Before founding his own IT company, Mahamoud Hassan cut his teeth by working at his family’s business, Ultimate Commercial Cleaning. There, he handled administration, on top of competing for contracts and negotiating prices with vendors.
“Every day you’re either putting out a fire or laying down a brick for something in the future,” Hassan says. “It’s a constant challenge and I really appreciate that.”
In fact, Hassan appreciated it so much that he decided to pursue business administration for his post-graduate degree. “I often felt like (I had) impostor syndrome,” he explains. “I studied criminology; I didn’t know too much about business.”
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Hassan decided to study in the U.K., where his courses “reaffirmed a lot of things and taught me a lot that I didn’t know about business,” he admits.
What Hassan did know, though, was that business and technology are deeply intertwined. During his previous employment experiences, which included a role at a non-profit, Hassan found it difficult to find IT support teams who were patient and willing to get elbows-deep into an issue. “We never really found a company that we could grow with,” he recalls.
When he came back to Ottawa, Hassan seized the opportunity to create the kind of IT service he’d been missing.
That was five years ago. Today, Hassan is the co-founder and managing director of Toos Technical Solutions Canada, headquartered in Ottawa. Toos has a staff of six people, with an additional four in the U.S., servicing 30 clients across the world. In turn, those clients work with individuals living in Africa, India, South America — the list goes on.
“Sometimes you’re on a call with somebody who’s in Nigeria, or Kenya, the U.K., Guatemala,” Hassan says.
Toos, which means “direct” in Somali, focuses on serving small businesses, non-profits and social enterprises. “(Their organizational) resources are very limited, so they have to be very creative with the little that they have,” Hassan explains. “Our target audience was always the community, seeing how we can leverage technology to help them meet (their) objectives.”
On top of Toos’ tailored approach to client services, Hassan says that “you rarely ever see diverse companies like ours that are in (IT), let alone other industries, as well. There’s not a lot of Black leadership in these kinds of companies, so that was the other kind of motivation.”
In just four years, Toos has seen a great deal of growth, although things were rocky between 2017 and 2019 when Hassan was still having to work for his family’s business. However, by the end of 2019, he took the plunge and switched to Toos full-time.
“A lot of positive things came from that,” Hassan says. “January 2020, we hit the ground running and things started to speed up for us.”
Then, COVID hit. Hassan says he and his team were “sitting ducks for a while” as industries halted, waiting to see how long the pandemic would last. Then, one by one, companies started to go remote and Toos’ success began to take off.
Hassan says his business journey has not been a perfectly straight line. His advice to budding entrepreneurs? “You don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment to get (your idea) rolling,” he says. “Just be stubborn and consistent.”
Taking those words to heart, Toos’ team has its sights set on expanding into Africa within the next 10 years. “We really want to become the IT company of the community in Ottawa and other regions, hopefully,” Hassan says.
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The Bright Side of Business is an editorial feature focused on sharing positive stories of business success.
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