Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
Mr. Segal was only 16 years old when he became chief technology officer at marketing agency Motion Works Group in Toronto.
“There were a lot of individuals who were frustrated to be reporting to a 16-year-old,” Mr. Segal acknowledges. “But I was also lucky to be surrounded by people who had more experience than me, and I had incredible mentors who supported and motivated me.”
When he ventures out of his office to play, Leerom Segal likes to go for the crazy stuff, like extreme skiing or scaling Mount Everest.
“In my personal life I tend to do the things that really scare me,” says Mr. Segal, president and CEO of Klick Inc., an interactive communications agency in Toronto that provides Web solutions, e-learning systems and marketing services to big-name companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. “I seem to gravitate towards such crazy shenanigans.”
But when it comes to his business, Mr. Segal is all business, spending hours planning the company’s next moves in minute detail and working out any potential risks. For him, it’s all about making sure everything needed to serve Klick’s customers is in place at the company he co-founded 14 years ago with a high-school buddy and a former client.
Today, Klick is among the largest marketing services agencies in Canada focused on the pharmaceutical industry, says Mr. Segal. What had started out as a company that provided technical services that helped pharmas put their business online is now a full-service digital marketing agency.
“Our clients trust us with everything, from helping them plan their digital strategy to every aspect of executing this strategy,” says Mr. Segal.
Mr. Segal is much younger than most CEOs – Forbes Magazine says the average age of CEOs today is 53. But what's even more surprising is the fact that he’s already had 20 years of experience running a business.
Mr. Segal was only 12 years old when he and a high-school friend, Aaron Goldstein, started The Byte Doctors, a company that assembled computers – mostly for friends and family, says Mr. Segal – and built software, including one program that calculated the commission from real estate sales. Mr. Goldstein today is COO of Klick Inc. and one of its co-founders.
The Byte Doctors was acquired by a Toronto marketing agency owned by Peter Cordy, Klick’s chairman and other co-founder.
More winners:
