It’s no mean feat to make it onto the list of Canada’s Best Managed Companies. For 31 years, the program has been rigorously vetting the top mid-market privately owned companies in the country (those with $50 million or more in revenue), with Deloitte’s team of coaches, internal and external judges and, of course, the companies themselves, putting in hundreds of hours to ensure only outstanding contenders make it to the finish line.
So, what does it take to be a Best Managed Company? “These are companies that are purpose-driven, always evolving and looking to the future,” says Lorrie King, who leads the global program, which has spread to 46 countries. “They understand the need to change, and they care about their customers. But every Best Managed Company is also uber-focused on development and succession, and making sure their people feel valued.” Derrick Dempster, who co-leads the Canadian program with King, adds: “The leadership is just superior to their peer group. They spend more time and energy preparing and educating and making themselves better, and that’s how they differentiate themselves.”
King and Dempster are looking forward to adding even more great companies to the program. “When we compare our generation to our kids, they’re smarter than we are—evolution makes it so,” says Dempster. So it is with Best Managed: “Generally speaking, the quality of the portfolio continues to elevate.”
Read the methodology and see the full list of 466 existing Best Managed Companies here. And meet this year’s newest additions.
Confidence is key
Prestilux
(Laval, Que.)
95 employees
3,000 points of sale
Of all ways to land in the top job, the death of your mentor is arguably the most challenging. That’s what happened to Marie Farel when she assumed the leadership mantle at cosmetics marketer and distributor Prestilux. “It was a shock—he passed away over the weekend, and the following Tuesday, I was appointed president,” says Farel, who had been vice-president of marketing and strategy. “But I refused to get lost in self-doubt. I just went for it.”
Prestilux distributes cosmetics products on behalf of brands and, according to its contracts, a change in leadership is enough to release a brand from its obligations. So, Farel didn’t just have to learn how to run a company on the fly; she had to avert potential catastrophe by convincing her company’s customers that she was fit to lead. “I was quite young and a woman president in an industry where that’s still uncommon,” she says. “If they wanted to, every single brand could have walked away.”
Sure, there were some unpleasant meetings. But Farel confidently pursued a new vision for the company—promising not only to maintain current operations, but to expand beyond Prestilux’s focus on skincare. Following market trends, Farel moved into fragrance and natural health, and doubled down on digital channels, in addition to brick-and-mortar. The company now distributes on nine different e-commerce platforms, and turnover in that division has doubled every year. In a bid for agility, Farel also abandoned Prestilux’s one-stop-shop model, allowing clients to choose to engage its marketing, distribution, logistics or other services—or all of the above—as their needs demand. And to guard against risk, Farel makes sure that no single brand dominates more than 15% of the company’s portfolio.
In the end, not only did Prestilux not lose a single contract (except for one that was set to expire before she took over), but it signed on numerous new clients and retail partners. Today, it’s performing better than ever, thanks to Farel turning a potential firestorm into an opportunity for innovation.
Know what you don’t know
A&H Steel
Edmonton
65 employees (350+ in peak season)
110,000 sq. ft. of shop space
Glenise Harvey doesn’t have your typical CEO bona fides: Before taking over her family’s steel-reinforcing business, along with her stepbrother Craig Kotun, she spent 30 years as an elementary school teacher. “I didn’t know as much about rebar as Craig, but I did know a thing or two about inspiring and leading people,” she says.
When Harvey joined A&H, there wasn’t much of a company culture to speak of, beyond a focus on finishing the job. “I saw an opportunity to focus on how the work was getting done and who we were being in the process,” she says. Recognizing both what she brought to the table and the gaps in her knowledge, Harvey hired two consulting firms to help guide the transition, eventually landing on a set of core values. She then got to work operationalizing them through the entire company, which completes 300-plus projects each year. The firm’s aggregate “culture quotient” score, based on employee surveys, went from 7.5 out of 10 in 2016 to 9.2 in 2023.
Alignment is everything
Acadia Group
Saskatoon
100 employees (225 in peak season)
150+ pieces of heavy equipment
Five years ago, a faction of Acadia Group’s managing partners decided the construction conglomerate needed to explore new sectors and geographies—namely, opening an office beyond its Saskatoon headquarters and providing heavy equipment support to the railway sector. But one of its owners, then close to retirement, was wary of big changes so near the end of his tenure. That led to an internal tug-of-war at the nearly 50-year-old company.
President and CEO Jason Horner realized that if he wanted the expansion to succeed, he’d need to get everyone pulling in the same direction. He and his fellow partners arranged to buy out the objecting owner (and on good terms—he continued to work for Acadia on a contract basis), leaving the rest of the team free to chart a new course. The new office didn’t pan out, but railway work is now one of Acadia’s largest business lines. “If you’re looking at making changes to your business model, make sure everyone is aligned,” Horner says. “And if they aren’t, resolve that before you make your move.”
Turn blockades into building blocks
Amico Group
Windsor, Ont.
825 employees
75 clients
Amico Group has been on the receiving end of some pretty ugly competitive tactics. In the mid-’90s, it took on a road-paving project in Lakeshore, Ont., only to have a rival leverage its influence to deny the young company access to local asphalt. When Amico arranged an alternative from across the border in Detroit, it found the road to the work site blocked by competitors’ equipment. Eventually, Amico negotiated a resolution with one of said competitors and completed the job, but the incident had a lasting impact on the way it does business.
“While laying down the asphalt, we also laid down a cornerstone principle that underpins our strategy and fuels our growth today: Own the supply chain,” says president and founder Dominic Amicone, who now oversees 12 operating companies in three locations across Ontario. The firm bought into a regional asphalt company—and didn’t stop there. “Repeatedly applying that principle has helped us grow into a diversified and vertically integrated structure,” says Amicone. “It lets us offer our clients single-source accountability and better manage the scheduling issues that often plague others.”
Emballage Cartier.Hamin Lee/The Globe and Mail
No risk, no reward
Emballage Cartier
(Saint-Césaire, Que.)
91 employees
26,000+ annual deliveries
Packaging isn’t exactly the sexiest part of the consumer goods business—David Cartier, CEO of the Montreal-based packaging firm Emballage Cartier, is the first to admit that. It’s all about the R&D and marketing, not what a given product ends up being wrapped in en route to its destination. And when you’re not all that high on a potential client’s priority list, adding value is that much more important. So, 12 years ago, Cartier took a big risk, creating a Canada-first packaging optimization lab.
The lab simulates shipping conditions down to the tiniest detail. If a client wants to send a pallet from Chicago to Toronto, for instance, Cartier recreates the freight journey—whether via truck, plane or boat—to simulate the friction, vibration, compression and temperature changes along the way. From there, it’s about finding weaknesses in the packaging and optimizing accordingly. Sometimes, it’s as simple as adjusting boxes and tape. Occasionally, Cartier will work with a supplier to invent an all-new solution. For one recent client—Rotec, which manufactures hospital beds—Cartier’s improvements saved $72,000, with a 35% reduction in material and labour costs, and 17% less plastic.
What started as three machines in the back of a warehouse is now a fully equipped lab—and a core part of Emballage Cartier’s value proposition. But getting clients on board wasn’t easy. “This sort of thing just wasn’t done,” says Cartier. “Purchasers would traditionally select options off a list, and most had never heard of an approach involving this type of simulation testing. We had to embark on an education campaign for everyone in the supply chain.”
For its first three years, the lab made no money. But clients eventually caught on to its value. To date, Emballage Cartier has invested $1.2 million in the 5,000-square-foot facility—and in 2023, innovations made in the lab netted the equivalent of 781,600 plastic bottles taken out of circulation and 40 cars removed from the road. And it’s still the only facility of its kind in the country.
Disrupt yourself
Bockstael Construction
Winnipeg
186 employees
$220M+ in annual revenue
When Bockstael celebrated its 100th anniversary back in 2012, things were going well for the construction firm—at least on paper. But CEO Carmine Militano saw the writing on the wall. “The sands were shifting beneath our feet,” he says. “There was significant industry consolidation, several new market entrants buoyed by an expanding market, and the average size of projects in our addressable market was increasing.” To stay competitive, Militano decided the company had to evolve.
In 2013, Bockstael embarked on a process that would redefine its client experience—and, given that it involved retooling the entire company, it was a high-stakes bet. The upshot was radically increasing the granularity of the information shared with clients—including 200- to 300-line budgets, and comprehensive reports that detailed every problem or issue and how the company intended to address it. When projects stalled during COVID-19, instead of attempting to hold clients to their commitments via force majeure clauses—which protect parties from situations beyond their control—it developed and used a risk assessment tool to collaborate with clients on mutually agreeable plans. The result? Significant and sustained growth—revenue has tripled over the past decade.
Diversify your client base
Earth Rated
Mont-Roy, Que.
70 employees
25,000 retail partners
If you have a dog, it’s likely you’ve used Earth Rated wipes, toys or poop bags—the company’s products are sold in more than 40 countries, everywhere from major brick-and-mortar chains like Walmart and Target, to online retailers like Amazon and Chewy. But when brands get big, says CEO Abby Gnanendran, they tend to over-rely on major clients. The price of that is torpedoing the speed at which a new product goes from innovation to market; the behemoths of the brick-and-mortar retail world have long stretches between reset dates, when they put new products on shelves.
By maintaining part of the focus on pet independents and online retailers, the company achieves rapid and smooth transition from innovation to market. “That means we can out-innovate our competitors on a regular basis.” It’s hard for a Goliath to stay nimble, but Earth Rated can move a product from the lab to the shelf within a month.
Roll up your sleeves
Franklin Empire
Montreal
600 employees
5 assembly/repair shops
Cliff and Bernie Backman are the third-generation leaders of Franklin Empire, Canada’s largest independently owned electrical distributor, with 23 branches across Ontario and Quebec. But the co-presidents didn’t simply swan into the executive suite as soon as they’d graduated from business school. They’ve been working at Franklin since high school, when they spent summers and weekends doing just about every job the company had to offer.
From helping out with shipping in the warehouse and working the floor in counter sales to customer service, purchasing, and pricing (which was a manual job back in the day), the brothers got their hands dirty—and crucially, got to know how every department works first-hand. “It really gave us deep insight on the challenges every department faces, which helps inform our leadership today,” says Cliff. “And having come in as third-generation owners, it was an important way to earn the team’s trust.”
Be transparent with your partners
Global Container Terminals
Vancouver
253 salaried employees and 1,625+ ILWU members
Serves the world’s top 20 container carriers
Global Container Terminals—founded in 1907 on Canada’s West Coast—recently made a major tech upgrade to its rail yard. That included automation technology reducing the number of rail crane workers by more than a third. Naturally, its labour partner, the International Longshore Warehouse Union (ILWU)—of which more than 1,600 members work for GCT—initially wasn’t thrilled. But increased capacity on the same footprint brought in more jobs through volume than were initially lost.
“The best way to communicate this was to be open with the union,” says GCT CEO Eric Waltz. “We were honest about what they would lose and what they would gain. That allowed us to strike new commitments with them. It’s about sharing a vision, even if you look at a situation from different angles.” By staying transparent with its labour partner, Global Terminals maintained the relationship, and everyone came out on top in the end.
Walk the floor
Green Diamond Equipment
Moncton
360 employees
300+ tractors sold per year
In 2016, John Reddin merged his Reddin Equipment with Green Diamond. “Before the merger, I was a competitor,” he says. “So while I had plenty of ideas and strategies in mind at the outset, I knew that earning the trust and respect of my new team members was paramount.”
To that end, before making any major changes, he personally visited each store and learned his new team’s culture and dynamics on the ground, instead of from up-high. Putting rubber to the road also gave Reddin the in-depth view he needed to make decisions, whether that meant reassigning staff at his 15 locations or reorganizing operations. In the wake of a merger, leadership isn’t just about bringing new ideas to the table—it means understanding and integrating cultures, and getting your own feel for the lay of the land.
Omega Tool Corp.Hamin Lee/The Globe and Mail
Leverage ground-level intel
Omega Tool Corp.
(Windsor, Ont.)
350 employees
7 million+ pounds of steel consumed each year
When it comes to business development, CEOs have a number of avenues to consider, like hiring consultants or doing market research. But there’s another, oft-overlooked way to move your business forward: Hit up your employees for ideas. It’s one thing to perfunctorily ask for feedback, of course, and another to truly tap into ground-level intelligence and use those insights to drive positive change. Dave Cecchin, president of plastics tooling company Omega Tools, found a way to do just that.
In 2018, Cecchin launched a series of informal forums with the office’s millennial and Gen Z employees (free doughnuts included). Omega already had processes in place to transfer knowledge from the older generation down. But this was about drawing untapped knowledge from younger workers. There was a strict no-idea-is-bad policy; everything was jotted down on a whiteboard and then voted on by the group. Each winning idea was assigned a mini board of directors that included a young champion, an older mentor and support staff. The unofficial board then collected data: Is the idea feasible? Who else is doing it and how? How much would it cost? Workable ideas got the green light.
One such proposal was conveniently prescient: A young team member argued for part-time remote work, and a small pilot was carried out in 2019. When COVID-19 hit, Omega was that much better prepared for the shift to remote work. Another idea led to a major upgrade to the firm’s online presence when it was pointed out that Omega’s website was so vague that it was hard to figure out what the company actually did. Cecchin commissioned a total revamp, got Omega on social media, and hired a full-time marketing and communications professional. The result was a major boon for its hiring process.
“Having grown up in this industry, I benefitted from amazing mentors, so I know first-hand the power of knowledge transfer from one generation to the next,” says Cecchin. “This project was about real two-way listening.”
Many hands make light work
Groupe Mundial
Saint-Lambert-de-Lauzon, Que.
250+ employees
$65 million in annual revenue
When it comes to leadership, Groupe Mundial founder and president Louis Veilleux isn’t exactly a lone wolf. He shares control of the industrial subcontracting company with 17 other people, all of whom have been with the business for a long time—and all, he says, play a major role in its governance.
That democratic attitude extends to Veilleux’s succession plan, which he’s been carefully crafting for almost 20 years. It doesn’t centre on just one or even a few individuals, but a whole group he hopes will carry Groupe Mundial into future generations. He even plans on appointing co-CEOs. “I share power because I don’t want my mistakes to be too burdensome for the company,” he says. “I was a punk when I was young. I don’t really believe in a single person having power over everyone.” Veilleux’s approach may be unconventional, but with $65 million in annual revenue, plus strong profits and growth, you can’t argue with the results.
Don’t seize every opportunity
Homes by Avi
Calgary
250 employees
Building homes in 35 communities
When Alberta-based builder Homes by Avi acquired a site for a large-scale, multifamily rental development a few years ago, CEO Charron Ungar couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling. Demand for a higher-density project was strong in that particular market, but something felt off—largely because the company’s core business is single-family homes.
“We had the skill set, but it would have been a major drag on our human resources and taken away from our core base of operations,” says Ungar. “We would’ve been stretched too thin.” Homes by Avi, which was founded back in 1978, ended up offloading the site, not because it wasn’t a great opportunity, but just because it was meant for somebody else. “We use an investment committee model that helps guide our decisions and test the assumptions in every opportunity we consider,” says Ungar. “We place high value in being selective in what we take on, which has proven successful for us.”
Support equals service
Humberview Group
Toronto
1,400 employees
47,000 vehicles sold in 2023
Humberview Group started as a single dealership in Toronto in 1971, with the founding philosophy: “Serving our customers better, each and every day.” In 2019, the word “customer” was purged from the motto. That change—to “Serving you better, each and every day”—didn’t reflect a new ambivalence for excellent customer service at its 20 dealerships. Rather, it was an acknowledgement that treating your team—not just your customers—with care is the best way to guarantee it.
At Humberview, team members aren’t subjected to annual reviews. Instead, each one gets a “personal development plan” that focuses more on their experience than their performance. “If a manager has an issue with someone’s sales, they should be addressing that throughout the year,” says CEO John Esplen. “These sessions are an opportunity to fortify connections between our team members. The true secret to customer service? If you treat your people right, they’ll treat everyone else right.”
Balance strategy with a front-line focus
Integricon
Vaughan, Ont.
129 employees, 300+ contractors
3,500+ claims handled in 2023
Under Desmond D’Silva’s leadership, Integricon—which restores residential and commercial properties—has expanded from Ontario to Alberta, and now has nine offices between the two provinces, with 74% revenue growth over the past five years. But the CEO has his sights set on a truly national expansion. Of course, with growth comes the risk of weakening your core competencies. In Integricon’s case, with its consistently high consumer-approval ratings, that core is an exceptional client experience—arguably important in any industry, but especially so in the high-stress world of property restoration.
D’Silva doesn’t shy away from a high-level approach—Integricon recently started building strategic business units, instituting a revenue goal of $10 million per unit within three years. But the company’s strategy also centres on treating employees the same as they would valued clients and promoting from within as a general rule. “Our overarching strategy does not work without the front-line-focus mindset, and vice-versa,” says D’Silva. “By keeping these priorities in delicate balance, we can grow in numbers without diluting our strengths.”
Listen to the front line
Italian Centre Shop Ltd.
5 Alberta locations
700+ employees
$110 million net worth
Teresa Spinelli took her first steps in the pasta aisle of her father’s Edmonton independent grocery store. At 13, she became a cashier, and from there she took on numerous roles both on the floor and at head office before becoming CEO in 2000. Spinelli drew on all her years of experience at the Italian Centre to make a major leap in leadership strategy: moving away from top-down directives.”I sit here in my office and don’t know what’s happening on the ground,” she says. “But the person out there slicing salami? They know everything there is to know about that—and how we can make it better.”
Since then, the five-store chain’s strategy has more or less been driven by employees’ ideas, from a refreshed warehouse-receiving policy to the “Nifty 50 report,” which helps each location prioritize its 50 best-selling products. “True success,” says Spinelli, “has come from listening to the collective wisdom of our team.”
Tenacity will get you everywhere
Joseph Haulage
Stoney Creek, Ont.
151 employees, 249 owner operators
350-unit-plus fleet across North America
For most of its history, Joseph Haulage offered one service: dump trucks. But in 2005, Geoff Joseph, its second-generation owner, spearheaded its evolution to what he calls a “one call gets it all” model. He wanted the company to offer a comprehensive range of transportation services, from flatbed trailers that move construction and building projects, to fuel delivery trucks and pneumatic tankers for concrete plants. Even the logo changed from plain text to an overlaid oval to symbolize the new full-circle approach. It was an audacious move—both competitors and naysaying internal voices said his goal was too ambitious. Over the years, it took a nearly $70-million investment, and some of the company’s new business units seemed overbuilt well before they began to realize a return. It was worth it. In 2010, the company’s revenue sat around $5 million—that’s up to around $100 million today.
Get outta the way
MAD Elevator
Mississauga, Ont.
280 employees
100,000+ MAD-equipped elevators
MAD Elevator—a manufacturer of fixtures, interiors and other elevator components—was a 20-person team in 2008. And despite having ballooned to 280 employees, longtime CEO Steve Reich-Rohrwig has staunchly resisted implementing elaborate bureaucracy and approval mechanisms. “We spend so much time making sure we hire great people who have a growth mindset, training them, and aligning them with our values,” he says. “Why would we then spend even more time controlling and supervising their day-to-day? The best thing we can do for them and the company is get out of their way.”
Sure, mistakes happen—on one occasion, a team member spent $3,000 to airfreight a $1,500 product across the country overnight. A manager may not have approved the decision, but on further review, it turned out to be the right call. Micromanagement can lock competent team members in a box. If you empower them do their jobs, Reich-Rohrwig says, they’ll make the right decisions the vast majority of the time.
Amir Quality Meats.Hamin Lee/The Globe and Mail
Own the supply chain
Amir Quality Meats
(Brampton, Ont.)
200+ employees
300+ customers in 9 provinces
In the halal meat industry, strict adherence to religious standards is essential, and consumers place immense trust in processors to uphold these values throughout the supply chain. Consequently, for Amir Quality Meats—a Muslim-owned and -operated halal meat processor and distributor certified by the Canadian Council of Imams—consumer confidence in its due diligence is the bedrock of the business. For years, buying meat from suppliers worked out fine, barring the odd hiccup here or there. But then the company experienced immense growth, to the tune of 650% between 2018 and 2022. Clearly it was doing something right—and a less forward-thinking CEO than Tony Aziz may have become complacent.
Not so in this case. “We took a strategic view of the business and homed in on our mission, which is to make halal more accessible,” says Aziz. “We realized that to continue to grow and serve our customers and community, we needed to have more control.” The company had to somehow both meet growing demand and maintain the integrity of the supply chain; relying on external suppliers would no longer suffice.
In late 2022, Aziz acquired a poultry facility in Arthur, Ont., and set about upgrading it to a state-of-the-art, halal-compliant facility. To date, he’s invested about $50 million into the abattoir, which sits on 90 acres of land and will span 60,000 square feet when complete. “Control over the supply chain ensures complete traceability over the process, and that’s incredibly important to us,” says Aziz. “With this facility, and through establishing our own relationships with farmers, we’re making sure we not only have enough supply to cater to our current needs, but our future ones, too.”
Vertical integration isn’t for the faint of heart; it demands substantial upfront investment and escalates management complexity. With a 12- to 18-month window for completion for the facility, Amir Quality Meats is far from realizing a return on its investment—but this is a play at longevity, not short-term gain.
Live your culture
Oaken Equipment
5 locations in Ontario
100 employees
On a Sunday morning in March 2020, Kai Sørensen—CEO of Canada’s largest Bobcat dealer network, Oaken Equipment—sat in front of his computer staring at a list of his employees. The pandemic had financially upended the business, and only eight weeks after rolling out “the Oaken Way”—a codified set of company values, the first of which was “People First”—he faced the prospect of selecting team members to lay off.
It would’ve been the right move for the firm’s near-term financial health, but Sørensen couldn’t do it. Instead, he kept everyone and paid them 100% of their salaries (or topped them off to 100%) even before the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy was announced. “In retrospect, it was the right decision,” says Sørensen. “It emboldened our team and inspired a great deal of loyalty to our people-first culture, especially compared to the choices made by other companies in our industry.” The business began to rebound in late 2020. Since then, Oaken Equipment has more than doubled its staff, added two new locations, and grown its revenue by 75%, selling more than 1,000 machines each year.
Keep it simple
O’Dell HVAC Group
Burlington, Ont.
102 employees
283% revenue growth since 2020
Until 2019, O’Dell HVAC Group was a band of partners and employees with no concrete management structure. As the company’s sales ramped up, that started to change—but the org chart stayed fairly lean, with minimal middle management and lots of room for entrepreneurial spirit in the ranks. When O’Dell acquired Ottawa’s Walmar Ventilation in 2021, the team doubled to 60 overnight—and as the firm added 40 team members over the next year and a half, its president, Nathan Martin, started to wonder whether it might be time to add some depth to the structure.
“I was looking at what bigger companies were doing, but what stopped me is a conversation with a mentor. He reminded me that our management structure should reflect our core values. And for us, a crucial one is staying nimble,” he says. “I thought I had to add all this complexity, but that conversation gave me confidence in the way we were doing things.” Now, Martin is intentional about maintaining a lean operation—O’Dell has six mid-level managers, and in keeping with its values, no immediate plans to layer on.
Go with the flow
ProFab Group
Saint-Apollinaire, Que.
300+ employees
2 plants, 180+ home models available
Rising interest rates slowed the single-family home market and caused a surge in demand for rentals. In 2021, ProFab Group—a modular and factory-made home builder that had long specialized in single-family homes—responded by branching out in a bold new direction, fuelled by its acquisition by the private equity fund Kairos Capital Management.
By expanding its portfolio to multidwelling units and rentals, plus building components like walls and roof trusses, ProFab evolved to meet a changing market—without losing its identity as a modular construction company. It also added architecture and engineering to its repertoire of services, and blended traditional building methods with its usual modular process, all in an effort to become a comprehensive service provider. In an increasingly unstable world, a static business strategy is a recipe for irrelevance—ProFab is tackling the needs of today’s market and shoring up its capabilities for whatever the future has in store.
Foster healthy living
Scotlynn
Vittoria, Ont.
1,800+ employees
150 million pounds of produce grown and packed in 2023
In 2014, Scotlynn CEO and president Scott Biddle was training for the Cain’s Quest Snowmobile Endurance Race—a gruelling six-day, 3,100-kilometre event. Soon after he began working with a personal trainer, he noticed an improvement in his focus at work, which includes overseeing six locations across North America and a million shipments of produce each year. “It occurred to me that if this was how much better I was feeling, I should offer the same opportunity to the people who worked for me,” he says.
In a fairly unconventional move for a shipping and logistics company, he hired a full-time personal trainer and chef/dietician for the office. He also built a full kitchen, and a gym complete with weights, rowing machines and stationary bikes. Today, keeping fit is an entrenched part of the company culture—as is taking full advantage of the free, nutritious food available throughout the work day. Not everyone opts into working out, of course. But those who do exercise in teams to keep each other motivated, which Biddle says has been a major boon for team collaboration.
Think global, act local
SideFX
Toronto
163 employees (148 full time)
2,126 customers from 71 countries
SideFX is the company behind Houdini, 3D animation software that’s been used by nearly every major visual effects (VFX) studio, including Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Sony. As a private Canadian company, it was always competing with much bigger fish, so it was crucial for it to find the right niche.
Initially, SideFX focused on VFX for high-end features—think True Lies, Twister and Children of the Corn. “But over time, that focus on feature films wasn’t enough to support our aspirations for growth,” says CEO Kim Davidson. “We knew we had to expand our focus without going too far afield.” That meant disregarding well-meaning suggestions to shift into effects for architectural and product design, which was promising, but would have taken the sales and marketing teams too far outside the company’s scope. In the early 2000s, SideFX doubled down on the game and TV market, which had accounted for only a small portion of sales. Now, they make up a sizeable portion of its business. And though non-media customers are part of the picture, films, games and TV are the throughline. “The temptation is to grow in every direction, but to stay on track, we have to be disciplined,” says Davidson.