The Most Important Thing

On Friday March 13, 2015 at the 6th annual Spirit of Winnipeg Awards Gala, presented by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, Bold Innovation Group Ltd. was given the award for the Startup Business category.
Certainly it had nothing to do with luck...well maybe just a little. A lot of things--a lot of decisions had to happen at the right times and in the right order to get to this point. I’ll tell you where we were lucky.First of all, we’re extremely grateful for this award. It couldn’t come at a better time. Over the past couple years, we’ve grown from 4 to 40 something people. Most of it has been because of our initial concept and business model. We had an idea, we made it, and it turned into a business that was scaleable. There are so many things that we say are “the most important thing’ in our success. And the list keeps growing.

At first it was our tech support. We knew we had a good idea, and the skill to build it, but we were nothing if we couldn’t support our apps. So our support has always been the most important thing.

And then as we grew a bit bigger our corporate culture became the most important thing. It didn’t just happen, it was planned. We wanted a company that we could all enjoy coming to work at everyday. It’s what has helped us find the amazing talent that we’ve brought in and why we have had almost zero staff turnover. Aside from a couple extraordinary cases, we are the same team we’ve always been. It just keeps getting bigger.

And then, as our reputation grew we were comfortable starting to say that our products were the most important thing. They have to be great. People expect that from us now. It’s not that we haven’t always developed great apps, it’s just that when you first start out, you aren’t allowed to say that you’re building the best app of its kind. Not if you have any sort of modesty and want to make friends with peers in your industry. You have to earn that privilege. And it’s not even something we decided in a marketing meeting or anything like that. It’s more like it has become demanded of us. We have to develop great stuff or it will all start to fall apart.

And then our company philosophy became the most important part of our continued development: Our philosophy of developing new ideas that come from any member of our entire team; Our philosophy of giving back to the community with volunteered man-hours, with pro-bono services, and with cash donations; Our philosophy of dedicating 20% of our resources on new, unproven ideas that are unrelated to our core businesses model; Our philosophy of #InnovateOrDie.

But when we look at all these ‘most important things’ they all have one thing in common. There really is only one ‘most important thing.’ It’s the people that we spend everyday with, and a lot of evenings and weekends. online, offline, in our suits and in our sweatpants.

Every person that comes to work at Bold everyday is the reason this award has come to us at this time. If you come to our office and you look around, at any given time you’ll see more than a handful of people wearing Bold hats, Bold t-shirts, and Bold hoodies. You’ll see Bold stickers proudly proclaiming that this laptop is writing code for Bold; that this laptop is providing support for an app by Bold; that this car is on its way to the Bold offices in Ile des Chenes.

So this Startup business award comes at a time when we can be a bit retrospective and nostalgic and look back at the infancy of this company, but just for a minute. Because with the team that we are lucky enough to have assembled in one room, with the ideas that they come up with, and with the skills that they continue to build, we look at this award as a corner that we’re turning. We’ve matured. We’re all grown up, taking on bigger clients and bigger ideas. That’s where we’re lucky.

So with all the thanks that we’ve given out to the Winnipeg tech community, to our partners at the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, at Red River College, at New Media Manitoba, and Ramp Up Manitoba, at Innovate Manitoba and Futurepreneur and all along Innovation Alley, and all the other inspiring finalists in our category and developers around the world that we get to work with everyday, the real thank you goes to the people in the Bold offices every day. We’re all in this together. It’s pretty obvious, and it’s something we’re lucky to be part of.

Thank you.
The Bold Team