Founding Generatr

Finding Purpose

In November 2023, I founded Generatr Solutions to address two key frustrations I’ve encountered throughout my career: major gaps in business strategy that undermined marketing and CX projects, and the failure of companies to transform their businesses to capitalize on evolving market opportunities.

Over the years, I’ve worked at seven marketing agencies, spent time on the client side in two separate roles, and managed through three M&A events, where I was directly involved in two of them. I’ve led cross-functional teams, held senior roles with financial responsibility for almost a decade, and participated in executive-level leadership decisioning. This experience, while not without its challenges, has given me invaluable perspective.

How It Began

My career started in customer experience, working with clients like FedEx, Microsoft, Roche, and later RBC, Dynamic, and Manulife, among others. These were the early days of web UX, where many basic technologies we now take for granted didn’t yet exist. The work was focused on user experience, integrating new technologies, and migrating to CMS platforms, alongside comprehensive redesigns.

At the core of these projects was understanding the customer: What did they need? How did they interact with the brand or product? What could we do to make their interactions intuitive? Customer research, usability testing, and iterative design were central to answering these questions. But beyond usability and intuitive design, there was something more critical: Insight. 

Insight, as a technical term, provides a critical understanding or perspective on the customers’ relationships and expectations that are central to how they interpret their interactions with a brand. While usability is broadly attainable, insight is narrow and specific, and enables meaningful differentiation within a customer experience. Employing insight should mean the generation of legitimate competitive advantage, which is where customer and design strategy significantly intersect business strategy. 

Shifting to Strategy

As my career progressed, I focused on strategy—identifying opportunities everywhere, especially amongst digital design and marketing problems. How could the work better align to customer needs and desires? How could it outpace competitors? What sort of sustainable competitive advantage could be established? 

When leading strategy across UX, content and technology, I would often need to backstop the tactical strategy by determining what the business really needed; what were the real underlying problems that needed to be solved; what business objectives should they contribute to?  

Unfortunately, some clients only seemed interested in fixing the surface-level issues with existing digital interfaces: not rethinking their underlying business strategy. I knew this was a necessary component to success, and witnessed the impact of its absence. I became frustrated with tactical strategy, and left for management roles.

Corporate Transitions and Business Transformation

In 2009, I joined Canwest just as it entered bankruptcy, with my offer arriving the same week as the formal announcement. I decided to take the role and lead a 30-person UX team within Canada’s largest newspaper network. It would be my first exposure to corporate transition through M&A, if not business transformation.

Through Canwest’s transition to Postmedia, I saw firsthand how transformational change isn’t driven from the bottom-up, but from the top-down. Functional teams, no matter how capable, do not have an adequate perspective or control to effect a transformation. It requires executive alignment and considers not only customer behaviour and market dynamics, but financial factors, operational concerns, shifts in the competitive landscape, technology, and shareholder interests. 

This experience shattered my earlier, purist view of customer-centric business success, and in doing so, broadened my perspective.

After Postmedia, I joined Transcontinental Interactive—an operation built from several acquisitions, including Redwood (rebranded to Totem), ThinData, Rastar, and Vortex Mobile, among others. As part of the strategy team, I worked with a range of clients, including P&G, Home Depot USA, and Aeroplan, during a period when digital marketing and customer experience technologies were rapidly evolving.

Each business unit carried on independently following their acquisition, while attempts to find meaningful points of integration continued in the background. Multiple rounds of executive leadership changes ensued; competing interests slowed progress; groups of clients who saw their tactical support diminish, all of which served to make this a challenging period. 

Meanwhile, the market was changing. Critical technologies that were adequate upon acquisition had become dated. Confusion around brand and business purpose emerged amongst clients. Eventually the original business units were sold off, or “integrated” within the broader operation. 

An Example

There was a moment in which Totem had a real opportunity to pivot and transform into a contemporary, in-demand, digital agency. Totem’s business was roughly 50% digital when I joined, but in the midst of corporate changes this opportunity eluded the operation. Totem had become fundamentally a print-based business at a time when demand for custom magazines was in decline. 

Still viable, Totem was sold to Yellow Pages Group and continued to operate in isolation of YPG’s other activities. Potential integration with Mediative was explored, YPG’s own amalgamation of digital agency / media services acquisitions, but this didn’t go far. Executive leadership changes at YPG meant everything but core operations were put on the block, and Totem was sold again, this time to St. Joseph Communications (later SJC) and merged into Strategic Content Labs.

Founding Generatr

By the time I left SJC Media in 2023, having managed Strategic Content Labs for five years, I felt I’d witnessed enough of the same story: viable businesses undermined by slow decision-making, outmoded business models, and a lack of core strategy. Businesses that were ultimately harvested for their trailing margins. 

As investments, I’m confident these businesses largely delivered on their expected, short term returns. I can’t, however, accept the failures to identify, and act on, a path towards sustainable revenues, margin and growth. In most cases this was possible, but a failure to align on these priorities meant that the parent company lost interest, and eventually pulled the plug. 

Companies need business strategy. Companies need to transform their businesses. The impact is material, and the creation of sustainable businesses with ongoing streams of revenue and margin is the literal difference between an operation’s - perhaps an acquisition’s - success and failure. Executive leadership knows this. Yet somehow both of these essentials seem elusive. In their absence, no amount of marketing or improved customer experiences can fix the underlying issues.

That’s why I founded Generatr Solutions, a strategic consultancy and marketing services firm, equipped to tackle business strategy and transformation, backed up with an integrated set of marketing and customer experience capabilities. I see the need, and I’ve seen it left unmet for too long. I’m hopeful you’ll see the benefit in closing these gaps and unlocking sustainable business performance.