Business Adviser

Succeeding beyond North American borders

By Jeremy Laurin
President and CEO
ventureLAB

In my early twenties I co-founded my first technology enterprise in Kingston, Ontario. Over the course of the next three years my partners and I struggled to fund and grow our new business. One target we aggressively pursued was elusive customers from all over the globe. Our story goes that we worked hard, and we were fortunate to make a successful Canadian high tech company. The Province of Ontario recognized us with a Global Exporters Award, a true honour. I was invited to speak to groups around the Province about how we accomplished breaking into European and Asian markets so early in our company’s life cycle.

From this adventure come some insights we focus on at ventureLAB today.

The importance of international customers-lesson learned

Years later, hard experience has helped me better understand just how important the accomplishment of breaking into international markets actually was – something that I did not fully realize at the time.

In my travels and round table moments I would regularly lament the fact that we didn’t have a single Canadian customer at that time. Too true, by the way. It meant that the Canadian market is always late to adopt new home grown innovations, also true. And as a Canadian entrepreneur, this really bothered me.

To this point throughout the difficult early years, I recall that a Board member regularly reminded me that “every sale made outside of Canada Jeremy is a brand new shiny loonie for our economy, not the same old recycled one”. What I have learned over the years since that time is exactly how true those words of wisdom were then and remain now.

Every international sale creates economic prosperity here

The lesson here, in my opinion, is that Canadian technology entrepreneurs need to establish firm strategies early in the life cycle of their company for building beyond their domestic borders. Why? Because it's fundamental to the success of their company and it also happens to be fundamental to the success of our nation. Every “new loonie” generated by international sales creates economic prosperity here at home. Small nations such as Israel, Denmark and a host of others have known this for decades and have successfully hard-wired this thinking into their entrepreneurial class.

Canada needs to get its head around this fact - we need more Canadian-owned start-ups in order to thrive as a nation and be taken seriously as a meaningful start-up nation that can grow enterprise-class technology firms.

Canada has always been well recognized as an innovative nation with great R&D capabilities, the concept of the “smart phone” was invented here after all! The challenge, however, is that exporting is all about sales – a scary word for most Canadians. This is where we need to get our act together.

Why is it so difficult to get loud and proud about our homegrown innovations? Instead, all too often Canadian entrepreneurs exit early to our American counterparts who then take our ideas and commercialize them on the world’s stage.

ventureLAB helps great Canadian technology companies grow and better export

Here at ventureLAB, we have dedicated a huge amount of time and energy to building boot camps and curriculum based programs to address these issues. Designed by entrepreneurs-for entrepreneurs.

ventureLAB’s flagship program, BUILD is a framework which stands for Begin, edUcate, Invest, Launch and expanD. Five pillars to designing, building and growing a successful enterprise class company. The final pillar, expanD, is solely dedicated to helping entrepreneurs who have already launched successful businesses understand and grow in the export market beyond the borders of the United States.

Why are we going in this direction? The answer is clear. It is our view that the value of emerging Canadian tech companies doing business in other countries beyond the US is immense. Something I personally lived. Success is in large part succeeding beyond North American borders.

We should not be interested in a class of entrepreneurs who want to build to an early exit. Rather, we feel that entrepreneurs should build successful multinational enterprises which become recognized on the world’s stage as a Canadian high-tech, innovative and growth oriented company.

It’s what I have learned and something I believe that will continue to be of increasing importance to the success of the Canadian technology business. An attitude which we are fostering at ventureLAB and something that Canada needs to nurture and celebrate as well.

ventureLAB is York Region's non-profit Regional Innovation Centre for advanced health tech, digital media, ICT, green energy, clean tech and advanced materials & manufacturing entrepreneurs.