It's All One Big Puzzle
Carol Leaman, President and CEO at Axonify
Unique in the number of start-ups she has led, and one of the leading females in the Canadian Tech space, Carol Leaman, the President and CEO of Axonify, is a very inspiring, serial entrepreneur. She has kindly shared her journey and provided some great insights and advice into the Canadian start-up world.
Carol noted that as a teenager, she had a conversation with a friend of her mother’s, who asked if she had any idea of what she wanted to do after high school. Carol noted that she very distinctly remembers telling her that she would own her own company one day and was going to be a corporate CEO. She thoughtfully noted that she didn’t know why she said that, but she knew that was the right path for her. She noted that her mother’s friend was quite skeptical at the time, but 30 years later she has done just that. Following high school, Carol took business in university and ended-up becoming a Chartered Accountant. She noted that she didn’t manufacture or try to force her career in any particular direction. It was very fluid and she followed the CA path and worked for a public company in the corporate finance department, where her group primarily bought and sold companies. In 1998, her group purchased a company in California, which she became CEO of. This started her path of running tech companies and 4 companies later, she is now leading Axonify.
She noted Axonify is the closest company to her starting a company from scratch. She and her business partner bought it when it had 1 customer and 2 employees. They tossed the old technology and started over. Carol said she isn’t good at generating her own ideas, but she knows when something is good and has good intuition when it comes to other people’s ideas. Axonify is essentially a knowledge platform. Carol noted that they deliver knowledge using brain science techniques, gamification, adaptive learning, and micro-learning that create very effective memory and retention in the brain, which changes human behavior and ensures employees will do the right thing at the point they need to.
Carol noted Axonify has about 100 employees and 100 customers and they have faced their fair share of challenges through this growth. Axonify focuses on fortune 1000 companies as customers, which tend to have long sales cycles, cheque sizes are large, are complicated sales, and finding sales people, who can sell to large enterprises is difficult. She noted raising brand awareness, boot strapping with not a lot of money and getting the company going on every front is hard. She noted she loves it and that you have to make good decisions along the way and learn from the things that go wrong; it’s never easy. She noted there are a ton of first time entrepreneurs that don’t appreciate how hard it is, and she noted even for herself on start-up #4, every new one is a challenge, they take longer than you expect, they cost more money than you expect, things happen that you have to deal with, and every day is a new adventure. She noted you have to be the type of person that thrives off that and that challenges will come on every level and you need to just solve them and move on.
Carol bought Axonify 5 years ago and she noted there are a few specific criteria she looks for when making a purchase like this. She looks at the size and market opportunity and asks whether that market is big enough and that someone will spend money on it. She also considers whether she can put a company together that will meet that market opportunity. After purchasing a company, the first thing she sets out to do is meet with investors. She noted that she knew Axonify needed venture investment to get funds to hire the best people to move the business forward and to execute quickly.
In executing, Carol noted that there are differences in leadership when starting, to running a company with 100 employees. She noted that when you are first getting going, it’s really about priorities. She thinks about it like building a puzzle. When you dump all the puzzle pieces on the table you really need to just start. Pick up a piece and start putting it together with a couple of other pieces, and then as the puzzle gets built you start focusing on what is left to do and not what is already together. In the earlier days, she was heavily involved in sales, the product roadmap, and the marketing plan. Now, she has management with whole teams taking care of that, so she can focus on the edge pieces. She takes a step back and thinks outside of the business, what’s going on in the competitive landscape and what do they need to do overall.
The overall market includes all of North America as a primary target. In comparing the US and Canadian start-up regions, she noted Canada is about 10 years behind Silicon Valley. She noted they have tons of obvious success, through investment and the huge number of venture capitalists down there. They’ve also had a series of large exits, where the founders have become the next level of investor, helping the new crop of companies, and they’ve been through almost a full cycle, in contrast to us here. She noted we are still in our first cycle, and she expects there will be a lot more exits locally in the next 5-7 years and we will start to see these entrepreneurs invest in other entrepreneurs and start new companies again.
If you focus in on the tech start-ups, you might notice how few CEO’s of start-ups are female. When I started this blog, I quickly found out there were very few female entrepreneurs in the technology space, so I asked Carol her thoughts. She noted no other founders, female or male, have done 4 companies in the Waterloo Region, and when she started out she didn’t meet any female entrepreneurs in tech unless they were in HR or Marketing. She noted, however, that when she was having her children, all of her friends were giving up their jobs allowing their husbands’ careers to take off and diminishing their own possibilities. She noted her husband recognized that her career had a lot more potential and so they had role reversal, which was very uncommon at the time. She noted either way, these were both family decisions, so a lack of female entrepreneurs over the age of 35 is not because it wasn’t possible, but because they were self-selecting out. In recent years, females are standing-up and are saying they can do it too.
Get to know Carol a bit better!
What motivates Carol…She noted it is the challenge of taking nothing and turning it into something important. She noted that she feels a great sense of accomplishment and feels so lucky that she gets to do what she knows she was meant to do. Even though it is extremely challenging, she enjoys helping people and loves building great companies where people love to work.
If she wrote a book…She would call it Effed-Up Start-ups. In her spare time, she mentors a lot of early stage entrepreneurs and she constantly hears their stories and their struggles, and has really seen it all.
Crazy story….She noted that she caught a senior sales guy very randomly at a conference selling for a different company. WHAT?!
Inspiration along the way…She noted she’s a snack-sized reader now, but a book called Built to Last had a profound impact on her. You’ll also find her reading industry-specific books.
Favorite place traveled…She noted that she was in South Africa last year for a customer and realized that it was very different than she expected in terms of how beautiful it was.
Wish knew prior…Carol noted that she has a pretty good radar for people but sometimes she admitted that you can just make a mistake when hiring someone, and she wishes she had a crystal ball going into hiring so she could see how new employees would contribute to get the best out of them quickly. She noted she knew starting a company was going to be this hard every time. She expects it to be a bit of a black box and a mystery and she has benefited from experience and a realized it’s a bit of a formula. Her approach is to start off by generally getting the company to move in the right direction and specifically not the wrong direction, and that can be tricky.
Carol has some great advice: Hire the best people you can afford. She noted a lot of early stage entrepreneurs think about the cheapest person they can find and that is a key mistake. Most young entrepreneurs also undervalue marketing and think they can do social media and invest more money in the product and technical aspects. There are cheap ways to start, for example, with social media, going to conferences, calling up influencers in the marketing space and asking for advice. She noted marketing lays the pavement. If you have not laid the pavement, you could have the best vehicle but nowhere to drive it. She also noted to watch your pennies and have good visibility as to what your cash is going to be, otherwise you run the risk of running out of money.
Thank you so much for reading this post! You can find more about Axonify at their website. If you have any questions or comments for me, please reach-out to me through e-mail.
