Tech boss wants no part in exporting jobs

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.

I have a nationalist point of view on that: I don't get it. We shouldn't be exporting all of these high-value knowledge jobs to other parts of the world. We will become a nation of fast-food workers, if we're not careful.

A better strategy is to have a near-shore, small-town product where the total customer value is as good or better. But we would retain in North America the lock on creativity and intellectual ability that is still our biggest source of strength.

But India has well-educated, creative people.

They are very good. I am taking nothing away from them, but it is a competitive global economy. We've got to look out for ourselves. We're very good, as well.

We have to be better and so do they. The global competition is wonderful, and it's something we need to be able to work with. But in the area where we work, we have a competitive advantage.

Are you benefiting from the government stimulus packages?

I don't think so. I don't see it directly. It doesn't apply.

But isn't this an opportunity to invest in technology that builds the future, instead of the old roads-and-bridges approach?

I think you're right. Certainly, digital infrastructure is at least as important, if not more important, than the normal infrastructure we think of. There is a whole class of faster return-on-investment solutions that we need to reduce [government]costs and empower the consumer or the citizen to look after their own issues more effectively.

We have to take costs out of government in a very significant way. We all know that. But we haven't come to grips with the fact that all these technologies are proceeding at a rapid pace and enable us to do that.

Customer self-service in government is a no-brainer. Let's do that now and dissolve the large bureaucracies that are really ineffectual in the modern world. Citizen democracy is something that interests me, as well as the ability to accelerate the speed of turnaround, feedback and progress [in government]

So this is another Geoff Flood, a guy driven by causes?

The people in our business may be geeky in some sense, but we do think, naively or not, that we can change the world. As good technology people, we can see the opportunity to make things better, and for us, that opportunity is increasing.

It starts with serving our customers, with the idea that "I can help you succeed better by doing this or that." The same thing applies to society. In our company, it is pretty critical that people really want to make a difference. And they stay here because we believe we have an obligation to do more than just make a profit. We can offer that.

Has your support for causes been affected by the recession?

This year, a little bit. Over the past four to five years, we've raised about $1-million in our small company for organizations we support. We took a step back. The level of involvement has increased, but I think the amount of fundraising is a little slower.

What's the future of T4G?

The idea is to have people say, "I want to work for that company" or "I want to have them work for me." Or "How do they do that? I want to do some of that." It has to do with culture and passion.

After the dot-com collapse, we emerged as a place to go. Now, coming out of this recession, we want to go to other cities, find these people and have them join the team. The [locations]are just real estate and that's the easy thing. The important thing is the high-performing team. There is more to building it than just hiring people.

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Geoff Flood

Title: President, T4G Ltd., Toronto

Born: Jan. 26, 1953, in Saint John

Education: 1976, Bachelor of arts in economics, St. Francis Xavier University

1979, MBA in finance, Queen's University

Career highlights:

Early career: Worked for George Weston Ltd., where he rose to position of information systems officer. Managed systems activity across Weston/Loblaw group.

Joined Dylex Ltd., where he became vice-president and chief information officer for the specialty retail company (now defunct). January, 1996: Left Dylex and joined Michael Cottenden and David Posluns to form T4G. Financial backing came from the Posluns family, which had once controlled Dylex.