“Facilitating Collaboration” — with Marc Gingras, CEO Foko Retail

Today, we’re speaking with Marc Gingras, CEO of Foko Retail . We talk about staying humble, his many startups, and how Foko Retail brings in-store retail visions to life.

Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager.

Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.

Welcome to Journey Map, the audio experience that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people. Today’s guest graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ottawa. He also went on to obtain a Masters in Management Science from the University of Waterloo and swiftly founded his first startup shortly after, which would be acquired by Entrade Inc. where he would eventually become CTO and VP of R&D. After this experience, he would head back to academia getting his Masters in Business Administration from Insead Graduate Business School. In 2003 he takes on the role as Investment Manager at Innovatech Montreal. Leaving this position, he would next become the VP of Product Marketing and Business Development at Nimcat Networks. In 2006 he goes of and founded his own company Tungle Coporation, and creates Tungle.me a software that enabled users to schedule meetings across organizations, calendar systems, and time zones. He would eventually sell Tungle.me to BlackBerry and takes a position in the company as Senior Director of Handheld Applications. He works there until 2013 when he goes off and founded another company Foko Retail. For those of you who don’t know Foko Retail is a visual communication platform for retail teams. With clients like Nike, WholeFoods and Helly Hansen Foko Retail has created one of the industry’s largest groups of visual merchandisers.

Today’s episode of Journey Map is brought to you by MindManager. Journey Map listeners know that with the right map you can take your career anywhere you set your mind to. MindManager work management software puts your ideas, plans and projects on the path to success by transforming them into dynamic digital maps, charts, diagrams and more. Mind Managers flexible visual format makes it easy to capture, organize, understand and evolve critical business information and with powerful collaboration sharing features it’s the perfect tool for keeping remote teams aligned, on track and headed in the right direction.You can take a free thirty day no commitment trial today by visiting www.mindmanager.com/journeymap.

DH: Today we are speaking with Marc Gingras CEO of Foko Retail. Marc welcome to Journey Map!

MG: Pleasure to be with you.

DH: As I was explaining the introduction, you do your bachelor science in mechanical engineering, you do a masters of science in management sciences, you get an MBA and then immediately jump into the role of CTO and VP research and development at EnTrade. What was it like jumping into such a big role right out of school?

MG: I’d just like to do a correction, I actually worked for Entrade between my masters. I ended up doing my MBA after working for Entrade, but the way I ended up being an Entrade after my Waterloo and management sciences degree is I basically ended up starting a start up there. We were building different e-commerce websites for different companies so we were two people starting the company and then we ended up growing to about 30 people and eventually we sold it to Entrade and that’s how I became CTO and VP of R&D over there.

DH: Okay well that’s great to know and so what regrets do you have in moving that quickly kind of up the corporate ladder and what do you attribute to that later success by having that experience so early on?

MG: Yeah so you know it’s interesting because I don’t have regrets because even though I’ve made many mistakes then you could regret mistakes but at the end of may I feel that those mistakes allow me to be and do what I like doing and love doing. Ultimately what drove me to want to start a company back in 1998 was I had had the option to do a few co-op terms as an engineer and one of the co-op work terms was with a manufacturing company called 3M. You all know 3M for doing masking tape and I was actually in the 3M manufacturing plants as a young engineer doing masking tape. I was in charge of a few projects to kind of improve the production and I realized that there’s no way I could wear a hard hat all day in a manufacturing plant with ear plugs. I was looking at the senior management there and they were people to me at the time and I think I’m at that age but they seemed very old. I was like it took them that long to get to that level, and I remember seeing one vice president there that seemed younger and I wondered how he managed to go up the ladder that fast. So I went up and talked to the guy and I was like “Hey how did you get to be Vice President at such a young age?” and he looked at me like well “I’m here because I had my own company that 3M acquired” and that just set off a bunch of alarms in my head, saying hold on there’s a way to shortcut this is by doing your own thing? Then from there you end up having bigger and larger positions if you take the risk at a younger age so that’s actually what sent me in the course of wanting to be an entrepreneur.

DH: It’s a little bit meta, you did your own journey map episode with this person and now we’re benefiting from both experiences. So what was it like when you got out of that start up and joined Engrade what was it about that experience that you lasted three years there and when it was time to move on and take on the next challenge at what were some of the reasons for moving on?

MG: So the company that I had coming out of the University of Waterloo I was maybe 24 at the time, and at 24 and I still do today so I had an ego that could not fit through a door. To me after the acquisition I was this young 24 year old that had built a company and sold it and I was now in charge of an army. So I came in there with an attitude that was probably one of the worst things you can have when you do an acquisition, where you’ve got an ego and you think you’re always right. I would go into meetings and I would tell people you know this is not that we should be running things, this is how you should do X and Y, and I don’t know why you’re making these types of decisions. That was really the type of attitude I had coming in. I remember my COO at the time he was my boss, he was a Harvard grad and he had more grey hair on his head than I had at the time. He took me out for dinner one day and that was maybe a month after the acquisition, and he’s like “Hey Marc how do you think it’s going” and I’m like “I think it’s going great! I see a lot of things that can be improved and there’s a lot of ways we can make the business bigger and better” and he looked at me and he said “Like you know what Marc you may be right but there is no way in hell you’re going to make it happen” , I’m like “What do you mean you’re not gonna let me do it?” and he’s like “Basically no one wants to work with you, nobody wants to take your opinions because the way you’re approaching it is totally wrong”. That was a major slap in the face for me when for the first time because I was not running my own show it was a very humbling experience and he basically looked at me said “You know once in awhile you have to have an iron fist and a velvet glove” he told me that and that resonated very well with me. It took me about 3 to 6 months to regain the confidence of the people I was working with, so instead of going into meetings and kind of dictating I just spent more time listening, understanding, and asking questions and then slowly working with some people to say “Hey maybe we should look at doing it this way”, but having them come up with the ideas or working together to come up with solutions that I may not have even thought of. That experience is probably the most rewarding experience that I had there, which was sometimes to have influence is not about power it’s about working, collaborating and putting your ego aside and understanding what people are trying to drive to. The other part is we’re building a company and during the beautiful bubble days where the basic business fundamentals were put aside, where it was about creating the most clicks, the most transactions but it was not about revenue, it was not about cash flow. It was not about all that stuff because the idea was “Hey don’t worry if you don’t have the money you’ll be able to raise it”. Well when the bubble burst it went down and we went down as a company. I remember getting to the lunch room where I had to lay off about 40–50 people, it was the most difficult situation I’ve ever had to live and still to this date and it’s something I would never want to repeat again. So if there was one lesson I took away from my Entrade experience was being humble and respectful and not believing the hype is super important moving forward.

DH: You mentioned while telling some of that story that you had VP’s that you thought were old while you’re at 3M and you realize you’re probably the same age as them now. I’m in my thirties, not old by definition but starting to feel the same about certain things that come out of my mouth or ways that I think about things. An example of that is that I was an excited user of Tungle back in the 2008–2009 time frame probably. I’m sure there are lots of people who are gonna listen to this podcast today who were children then so I feel a bit dated. But in the Tungle days what was the insight that you had it made sense to create you know this very specific application in Tungle.me?

MG: It’s interesting to me because what Tungle eventually became was a scheduling service to help business professionals schedule meetings instead of doing all the ping pong back and forth. It was really a service to cater to that, but the initial idea was not that. The initial idea was that I had just come from this other startup named Nimcat that we eventually sold so it was a good exit for everybody. During that start up we grew when I joined was maybe 15 people we grew to like 40–50, and so we went to the transition of needing to install at the time what was called an exchange server, so kind of an email provider with the calendar sharing capability and all that. It was very complicated to get going, you needed to get the right resources to come in and it was hyper complicated too much for something that should be super simple. So my idea was “Hey can we build a more simple exchange server?”, and when I started to dig into trying to figure out what are the key capabilities that we would need to have for a more simpler exchanger that would need to be built into a system. I realized that ultimately what was driving people’s decision to install an exchange server was the ability to share calendars. That was kind of the main feature that people said “You know what we’re at a point right now where I need to see the calendars of my colleagues’ so let me build something for that. So instead of trying to build the entire thing I’m like okay let me build the calendar sharing app. At the time also the internet the browsers were becoming kind of the place where people were gonna go work, Google calendar was starting to have some capabilities. Then it became, okay well maybe the issue is not that I want to see your calendar the issue is more that I want to meet with you and I need to find a time that you’re free. Now a problem that’s not solved is when I want to meet with someone outside the organization that’s from there we came to say okay there’s maybe a bigger need in the bigger market where people are from different organizations and ultimately the major problem that they want to solve is that of meeting each other. That’s where we really wanted to focus and that’s how Tungle became what it was.

DH: So the acquisition by Black Berry or RIM at the time, what was the surprisingly easiest part of the acquisition for you? Like if you had to lay out like okay here’s going to be the hard things heading into the acquisition and if there was one what was something that was surprisingly easier than you thought it might be heading into?

MG: When I started Tungle it was always going to be a company that would not be generating revenue. We knew that we would be a capability that would be molded into a bigger platform whether it’s a counter platform or so on. That was kind of the premise of Tungle from day one, so it was really about building the biggest user base possible so that you become an incumbent and attractive for someone that wants to roll that capability into their system. So that was our strategy from day one. The easiest part of going through this acquisition was the synergies that we had with Black Berry. Black Berry’s user base was business professionals, and business professionals need a scheduling platform as much as possible, they live on their devices mobile is the new computer. So from that standpoint the synergies were just there, being another Canadian company was something I really liked, and also at the time Apple was really starting to make some noise and it felt good to be part of a possible comeback although it did not happen. But the possibility of that to me was attractive, so the decision to decide to let go of the reins and be part of a bigger play was interesting at that point.

DH: Well what I like about that story and why it chose to focus on those two parts of the journey specifically, you seem to have a knack for uncovering a need that’s often in a B2B environment or a behind the scenes environment. I’m a huge fan of product companies that are solving a problem that’s hidden in plain sight, and I think Foko Retail it’s a great example of that. So I kind of explained in the introduction but sorry if I butcher this, but you can correct me. If you’re a visual merchandise manager or someone in store operations and you walk into any given store from I know you work with Hermes, I don’t go into Hermes so I can’t use that example but you know you walk into a Nike store and there’s a way that things are laid out and that way it is often being directed by someone who has to oversee many stores and make sure that things are set up properly and maintained properly. You kind of realize that this is an opportunity to inject social technology into that behind the scenes to allow merchandisers and store operation folks to have a better experience and make sure that guidelines are being followed properly. Again I’m gonna stop because I feel like I’m now going to be at risk of butchering what the product does. How did you realize that this problem needed to be solved when it doesn’t seem like you had really much background if any in retail merchandising or store operations?

MG: Yeah there’s short answers and then there’s long answers to that one. Let me start by just giving a little bit of a run down about what Foko does and that will help give an understanding of what’s attractive about what we do. So Foko underlying everything is a communication platform that allows a retailer at the headquarters to get the frontline team excited and engaged to deliver the vision that they have for their stores. So from there they can assign tasks for people to get done in the stores, they can communicate, they can collaborate, they can really engage with the vision and what the brand is all about. So that when you go into the stores you really feel that experience. Ultimately why we discovered this need here is that five years ago and it’s still even more prevalent in a covid environment is that people were saying five years ago that brick and mortar is dead like it ain’t gonna survive, it’s going to be replaced by e-commerce and you know what that’s just not true. People will still go into the stores because they need to discover new things, they need to try new things, they need to be attached to the brand. Ultimately what you really need to do is uncover the ambassadors that you have and are your sales associate to really be promoting you the right way. These associates in the stores are really going through a change in their role; they’re becoming brand ambassadors, they’re becoming fulfillment with curbside pickup in increasing, their becoming consultants on how to use the product or how to configure the product. So the role the associate is changing so a way to communicate with them is so fundamentally important, and if you look at all the companies that I’ve been involved with it is about facilitating communication, facilitating this way for people to get together to meet, to understand, and to collaborate. That’s what my focus has been throughout my career even at Black Berry, and so that’s kind of that knowledge that we’re bringing to this fundamental problem that retailers are having. So really helping these associates become brand ambassadors and the only way to do that is if there’s a proper way to communicate with them.

DH: If you could go back when you created your first startup and take one lesson that you now either through Foko or the other experiences that you’ve had, and go back and tell yourself just one thing that you think would make a lot of missteps not happen or accelerate your career at an even faster clip. If that’s what you would have wanted, what would that thing be?

MG: You know what can I cheat and use three?

DH: Sure

MG: My mind, my line of thought, and my modus operandi and I’ve got the scars to bring me to this has always been on these three things that I need to focus on: 1. Work hard but work smart, 2. Have a good heart, and that comes from being humble, and caring about your people, your customers, the environment, everything, 3. If you do those two things you’ll get a little bit of luck and things will happen. Those to me are the three ingredients to success which is work hard but smart, have a good heart, and some luck will happen.

DH: I think there’s no better place to end than on that sage advice, which you’ve given to yourself and now everyone else listening as a result. So Marc thank you for being on the show with us today, I’m going to include links in our show notes to where people can learn more about Foko Retail and find you online. If you are finding yourself as a person who’s working in and brick and mortar store and in need of a really great tool for visual merchandise communication then I think you should definitely be checking out Foko. Marc thank you again for taking the time and yeah hopefully we can do this again in a few years to see where the journey’s gone.

MG: That’d be great, thanks Dave for your time.