Seven years after the company once called Vision Critical Communications Inc. resolved a protracted conflict with former CEO and pollster Angus Reid, it is still trying to revive the momentum that made it a breakout star of Canada’s early 2010s technology revival.
On Tuesday the market research software company, now named Alida Inc., said it had promoted 52-year-old chief operating officer Efrem Ainsley to chief executive officer. He replaces Ross Wainwright, who resigned last month after four years.
Alida chairman Phil Deck said in an interview that Mr. Wainwright’s departure was the former CEO’s decision. Mr. Wainwright said in a statement he would support “a smooth transition as Efrem takes the helm” and remain “an evangelist, investor, shareholder and enduring supporter of Alida.”
Several weeks ago, president Riaz Raihan left to become chief digital officer with U.S. heating and cooling systems giant Trane Technologies.
Alida has done a lot of running on the spot during the tenure of Mr. Wainwright and Mr. Raihan, both former SAP executives who joined Alida along with Mr. Ainsley in early 2020. They inherited a Vancouver-based company that had about $65-million in revenue and turned profitable in 2019, coming in with a goal of increasing annual revenue growth to 20 per cent. On their watch, the company, which helps corporations gather feedback from customers, shifted its headquarters to Toronto, raised capital, changed its name and revved up spending, bulking up to more than 440 people.
For all the changes, Alida didn’t deliver what counts most in enterprise software: strong revenue growth. In 2023, Alida generated close to US$60-million in revenue, an increase of less than 10 per cent over each of the prior two years. While growth has been more challenging for enterprise software vendors since 2021, anemic expansion has been a chronic issue for Alida for years. It only returned to operating profitability last fall after at least two years of losses, by slashing about 20 per cent of its staff. It now has 352 employees.
“I think we’ve now found our spot and can do really well in this market,” said Mr. Deck. “Efrem is the right guy to lead Alida for the next phase.”
Mr. Wainwright had succeeded CEO Scott Miller, who led the company while it was engulfed in a corporate civil war that left Mr. Reid at odds with investors, board members and executives over its direction. The company had built two businesses: developing software that corporations use to survey customers on a continuing basis, and a traditional market research and consulting service.
Its venture capital backers, including OMERS Ventures and Georgian Partners, wanted Vision Critical to sell the service business – which it did in 2016 – to focus on software, seen as a faster-growing, higher-margin business. Internal tensions had led fellow directors – including founder Andrew Reid, the pollster’s son – to strip Mr. Reid of his executive role in 2014 and continued as he questioned company strategies and pushed out several directors.
Those conflicts ended when Georgian and W Capital Partners bought out Mr. Reid and other investors in 2016. Mr. Reid has since formed another polling organization and backed his son’s latest market research software startup, Rival Technologies.
After the split, Mr. Miller overhauled Vision Critical’s leadership and trimmed its service activities and work force. The company changed its platform to make it easier for generalists outside market research departments to use.
Under Mr. Wainwright, Alida focused on a class of enterprise software known as customer experience management. Vendors typically gather insights from an array of channels including customer relationship management tools, customer contact centres, point of sale systems and social media. Alida built 20-plus products to compete against giants Medallia Inc. and Qualtrics LLC, which were each bought by private equity firms for billions of dollars in recent years.
Then, last year, Alida shifted its strategy to focus on large corporate customers – which include Canadian Tire CTC-T and Sun Life SLF-T – and products where it had the most traction. It pared its ranks as other technology companies have done since 2001, moves Mr. Ainsley said in an interview “had my fingerprints all over it. The board is now seeing a company that went into a big broad market start to tighten up its focus” and not compete directly with Medallia and Qualtrics. “The idea is not to catch them, you’ll lose that fight,” he said. “We’ll do one to two things in that market exceptionally well.”
With the new strategy, Mr. Ainsley, previously CEO of Georgian-backed ScribbleLive and senior vice-president of finance with Open Text Corp. OTEX-T, said Alida should remain highly profitable and improve its rate of revenue growth “that over the last couple of years wasn’t where we would love it to be. There is a lot of upside still. It just requires focus.”
Mr. Deck said “companies take various paths to get to the right place,” and he intends “to make sure by the end of the road that everyone is satisfied with the way it ends. That is what everyone is focused on now.”
Sean Silcoff