Avoiding complacency helped Remsoft survive: co-CEO (News)

Message: Tech executives discuss business at year-end Cybersocial

John Pollack
For the Telegraph-Journal

FREDERICTON - Complacency can maim or kill a business.

This is one of the messages a panel of tech executives had for an audience of more than 100 at Enterprise Fredericton's year-end cybersocial.

For Andrea Feunekes, co-CEO of Remsoft Inc., avoiding complacency helped her firm survive despite some tough odds.

In the early 2000s the land management software company, which sold primarily to forestry companies, started to make its computer programs less technical and easier to use so they could sell more licences.

Then around 2005 many of its clients started to either go under or stop growing their own trees, and therefore had less or no land to manage.

"Almost all of our most important biggest clients around the world disappeared," Feunekes said.

But thankfully for Remsoft, the firm was already in adjustment mode.

The company has since replaced its clients with many of the new owners of the lands in question as well as some new customers.

"The risk of not changing had been greater than sticking with the status quo," she said. "I don't like to think about what would have happened if we had decided to stay with our place in the world."

Feunekes was on the panel to talk about building a company, while Matt Eldridge, chief executive of Lymbix Inc. was at the event to talk about starting a new company.

He said it's important to get to know your target customer from the beginning.

"You should be the first one to start talking to your potential customers," said the head of the firm that won the award for most promising start up at the KIRAs earlier this month. "You can't just be in your basement building something."

Both Eldridge and Feunekes, as well as fellow panelist Mike LeBlanc, vice-president of technology at Chalk Media, said competitors are out there and are inevitably going to try to copy your product, so your energy is better focused on developing your products and markets.

Before joining Chalk Media Corp., which was since sold to BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. (TSX:RIM), LeBlanc exited two startups of his own, which he was invited to speak about.

The first one, ICGlobal was successfully sold, while Ensemble, which never got off the ground, narrowly avoided bankruptcy, though it honoured every severance agreement.

"That was an exit you don't like to have to plan for, but it had to happen," he said. "I learned a tonne of stuff during that exit."

Then a few years later at Chalk Media another sale opportunity came along.

"It looked like we could take the product and give it wings within RIM," he said of the 30-person company joining a 14,000-person organization. "They do move slow, fortunately we're in a department where we have a fair amount of autonomy."

But LeBlanc said exiting isn't necessary citing 18-year old Remsoft as a prime example.

He said entrepreneurs need to decide how big they want their businesses to get, and how long they want to run them for.

Larry Sampson, executive director of the NB IT Council and the fourth panelist, said the province has some success stories, but there needs to be more of them.

The event also included Propel ICT's annual general meeting, which had never happened outside of Saint John.

"Fredericton is part of the domain we operate in," said Jeff Roach, the provincial organization's executive director. "We can't keep doing everything in Saint John."