TELUS Talks Business correspondent Julie Bishop recently interviewed Tony Lourakis, the CEO of Complete Innovations, a leading global provider of mission critical fleet, asset and mobile workforce management solutions. The Markham Ontario headquartered company continues to win awards year after year being recognized for its national growth with honours including a spot on IDC Canada’s “10 to Watch” list, being ranked as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies by PROFIT 100 three years in a row, and being part of Deloitte’s Fast 500 List in 2010. 

In this post, Tony discusses his company's success and overcoming challenges.

What specific challenges does Complete Innovations address for its clients?

Complete Innovations helps companies that have a mobile workforce optimize their operations, create efficiencies, reduce costs, improve scalability and reduce risk.

We do this through our products and services, so companies go from not having visibility into where their mobile workforce is or what they're doing in a real time basis to having full visibility into the job status and exactly where their team, assets and vehicles are.

We have thousands of customers and they cover a wide array of industries, but all of them have the need to improve their efficiency in the field and that’s what we do. For instance, one of our customers is a bottled water company, which delivers across Canada and has a fleet of about 500 vehicles.

They had a policy not to idle on deliveries, but they never knew if people were complying with unless the supervisor drove around and followed the vehicles.
After they installed our Fleet Complete tracking product, which TELUS sold to them, they could monitor not only the location of their vehicles but also speeding, idling, hard braking, rapid acceleration and hard cornering.  But the key one here, in this case, was idling.  The technology was able to confirm that in most cases, drivers were idling on delivery.

The company then informed its drivers that they were being monitored for idling and reminded them of the no-idling policy. They quickly got full compliance on the policy, leading a savings of more than $100 per vehicle per month in fuel alone, just from implementing that one benefit. The system cost them $50 vehicle per month so their ROI was immediate and huge especially when you multiply that across a fleet of 400 or 500 vehicles.

Another example is of a courier company in Vancouver that recently implemented our system to replace paper waybills. The company’s waybill system was costing them about $50,000 per year as each waybill was a three-part carbon copy form.

Using our Courier Complete product, which features a mobile application for smart phones, enabled them to make their whole workflow paperless so the drivers could get all their delivery data on the mobile device.

When they do a pickup they can scan the packages.  When they go do a delivery, they hand the device to the customer and the customer signs off on it electronically. It’s eliminated the need for them to print waybills, and just that one thing has saved them more than $50,000 a year.

Additional benefits include many other savings from productivity gains and visibility, the ability to get data in real time, and environmental benefits such as reduced paper waste.

What are a couple of challenges you faced as a business and for which you could recommend resources to for other entrepreneurs?

First, it’s important to have a very sound business model to begin with. You need to spend a lot of time thinking about the business model and making sure there's a very strong value proposition in the market you're going after.

If you’ve thought all that through and have a sound business plan then when you execute your plan make sure you stick to your plan. Of course, plans change and things change, but when you start from a solid plan, you can have a better understanding of what can change and in which directions you should go.

Second, hiring and retaining top talents is a key.  Find people who are excited about what you're trying to do and are prepared to put in the blood, sweat and tears to see it through. Be sure to hire the best people you possibly can because you're only going to be as great as your people.

In next weeks' Entrepreneur straight talk series, Tony addresses financing, building a customer base and the importance of customer feedback.