Andrea Feunekes is a forester, software developer, mother – and a key catalyst in a new game plan for reviving the challenged New Brunswick economy. Ms. Feunekes and her husband, Ugo, have built Fredericton-based Remsoft Inc., a software firm serving a global space of 500 million acres – the property managed by its worldwide forestry-industry clients. For her latest gig, Remsoft’s co-CEO has added the chairwoman’s role at Future NB, a business-led initiative aimed at rekindling economic growth in the perennially have-not province.
What is a global software developer doing in Fredericton?
My husband and I came to do our master’s
And why not? We have a forestry school, an engineering school, a computer sciences school, and a business school. That’s what we need for our business.
But how do you run a business from here?
Our company has clients in 15 countries. That means we don’t have a lot of clients anywhere; we have a few clients in a ton of places – which is the nature of our industry. So we have to get very good at serving clients, and we can’t do it by setting up offices all over the world. It’s not cost-effective.
So we have to work with partners. We do a lot of tech support via the Internet. We do a lot of online training. And the time-zone thing? We’re actually closer to Europe than other regions of Canada. We’re kind of half-way to everywhere in doing remote things, but we also have sales guys based in Ontario.
What is your business?
We help clients do things like logistics, prioritization and scheduling harvests; sales and operational work; land evaluation; and where to put a plant. How do you protect the spotted owl and still generate revenue?
It gets so complicated to be sustainable. It’s easy to extract a resource, but it’s harder to do that and stay on the right side of the line. So you’ve got to have some modelling; you need some big thinking stuff. We go everywhere from a week to a couple of hundred years.
How did you get into saving New Brunswick?
Putting it that way might be a stretch. You try to be a bit of a part of the solution. A few years ago, I was invited to join the New Brunswick Business Council. I could see a bunch of guys completely committed to business in this province. But we just kept trying things as a province – tolls and the [proposed NB Power deal with Quebec], thing after thing. A ton of people were saying “Government should…” and not enough were saying “Let’s try to do something.”
My husband and I wrestled with it: “Are we just going to watch this? Or should we go somewhere else?” [Along with co-CEO Steve Palmer] we were all together in trying to do something.
Has the forest industry taught you something?
Our customers go bankrupt every time we turn around – not just domestically but internationally. The land is always there and someone is always going to manage it, but the players change and the game changes, in what they do, how they do it, where you can find them value. At first it was just, “How do I produce a harvest schedule?” Then it was a lot of environmental issues; now they are very focused on tight margins, so everything is changing all the time.
Is that a microcosm of what New Brunswick faces?
