Could you please tell us about your background and your current role?
I studied finance during my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and attained the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation shortly afterwards. Despite the strong leaning towards finance during my studies, I worked in consulting for about five years before pursuing a ‘finance’ job. That occurred I was given the opportunity to lead the Finance team of a start-up in Uganda that financed motorcycles. It was through that role that I decided to focus my career on contributing to the success of rapidly growing businesses, which is what I aim to achieve as the Head of Finance at Tread!
What do you like most about your job?
I do not have much experience in product development, so I get a lot of joy from seeing demos of each new feature that our team develops. I also love hearing about the impact that Tread has on the lives of our customers, particularly dispatchers and truck drivers, and hearing real life stories of Tread saving people time and money. It is a great feeling when you see the product that the Tread team built from scratch being well received by our customers. I find this particularly impressive in the digital age because there are so many products vying for people’s attention and mental energy at the moment.
I also love being a part of the Tread team, which is made up of smart, curious, and personable people. The task of tackling challenging problems is made much easier when you can do it with people that you enjoy being around.
How do you like to spend time outside of work?
I am a big music junkie so I spend a lot of time listening to music and doing my best to try to play and record it (on the guitar, and a little bit on the piano).
I also enjoy personal fitness and outdoor activity so I spend a lot of time running and biking outside.
As head of finance, what’s an average work day like for you?
It depends on what time of the month it is. The workload at the beginning of the month is typically heavier because we have to publish the financials of the month that just passed. This includes analyzing our performance against our budget and presenting these results to the Tread team and to our external stakeholders.
Other ‘standard’ finance duties include managing cash, processing payroll, paying our vendors, and working with our audit, legal and tax teams to ensure that Tread is on top of all regulatory requirements.
Finally, as a member of the Operations team, I spend 1 to 2 hours per day on ‘Operational matters’. This includes activities such as helping the rest of the Tread team set and achieve strategic goals, addressing one-off challenges, and ensuring that the process of getting Tread into customer’s hands is as seamless as possible. All great stuff!
What’s your favourite Tread feature and why?
This has to be the ‘sharing maps’ feature. This feature gives our ‘broker’ customers the ability to ‘share’ the physical location of their trucks with the customers for whom they are moving materials. I love this feature because I am a big advocate of transparency (for example, in communication and in pricing) and I feel like this feature makes Tread a powerful tool for not only our customers, but also their customers because every stakeholder that is interested in a particular job can see how the job is being executed on a real-time basis.
From your perspective, how does Tread solve our customers’ challenges?
The answer to this question has changed over time. In 2017, at the very early stages of the company, our impact on our customer’s lives was the digitization of previously manual processes. This change unlocked a lot of efficiency and enabled major gains in productivity, which is a big reason why a lot of our customers still use Tread today. Since then, our focus has been on working with our customers to broaden our product offering to address even more of their challenges. For example, the launch of contactless / digital ticketing to align with Department of Transportation requirements was a big step forward for our customers as regulators mandated a heightened level of contact awareness following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sharing maps feature, discussed above, unlocked a greater degree of transparency. The main point here is that Tread is developed alongside our customers and, as such, it is a tool that keeps getting better at providing digital solutions to problems that they face.
Can you name a few changes you’d expect to happen in the construction industry in the future?
A lot has been said and written about digitization in the construction industry, including by Noah, our CEO, so I will not repeat that here. Instead, I am interested in the effect that a Biden presidency will have on infrastructure spending in the U.S. Biden’s team has committed to focusing on infrastructure development as a means of economic recovery and job creation. Obviously, this would be hugely positive for our US-based customers, particularly those that work with municipal or state governments. This development would also be positive for the broader economies of the US and Canada, given that our two countries are so intertwined. It will be interesting to see how much of this commitment the incoming government can put into place. Furthermore, successful implementation of this stimulus will further underscore the importance of the construction industry as a major catalyst for economic growth.
Is there a problem & solution that you’d love to work on in the future in the construction industry?
A lot of our customers use a wide variety of systems as a normal course of business. There are systems for bidding on jobs, for accounting, for project management and, of course, for logistics and fleet management. Navigating between these various systems is a chore so I am excited about Tread’s growing integration capabilities. Specifically, I am looking forward to Tread continuing to ease the pain of ‘system switching’ by fostering ‘communication channels’ between Tread and these various systems.
If you’d like to learn more about how Tread can make your business more profitable, reach out to us to book your free demo!
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