The Eastern Ontario Business Journal is celebrating regional businesses that are on the fast track to growth with its third annual Fastest Growing Companies competition.
Eligible companies are headquartered in Eastern Ontario and have demonstrated substantial revenue growth over the past three years. This year, the top companies come from a variety of industries and from all over Eastern Ontario.
Read more about each of the companies in the fall issue of the Eastern Ontario Business Journal. Fastest Growing Companies is presented by MNP.
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Here are the top companies for 2024:
Blue Collar Marketing
Kingston
619% revenue growth
Blue Collar Marketing specializes in digital marketing for blue-collar businesses with targeted strategies, enhanced online presence and media production.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
Our biggest lesson learned has been the importance of planning for seasonality while staying adaptable in the face of fluctuating business demands. Early on, we realized that while our core service of website design is in high demand, the ebb and flow of projects can sometimes create gaps, especially during slower periods. To address this, we began to anticipate and plan for these seasonal shifts by diversifying our offerings.
By expanding our services to complement website design, we’ve been able to create additional value for our clients while securing more consistent work. This includes services like ongoing website maintenance, SEO management, and digital marketing support — services that naturally align with what we already do but allow us to better manage the peaks and valleys of demand.
Cloud Metric
Kingston
239.6% revenue growth
Cloud Metric provides IT management that enhances performance, quality and security for organizations in Canada, ensuring compliance with industry standards, supported by 24/7 support.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
The biggest challenge we faced was scaling our operations to keep up with rapid growth while maintaining service quality and customer satisfaction. This involved managing the complexities of project management, customer support, compliance and security, while simultaneously expanding our team. Additionally, recruiting the right talent quickly enough to support our growth proved to be a significant hurdle. We needed individuals who were not only technically skilled, but also aligned with our company’s vision and culture.
The Bar
Brockville
199% revenue growth
The Bar is a full-serve bar serving non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages with live entertainment six days per week.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
Our biggest challenge was adding and training new staff, quickly, while trying to handle new ways of accommodating our added customers. Coming in and out of the COVID shutdowns, never knowing if people were going to keep coming back or not, trying to add and train new staff, implementing new rules that changed on a monthly basis proved to be quite difficult. We experienced some growing pains, but were able to overcome those by trial and error.
Convergence Design Services
Arnprior
166.7% revenue growth
Convergence is an end-to-end contract design services company operating in aerospace, hardware, software, mechanical, robotics, and electric vehicle engineering.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
Balancing ongoing complex engineering projects while growing/onboarding the team in lockstep. As technology continues to evolve in aerospace/military/electric vehicle design, so do the challenges of adapting with the velocity of change.
J&J Landscaping
Sydenham
92.8% revenue growth
J&J is a small local landscaping and construction company.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
Hiring the right staff is always a challenge for any company. Growth is great, but remaining disciplined with our key goals in mind and always providing a top-quality job well done is most important to us. As each year changes, I would say the fear of not knowing what the next year will bring; things change fast and you have to be ready to adapt.
AquaOmega
Cornwall
71% revenue growth
AquaOmega aims to be the global leader in both innovation and quality regarding omega-3 fatty acid supplements.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
Our greatest challenge has been securing the raw materials necessary to maintain the high standards we’ve set for our products, while also building adequate inventory to keep up with our rapid, double-digit growth. As a company that prioritizes quality, we are extremely selective about the raw materials we use, which can sometimes limit availability. Balancing this with the need to avoid stock-outs and prevent customer frustration has required constant focus. Furthermore, we are a self-funded company that has never raised outside capital. This means that managing cash flow and ensuring we can scale inventory in line with demand while staying within budget has added its own set of complexities.
Brock IT
Brockville
67.6% revenue growth
Brock IT is a service provider specializing in higher-security environments such as health care, financial services and military.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
Service quality for current clients is always affected by adding new clients. New clients take 40-60 per cent more work for the first six months than current clients do, which results in more labour hours and thus slower response times for other issues.
Kemptville Heating & AC
Kemptville
54.4% revenue growth
Kemptville Heating & AC is an HVAC business.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
We have never focused on fast growth. Our main focus has always been to provide our clients with quality products and exceptional workmanship. The biggest challenge we have faced is balancing our workload. In this industry, it is easy to get overworked and burnt-out during peak seasons. We, as HVAC professionals, love what we do for a living but getting overworked can change that fast!
GlassHouse Botanics
Pembroke
33.4% revenue growth
GlassHouse is an EU-GMP certified medicinal cannabis cultivator and processor of dry flower produced for export to the E.U., U.K. and Australia.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
There are many challenges for a privately-owned startup in a brand new industry.
Aside from starting from scratch, building your own facility, hiring a new team and developing your own standard operating procedures, the biggest challenge would be navigating the significant regulatory requirements in Canada and Germany to obtain our Health Canada cannabis license and EU GMP certification. It took years and a significant amount of capital.
