I immigrated to Canada from Kenya, East Africa in 1975 and grew up in Burnaby, BC. Following my passion of playing soccer competitively, I dropped out of school and pursued this goal in London at the age of 17. This road eventually ended at SFU playing for their soccer team. My passion for the game also got me into SFU overlooking a high school degree.
This lead me to my second passion – Business…I loved accounting, finance, marketing and everything to do with business. I maintained a 4.0 + GPA at S.F.U.
In 1987, I decided to article with Ernst and Young to obtain my accreditation as a CA. I won the bronze medal in BC for Audit and became a tax manager in my second year. I immediately realized my passion to help my clients succeed in their businesses.
I sharpened my tax skills and set up the first tax course at S.F.U., partnered with the CA institute to allow students in my course to get course credits at the institute after taking my course at S.F.U. and taught it for the next three years. I used this to follow my passion of helping my clients succeed at Pisani & Co. Chartered Accountants. I successfully grew this business into a thriving CA practice for 15 years. Our slogan was “Your Success is our Business” which later became my motto in every venture.
During this time, I got involved in Network Technology Professionals Inc. becoming their President. We expanded this company across Canada setting up middle ware platforms for major private and government organizations across Western Canada with offices in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. We were both Novell and Microsoft Platinum partners and built a reputable client base. During this time, I also became involved as a member of the Board at one of my major customers, Contac Travel Marketing (Contac) and started to learn about the distribution business within the Travel Industry and its shortcomings.
In 2001, I took it upon myself to follow my passion and build a middleware platform for Contac. It was an end to end client facing ordering platform allowing our cruise line customers to control their collateral with a full back end warehousing, consolidated shipping and management system. This was never deployed by Contac to its full extent and in 2004, after selling Network Technology Professionals, I acquired Contac. We were a small distribution company in Delta BC, managing 5% of the travel distribution in Canada. We initially acquired the business as an investment but the more time I spent on the business, the more passionate I became. Within one year from 2005, we were able to demonstrate the advantages the middleware platform to the travel agents in Canada as well as the travel suppliers. We controlled 100% of the fulfilment in Canada by April 2006 becoming profitable and expanding our footprint across Canada also holding major infrastructure in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
In 2007, we saw the first gift cards hit the market and I immediately seized the opportunity to partner with Blackhawk Marketing (A division of Safeway). Building upon the middleware platform we created for the travel industry, we created the entire end to end fulfillment platform for the gift card industry. By 2009, we managed the entire NA gift card market using our platform as well as managed the fulfilment of gift cards by fully automating this process and created the first automated pick and put to light fulfilment and shipping system to manage our volumes. We also helped Blackhawk expand this footprint into the UK market and partnered with DSI in the UK to help us expand. This is when I was first introduced to digital one to one print and more importantly to the concept of one to one marketing using a personal URL or PURL.
I came back from this trip to London in 2009, and I knew that we had to adopt this vision of the PURL and apply this concept of enabling our customers to seamlessly interact with their customers in a one to one personalized manner to drive customer satisfaction and sales. At the same time, we embraced the digital web to print, acquired digital print equipment and added the functionality to our middleware distribution platform. This seamlessly allowed customers with several franchises to order digital print and physical product fulfilment and manage both the print and fulfilment in one entry.
We split Contac into two divisions at this point…Technology embracing the PURL and fulfilment which included Digital Print. We expanded and deployed the middleware platform to major customers across Canada including E&Y, Joeys, M&M Meats, Booster Juice and eventually we partnered with G&T to launch the middleware platform, The Online Brand Manager. We also expanded the distribution footprint across North America and started working with Nestle. We won the Nestle baby fulfilment for Canada and the Nestle coffee fulfilment for North America as well as working with Whirlpool to managing their water filter fulfilment for Canada for all their brands. We were successful in using our middleware technology, PURL technology combined with our physical distribution footprint.
The PURL technology side of the business as it pertained to travel became my new passion and we created mywurld. Over the years 2009 to 2014, we invested all our profits from the distribution side of the business into this vertical. We finally completed the build of our platform in 2013 and in 2014, and we successfully deployed this platform with major travel companies. This included Air Canada, Flight Centre, WestJet Vacations, EmQuest (Division of Emirates), Air Canada Vacations, CWT, AirMiles and were in the process of launching several other major companies around the world.
I then made a terrible mistake and for the first time, I failed and lost everything in 2014. In retrospect, this failure was the best thing that happened to me.
It taught me about my faults and what I did wrong. It taught me how I let my passion overlook critical signs and mistakes and most of all it taught me to be smarter and it taught me who my true friends were.
In 2015, I went back to the drawing board with no distractions. I envisioned the best product I could imagine with all my learning’s to date. My parents mortgaged their home and created Snowstorm for me. I accepted the position of the Chief Strategy Officer to help create and deploy disruptive technology within the travel industry with the “dream team”.
Please see www.snowstormtech.com and www.intrwiz.com. They are our hearts and passion of the things we have collectively learnt over the years in business that we have leveraged to help build the platform that will change the world of travel.
We can do so much in life but it all starts with following your passion…