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.

Last week, Tony discussed financing, building a customer base and the importance of customer feedback.  In this post, Tony looks to the future and talks to his goals for 2012.

What advice would you offer a start up based on your experience?

For a start up, one of the most important things is managing cash flow. Start ups need to move from a money burn situation to a money making situation as quickly as possible. Ensure you have a well thought out plan on how to do that, and identifies the tipping point and work backwards from there and make sure you execute on the plan.

So it’s getting to that financial stability as quickly as you can because, once you get there, it breeds more opportunity and success and it gives you the strength to do just so much more. That’s how you can really scale a business.

What would you say your greatest business success in 2011 has been?

Our greatest business success in 2011 has been launching our products with AT&T in the US in a similar way to how TELUS has been reselling our products for about five years now in Canada.

We launched in June of 2011 with AT&T. The launch was about three years in the making from quoting them initially, to getting our foot in the door, to working various levels of management, to being accepted and brought in.

The way AT&T operates is that they bring you in on kind of a tier initially where you’re not on their bill and they don’t resell your product.  It’s more of a co-sell type relation where you have to prove yourself. If the relationship is successful in this phase then they may start reselling your product.

Very few companies have achieved this point and doing so has been a big accomplishment for us. So 2012 for us is all about ramping up this opportunity to its full potential.

What are your other goals for 2012?

Some other key focuses are to stay focused on our partnership with TELUS in Canada and continue to grow that business. Our business with TELUS has been immensely successful for us and it still represents our biggest business. In fact, it has been a key driver in our success and growth.

Another important goal in 2012 is that we are working to launch our fourth generation product with Courier and Fleet Complete, which are going to be merged together into one platform. I think it’s going to be a game changer so we're looking over it to making that launch in 2012.

How do you keep your team motivated and focused on your business goals?

First off, we try to keep our goals very simple, something you can easily remember so when the teams come in everyday, they know exactly what they're working towards.

We have team goals or departmental goals and for instance, our Canadian sales team has a goal and it’s to hit a certain number of volume or subscribers we're adding for the year. Our customer service department has goals around key metrics like how fast we answer the call, how quickly close support tickets etc. Our R&D team has goals around product release timelines and quality levels.

Every week we measure our results against our targets on a week-to-week basis so we know in real time if we are trending on track, ahead or trending below our goals. And we do that with each department.

Our corporate goals are also simply stated. For instance, it might be as simple as to say here's our revenue goal for this year and here's our market goal in terms of market penetration or strategic thing that we want to do.

We remind people of these goals at every opportunity. We have a couple of company meetings a year, I do a video message every month to keep people up to date on how we're performing against these goals.

We also work to create that team feeling where we're out there competing and we want to win and we want to beat the competition much like a sports team.

And then we have other initiatives like, for example, we give back. Every year we donate some of our profits to charities. I think that helps the team see that the company isn’t just about growth earnings. Obviously there are bonuses tied to our business goals, but we're also doing something good for the community.

Is there any other advice you wanted to offer to SMBs looking to grow their  businesses?

The only other thing I would offer is to always be innovative.  I find some entrepreneurs get bored of their business sectors, as entrepreneurs by nature like creating and once something is running smoothly, they start to loose interest with it. I think that as the business leader you have the power and ability to innovate and transform it to expand into new markets and offerings and services and products.

So always be thinking about the possibilities of the future and innovation because there aren’t any limits. The opportunities are endless.

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.