If Canada is to have an economic future, it needs bosses like Geoff Flood, president of the technology services firm T4G Ltd., of Toronto. T4G is a private company with 230 people, but it makes a big imprint selling Canadian skills across North America and providing a chance for knowledge workers to live and work where they want. The New Brunswick-born Mr. Flood is a vocal critic of the current taste for shipping IT work to low-cost offshore sites without giving Canadians an opportunity to do it better.
You are based in Toronto, but you have people in several Atlantic cities and in Vancouver. Why these dispersed locations?
We have a strategy of locating where smart people want to live. All of these cities, Toronto included, fit that bill. There is a limit to the technology resource in the country, and we need to go where bright people want to live and can thrive.
What does your company do?
We're a project-based company that builds technology solutions for enterprise customers across North America. In this business, the typical strategy would be to locate ourselves where the customers are. But because there is a shortage of great technology people, we need to go to where they are, where they want to live, where they are most productive, where they are happiest. We build teams in those cities but have them service customers across North America
For example, our largest customer is in Atlanta and the work is being done in Halifax. It is a good export business; it's good for the talent in Halifax.
Isn't that the opposite of the old Canadian model whereby people move to where the work is - whether Fort McMurray or any mining town?
We're in a business where we can live anywhere and work anywhere, and we don't really care where it happens. It's 24/7, it's fast-paced but if you can do it in your kitchen, we don't have a problem. We provide communities that have a great living environment with the chance to add new workers.
In Vancouver's case, haven't you got some contracts, as well?
We don't typically look for the customers in the local city. We think it is better to be in the export business and compete on a larger scale, but it's really nice if you can work at home.
We've been in Vancouver seven years, and our first customer was Tourism British Columbia, for whom we built a system that presents all their operations, properties and tourist attractions globally in many languages. I would argue it's probably the best destination management system in the world.
And the Olympics are a big part of it. Tourism BC is responsible for building and managing accommodations from a technology perspective, and we're the contractor that did the work behind the scenes.
Has the recession affected you?
We didn't make our plan this year but the plan was quite aggressive. We are ahead of last year, and we think the market has turned. We are in the fortunate position of doing hard surgery for customers - the things critical to the success of their business. You can't stop that even in the worst recession. We have a very large customer which cut its IT budget from $1-billion to half a billion dollars. They doubled our allotment.
I think our strategy is working, which is to find the smart people who can write the book on what they do in another location and set them up to recruit like-minded individuals in their town.
You've mentioned Saskatoon as a possible target.
Saskatoon is a perfect example of a town with great talent, highly productive work force, people who love living there, and who are as good as anybody in the world. What we need is the key person or persons around whom we can build a team and build an export professional-services business in North America. That's the top of our list but we would welcome other cities, Lethbridge or whatever, to come and knock on our door.
Shouldn't you be in India, where you can slash costs?
Most people would think there is some sense to doing that. But at this point the pendulum is swinging back. I don't think the cost advantage is there in the way it might have been 10 years ago. Even for low-cost commodity kinds of work, we're on about par. And we want to do the hard stuff, the creative stuff, and you tend to find more of the resources to accomplish that in North America.
