
More on Bridgit Solutions:
|| https://www.bridgitsolutions.com/
|| https://twitter.com/bridgitsoftware
|| https://www.facebook.com/bridgitsolutions/
|| https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgit/
|| https://www.instagram.com/bridgitsolutions/
About Our Guest
Mallorie Brodie is the CEO and Co-founder of Bridgit. Along with Lauren Lake, Mallorie co-founded Bridgit in 2014 with a simple mission: to help the construction industry maximize profits and reduce risk by taking a people-first approach. Under her leadership, the team at Bridgit has established Bridgit Bench, the company’s flagship product, as the leading workforce intelligence solution built exclusively for the construction industry. Along with being named to the Top 40 Under 40 in Canadian Construction, Forbes Manufacturing & Industry 30 Under 30, and Best Of Canada Forbes Under 30 Innovators lists, Mallorie has been instrumental to Bridgit being recognized as one of Globe and Mail’s top growing companies in Canada for three consecutive years.

“We can honestly say that every assumption we made about how we thought it was going to work was wrong.”
Iain Klugman has spent the last 16 years bringing together government organizations, businesses, and talent to make Communitech an integral part of the Waterloo Region ecosystem. In this episode, he joins AQ to reminisce on his career of building Communitech to the intentionally collaborative and ambitious environment it is today.
Iain shares how his team worked to keep talent in the region when RIM went through a massive downfall, and how Communitech reviews their strategies yearly to adjust to this ever-changing community.
They discuss the comparison of Waterloo Region to Silicon Valley, the Future of X Initiative, the experiment that became the Corporate Innovation Program, and how the Waterloo Region has the potential to become a healthcare innovation hub.
 
Time Stamps:
0:21 Background of Iain Klugman and his role at Communitech
3:08 Last 16 Years at Communitech - Focus on Ecosystem
4:13 Comparison – Waterloo Region is NOT Silicon Valley
6:22 Future of X initiative
7:45 Google’s Expansion and it’s effects within the community
9:05 The War on Tent – status
10:43 Where Communitech’s Corporate Innovation Program Started – bringing in organizations as partners and the evolution of those relationships
14:30 Iain’s Public Administration Degree – worked in Government
16:06 Reworking strategies to suit the ecosystem’s maturation
17:48 Top 3 Communitech highlights of Iain’s last 16 years
22:27 When RIM lost its way and the impacts it had on the community and entrepreneurial ecosystem
24:55 Rise of MedTech in Waterloo Region
 
More on Iain:
||  https://www.linkedin.com/in/iain-klugman-136410/
||  https://twitter.com/iainklugman
More on Communitech:
||  https://www.linkedin.com/company/communitech/
||  https://www.facebook.com/communitechpage
||  https://www.instagram.com/communitech/
||  https://twitter.com/Communitech

In this week’s episode, Alan sits down with Dani Bazely, Director of Marketing for Driverseat, as they discuss the innovative, award-winning business. Driverseat’s franchise-based business model focuses on chauffeur and shuttle assistance, with opportunities for specialized services from accessible transport to tours across wine regions.
With low start-up costs, franchise owners range from young professionals and entrepreneurs to business owners looking to diversify their profile and add another income stream. The entrepreneurial opportunities that come from being a Driverseat franchisee are vast, as the business is scalable and has the potential to grow and expand in an ever-changing industry.
Dani discusses some of the marketing strategies coming into play for Driverseat in 2020. She also discusses the hurdles Driverseat has faced with their expansion from Kitchener, Ontario, to across Canada and the United States.
 
Time Stamps:
0:45 What is Driverseat?
2:43 Who might be interested in this type of franchise?
3:53 How important is company culture at Driverseat?
5:15 Chamber of Commerce Award: Being awarded the 2020 Young Professional of the Year
6:50 Lifelong Learning: What’s in the learning pipeline for Dani
8:00 Spectrum Board: Goals for the Spectrum brand in 2020
9:25 University History: From Economics to Communications
11:50 What marketing tactics is Driverseat going to employ in 2020?
13:28 Overcoming the challenges of expanding in the US
15:01 Who are Driverseat’s competitors?
15:51 Launching Driverseat in the Niagara wine region
 
More on Driverseat and Dani:
||  https://www.linkedin.com/in/dani-bazely-709ba750/
||  https://www.linkedin.com/company/driverseat-franchise/
||  https://www.facebook.com/DriverseatInc
||  https://www.instagram.com/driverseatinc/
||  https://twitter.com/DriverseatFirst
||  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqRjeY8Bfbfisyevj_WhyVw

What does successfully breaking into an untapped market actually look like? How do you do it? How do you bring a product to market that the market is ready to adopt right away?
You ask the market.
What sets Bridgit apart from so many other companies, and what has made them so successful, is that they went to their customers first. Before they ever had a business plan or a product - before they ever wrote a single line of code - they hit the pavement. Lauren Lake (Bridgit COO) and Mallorie Brodie (Bridgit CEO) would pop by construction sites early in the morning all over the city, with coffee and donuts and they talked to the people that would be consumers of their product. They spent their first 6 months in business “understanding the needs, building simple prototypes and validating those with people before actually investing and building the real product“. And that became Bridgit’s methodology - step by step, one piece at a time, following the research and the needs of those they were serving.
 
In this episode, Lauren goes into detail about the steps that Bridgit took in order to find a gap and identify the challenges within that gap, and how they turned their research into an incredible product used by over 150 customers across North America. 
Bridgit strives to revolutionize the way the construction industry functions, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.
 
Time stamps of key takeaways from this episode:
0:33 What is Bridgit
1:18 How the founders, Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, met and got started
3:52 Understanding the needs of their customers during the research process
5:45 The harder you work, the luckier you get
10:00 About the Bridgit products
15:15 What does success look like for Bridgit?
18:03 Finding support through incubators and accelerators 
20:54 What's next for Bridgit
23:50 How Lauren went from the Stratford arts community to being a Civil Engineering graduate
 
More on Bridgit Solutions:
|| https://www.bridgitsolutions.com/
|| https://twitter.com/bridgitsoftware
|| https://www.facebook.com/bridgitsolutions/
|| https://www.linkedin.com/company/bridgit/
|| https://www.instagram.com/bridgitsolutions/
|| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgXxXcVliK6pdOuQZMIkfLQ
Lauren is a civil engineer and the Chief Operating Officer of Bridgit Solutions based out of Kitchener, Ontario. Bridgit is on a mission to revolutionize the way the construction industry functions, and they are doing just that. With over 150 customers across North America, they're uncomplicating the way that construction projects run. 

"Innovation Factory Accelerates Success" - who doesn't want that!?
Incubators and accelerators, like Hamilton's Innovation Factory, are the not so hidden gem that entrepreneurs need to know. In this week's episode, David Carter and Alan Quarry discuss the difference between an accelerator and an incubator, why Canada isn't producing enough "mythical unicorns," and how regional innovation centers need to work together to increase the success rates of startups.
The City of Hamilton, often known for its Life Sciences presence, has a significant amount of innovation coming through that stream. But often, when academics and entrepreneurs come up with a brilliant new business idea, they end up thinking one of two ways: "I have this amazing product, so I'll post about it and everyone will buy it. #success"; OR "I have this amazing product, but there are about 85 overwhelming steps between this point and having a viable go to market strategy. I don't know where to start." Whether it's help with marketing strategies, boosting sales, finding investors or raising capital, the Innovation Factory fills in those gaps with workshops, programming and 1-on-1 mentoring.
https://innovationfactory.ca/