These companies achieved exponential growth, all while nurturing company culture, striving for sustainability, and overcoming supply chain bottlenecks. Congratulations to our winners! Check out OBJ’s Spring Newsmagazine for full coverage.
#5 Ottawa Valley Meats
Three-year revenue growth: 450%
Last year’s rank: New to the list
PROFILE: Farm-to-plate e-commerce, specializing in high-quality locally produced meats. Direct-to-consumer Amazon model of ordering farm meats.
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What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
“Hiring and maintaining high-level talent in growing divisions.”
What did you do to address it?
“We fostered talent from within and developed them into captains of their own divisions.
What has been your biggest lesson learned?
“The biggest lesson I learned was knowing how and when to delegate and let people use their own abilities to accomplish jobs.”
#4 Ottawa Deck and Rail
Three-year revenue growth: 1,185%
Last year’s rank: New to the list
PROFILE: Ottawa Deck and Rail supplies and installs aluminum powder coating railing for decks, balconies and front steps.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
“Supply chain management.”
What did you do to address it?
“We kept in close contact with suppliers and increased our margin of safety for minimum order requirements to create a larger buffer on time and price.”
What has been your biggest lesson learned?
“The value of communication.”
#3 GoFor Delivers
Three-year revenue growth: 1,382%
Last year’s rank: 1
PROFILE: GoFor provides small to big and bulky last-mile delivery services in the retail, construction and supply chain industries across North America.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
“The biggest challenge is being a last-mile industry leader while expanding our focus on sustainability. Customers want convenience, speed, and sustainability. GoFor is helping customers do this with carbon offsets, electric vehicles, and smart packaging to make the last mile carbon negative. Another challenge is doing this at a time of massive workplace change. GoFor has implemented a 100 per cent remote workforce in North America, working diligently on how to encourage connection to one another as our company grows.”
What did you do to address it?
“In 2022, we will be bringing new educational content and messaging to the front of our purpose. Breathing new life into the brand’s mission and re-energizing existing and future customers about why sustainable delivery is the path to the future.”
What has been your biggest lesson learned?
“What we hope it truly shows is that GoFor is listening and cares about the wants, needs and success of everyone we connect with, internally and externally. More than ever, GoFor has the capability and the resources to make sure we maximize the value of our employees, drivers, customers and most, importantly, our communities.”
#2 Noibu
Three-year revenue growth: 1,721%
Last year’s rank: 4
PROFILE: The e-commerce error monitoring platform powering the world’s best e-commerce experiences. Originally conceived as a vehicle for offering 3D virtual tours of brick-and-mortar stores, the startup changed focus in 2019 to become a bug-detection platform for e-commerce sites.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
“We prioritize our culture as we fundamentally want all of our Noibots to love working at Noibu. Our biggest challenge has been keeping up our top-quartile growth, while ensuring we don’t risk our employer net promoter score of 97.”
What did you do to address it?
“We have created an employee culture committee to drive our culture and events planning and ensure that we are focused exactly on what our people want. We also focus on maintaining our consistent feedback culture by encouraging everyone to always give feedback, regardless of role in the organization.”
What has been your biggest lesson learned?
“Employees are everything, they are the backbone of Noibu. Supporting our employees and ensuring they are happy is our biggest priority because without them we would not be where we are.”
#1 Bushbalm Natural Skincare
Three-year revenue growth: 5,570%
Last year’s rank: 3
PROFILE: Bushbalm is the bikini line skincare company, specializing in all-natural and vegan products. What makes it different is where the products are meant to be used: the ever-so-bashful pubic region.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in relation to the fast growth of your company?
“We’re not a software company where scale can be efficient. We make physical skincare products and the global supply chain has caused havoc on our operations. By the end of February 2021, we had experienced such rapid growth that we had already re-forecasted our revenue projections five times. Ensuring we had components on hand and product to sell was critical.”
What did you do to address it?
“We have an excellent operations team who seamlessly managed the pandemic and actually brought many of our costs down. From creative ways to managing components to air shipments, we made our manufacturing process work. Some costs rose significantly, while others improved with operational scale. Our ability to forecast and make bold predictions was key to getting out of one of the fastest-paced years yet.”
What has been your biggest lesson learned?
“As a startup growing so rapidly, we’ve had to work past our usual workloads, taking on more than one job. Growing a team through this type of growth has been hard, but ultimately taught us the importance of our people and team. Although it may be hard to measure, we take great pride in the importance of culture.”
