Growth: Head of national technology firm says company hasn't had a layoff in its 13-year history

B1

REBECCA PENTY
Telegraph-Journal

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

MONCTON - Geoff Flood says his company has not cut positions since it formed in 1996.

Enlarge Photo

Rebecca Penty/Telegraph-Journal

Geoff Flood, Toronto-based president of T4G Ltd., attended the technology firm’s grand opening of its Moncton office Thursday. The firm renovated the Hub City facility, which staff began using last fall, and announced it is moving into a new building in Halifax – part of a growth in Atlantic Canadian operations. The new, renovated Nova Scotia facility creates enough space to double the number of employees there from the current 33.

And the president of T4G hopes he will never have to.

"We haven't ever done a layoff," Flood said in an interview Thursday.

The Toronto-based executive was in Moncton at the grand opening of the technology firm's Hub City office, which employs 11 people but has newly renovated space to keep many more busy.

T4G quietly started up operations in Moncton last fall, even as the global recession began taking hold.

Flood said the contracts the company has been tackling have been so intricate and demanding that there was no room or need to scale back when the economy tanked.

"We're doing heart surgery for a lot of our customers," he said. "Even in a recession, you don't stop heart surgery."

Flood was on his way to Halifax later in the afternoon to announce the company has renovated a north-end building that now houses its operations, offering space to double that city's 33-strong T4G workforce.

Apart from Moncton and Halifax, the company has operations in Saint John, Vancouver and Toronto, with a total of about 230 employees across Canada.

T4G offers a host of technology services in more than eight different areas of expertise to at least six different industries.

Some notable clients regionally include New Brunswick's Department of Tourism and Parks, NB Power and Enterprise Saint John. Among its global customers are Best Buy, Sears Roebuck and Co., MasterCard Inc. (NYSE:MA) and many more.

For Flood, the firm's expansion into Atlantic Canada is a move to appeal to talented "high-end" developers who want to work in jurisdictions where he says the quality of life is high.

"For us it's really about locating where smart people want to live," Flood said. "It's places like Moncton that have a great workforce, great work ethic, great quality of life."

More specifically in the Hub City, though, the company took advantage of a few talented individuals who then brought in their peers to power the office.

"From a recruiting perspective, we don't use headhunters," Flood said.

"We think the right strategy is to go to a place, like Moncton, find a core group of individuals who could write the book around their area of expertise and hire the team."

Many of T4G's Moncton employees worked previously for Whitehill Technologies Inc. (later Skywire Software, now Oracle Corp.).

Troy Alward, the team leader for the portal solutions group in Moncton, said his group helps clients do a better job of communicating internally using Microsoft Office SharePoint solutions.

He said the other Moncton team, focused on professional services, works for large law firms in the United States on automating processes such as client invoicing.

"A lot of that group are ex-Whitehill folks," Alward said.

Jeff Roach, the executive director of New Brunswick technology association PropelICT, said T4G does on a corporate level what his industry group aims to do provincially through its growth programs.

"T4G develops specialized internal teams within its organization," Roach said.

"They would value the same kind of creativity that we value in the whole province."