LEADWAVE: offers affordable I.T. Solutions to businesses large and small

LEADWAVE was established in the year 2006 by Mat Berube and Aaron Weir in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. In the beginning, the company focused on I.T. Services, after which the focus shifted to the MSP model in 2009. The company started dealing with clients directly, managing staff, and developing the company. It has filled the management staff in the past two years and getting ready for rapid growth in 2020. LEADWAVE by the end of 2020 will be servicing clients in 27 different cities. The company said: “We currently have two offices with Sarnia office acting as H.Q. and Chatham office for servicing clients in the outlying areas. Early in 2020, we will be opening our London Ontario office.”

Let’s get in touch with Mat Berube, President and CEO

How has your company evolved over the years?

Any good business needs a good foundation. The foundation of our company is great employees working with an excellent framework for organization and management. Many companies say that their growth is organic, but our growth has been truly organic. We have grown our annual revenue to 10 times annually what we did in year one without the use of a formal sales team. We’ve built a solid foundation, and now we are pressing ahead with a full growth plan. Agreement forecasts for 2020 are already lining up to be 35% above our 2019 numbers. Our primary strategy is entering new markets and offering affordable I.T. services with technology and service levels our competitors can’t touch.

What were your initial hiccups? How did you manage to overcome them?

Finding the right staff has been and possibly always will be a hurdle that we regularly face. The standards we have for our service offerings are so high that our team must be held to a higher standard. If we held average internal standards, we would most likely encounter less staff turnover because any average level of I.T. employees could handle it. We are not trying to be a mediocre I.T. Company.

According to you should the firm be growing or try to be efficient?

The challenge is to do both and grow efficiently. The trick is to focus on being as efficient as you can first. Growth has never been the main driver behind what we do, we have been trying to help businesses leverage technology to succeed as best we can, and growth has been a byproduct. The companies we work with find growth by using technology to leverage their company assets, we do our part, and our customer base grows as our customers succeed.

Explicate about your offerings

Our primary offering is our only offering. We offer a fully outsourced I.T. department to any company that needs one. We don’t offer a la carte services. We feel it is our duty to all our customers to have them be fully protected, and we can’t do that if we don’t handle all I.T. related responsibilities. Our small business division can handle clients with two to ten users, while our primary tech department handles companies from 11 to 1000 users. Our clients pay a monthly fee, and they use us like they would an internal I.T. department. We don’t have limits on support requests they can put in or hourly restrictions. We tackle any issues and don’t stop till it’s done.

How is LEADWAVE unique?

When we first started, we had many competitors around the same size as us. At the time, we were just two computer nerds who started an I.T. service company. They were a dime a dozen, but not all were real companies. To grow, we had to reinvest in the company, our salaries for the first six years may have been at 50% of what we could get working for someone else. Some of our competitors lined their pockets without putting thought into the ever-changing technology landscape. Sure, it would have been nice to buy a new Harley at the end of year one, but we didn’t. We still hold ourselves to the standard of reinvesting a minimum of 50% of company profits to building the company.

How much effort did you have to put forth to handle customers’ ever-changing requirements?

Communication with the client is vital. As a big part of their business, we truly partner with them. We meet with our clients quarterly to learn about their plans for the next quarter. In these meetings, we find out what new projects we need to support, and we also offer solutions to problems the client may have. We talk with them about company goals for the quarter, and we partner with them to get these goals accomplished.

How does your company contribute towards making the business better across the industry? What are your personal inputs for the same?

We are participating in industry peer groups; these peer groups report best practices to each other, and some financial information is aggregated for all to review. Multiple industry events throughout the year allow thousands in our field to come together and see what we all are doing in the industry. We can all learn from each other.

Give us a quote that will best describe your company.

LEADWAVE is helping businesses leverage technology to succeed. Let us handle the tech while you handle your business.

Backdrop of the luminary

Mat has always been most passionate about emerging technologies and continues to be an early adopter and revels in bleeding-edge technology. He strives for LEADWAVE to remain at the LEADing edge of the Technology WAVE, and be the first to bring new technologies to its clients. This love of technology in helping individuals and businesses grow and accomplish their goals is what drives him to consistently strive to add value to LEADWAVE’s clients. His primary contribution has been in the development of innovative service delivery methods, attention to detail, and an absolute focus on providing above and beyond service for customer satisfaction and personal attention. However, this task is impossible for one single person to accomplish. Therefore, he relies heavily on his co-founding partner Aaron Weir who, as Chief Business Development Officer, has been instrumental in growth strategy and maintaining client relationships and additional outlining regional growth. The two share executive duties and have focused their efforts in the last two years in building a strong management team. They’ve added an Account Manager and vCIO, an Administrative Manager, and, most recently, a Director of Operations on whose shoulders to build a solid foundation for the growth they have planned for 2020. With this management team in place, the building of a strong technical and administration team has been front and center for 2019. With these efforts coming to fruition in Q4 of 2019, the entire team at LEADWAVE is well-positioned for exponential growth beginning in 2020.

"Our passion for transforming leading-edge technologies into affordable technologies makes us unique, thereby satisfying today’s critical need for reliable information systems."

"Our team of highly skilled and knowledgeable IT experts is ready to serve organizations at any level, from a few hours per month to full IT department support."