When COVID hit, Mike Potter’s Ottawa-based tech firm, Rewind, was on a roll.
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While Mike Potter’s firm has specialized in mitigating clients’ worst-case scenarios for a decade, it wasn’t until five years ago this week that the importance of disaster planning for his own business really hit home.
At the time, Potter’s Ottawa-based tech firm, Rewind, was on a roll. Its software, which automatically backs up and recovers data for users of cloud-based platforms such as Shopify, was serving tens of thousands of accounts worldwide. The company was on track to turn a profit by that summer.
Then, practically overnight, the COVID-19 crisis turned the global economy on its head. Within days of the World Health Organization declaring the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020, customers began calling Rewind to ask for discounts or, in some cases, free service in an effort to conserve cash while they tried to figure out how COVID would affect their bottom lines.
As CEO, Potter quickly understood that Rewind would also need to plan for its own “what-if” situations. He and his senior management team jumped into action, game-planning potential responses ranging from layoffs to vacating their office in Hintonburg.
“We would have had to do whatever it would have taken to make sure the business survived,” Potter says today. “We were planning for all sorts of scenarios.
“At that point, we were very, very close to (being) profitable. It wasn’t like we were likely going to have to let go of people, assuming our revenues stayed the same. I think what was the unsettling part for everybody was just the uncertainty. We had no idea what was going to happen to our customers.”
Potter’s worries were short-lived.
As consumers hunkered down at home to avoid spreading the virus, online shopping – and companies that underpinned e-commerce like Shopify – boomed. That, in turn, translated into big business for Rewind, which became profitable that June.
“As more people transitioned to starting online stores and were getting set up with Shopify, we quickly realized that our business was one that would benefit,” Potter explains. “Those requests for … free service, those didn’t last very long.
“We had a contingency plan that we had put in place, and it turned out we didn’t really need to implement anything that we had talked about. We actually needed to do the opposite – which was to raise money and grow and take advantage of the opportunity that was ahead of us.”
Already one of Ottawa’s fastest-growing tech startups, Rewind went into overdrive amid widespread shutdowns of brick-and-mortar retail outlets aimed at curbing the virus’s spread.
By the end of 2020, Rewind had landed a US$15-million funding round led by Montreal’s Inovia Capital. The following year, the company upped the ante with a US$65-million raise led by New York private capital giant Insight Partners.
For Potter and his team, it was heady times. Rewind ballooned from about 30 people at the start of the pandemic to more than 100 by the fall of 2021.
Onboarding that many employees in such a short span of time would be a challenge in any era. But it became a particular test of Rewind’s ingenuity when remote work was now the order of the day.
“Having to transition to a remote environment and then hiring people in that remote environment, it was fairly challenging to get used to that and build a culture,” Potter says. “I think it’s easier to build a remote company if you already have an established culture and your company is fairly large.”
Potter says Rewind had forged a strong “in-office” culture before COVID hit, with most employees gathering at the company’s headquarters on Somerset Street West. Within days of the pandemic being declared, everyone was working from home, juggling the multiple responsibilities that came along with that.
Potter had no less of a transition than anyone else. While his wife, an occupational therapist at the Queensway Carleton Hospital, went to work as usual, he and his three kids were housebound.
“We understood that everybody was going through a difficult time at home. You were really trying to balance the needs of the business with the needs of your employees,” he says.
“To actually get work done was really challenging because you kind of have to try to do your job, you’re trying to be a dad, you’re a bit of a teacher, you’re a bit of an IT support person. You just try to do the best you can.”
