Vanguard Magazine

42 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 www.vanguardcanada.com G GAME CHaNGER See the full interview online Q What is your role in your company today? It is the same as when I first started – President & CFO. However, my role these days is really twofold: to plan for the future, which includes making required changes within the organization, and to play "traffic cop" to ensure the smooth running of the company Q What was your worst moment? It was seven years in, having only one cus- tomer and 30 employees, and realizing that my customer was not able to sustain the same level of business for my company as they had in past years. I got busy try- ing to figure out a path forward. We vis- ited a bunch of new potential customers and gave them our best pitch. We were starting to think about a Plan B, namely what other businesses we could start in case we couldn't drum up new customers. We stop pursuing Plan B when the phone started ringing. Q What was your aha moment or epiphany that you think will resonate most with our reader? There have been a few. I'll tell you about the first significant one. After a few years working for my first customer and success- fully delivering a few projects, they asked me (a mechanical engineer by training by the way) to develop an airborne Operat- ing System (OS) software. I turned them down – twice – thinking how the heck is a mechanical engineer going to develop an OS. The third time they asked, I said yes! I told myself, "I know exactly what this software needs to do at any given mo- ment. All I need is some good software engineers to help me get this done". Our first OS program was highly suc- cessful. We were just about on budget and the quality was excellent – the soft- ware did what it was supposed to do at all times. The moral of this little story is: listen to the market demands and figure out a plan that makes sense …. always! Q Step back and analyze your journey. What is the takeaway you want to give to our audience? There are many takeaways. Business and personal. But I can summarize it as to be successful you will have to work quite hard, be ready to learn and change, hire the best people you can find and do some- thing you really like. Q What is the one thing that has you most fired up today? We recently received the largest IRB/ITB investment ever made in Canada from our long-time offset partner Lockheed Martin Aerospace. These investment dollars will allow us to transform the company to be- come a provider of our own proprietary software products. These software prod- ucts will be complimentary to the engi- neering services we have been providing since our inception. This is really a trans- formational change and has brought a new vision and life into the company. Q What is the best advice you received? It's quite funny actually, in its simplicity, "Be happy, you deserve to be happy". Q What is a habit that contributes to your success? There are probably a few: • Respect for everyone – employees, cus- tomers, suppliers … everyone. • Hard work – this was kind of engrained into me with my upbringing. It's got it upsides but can easily be overdone. • Rationalizing issues – this kind of comes naturally to me which sure helps be- cause at times emotions can drive bad decisions (I've made a few of those). Q What are some of the biggest impediments to innovation in your company or industry sector? I'll answer this from an industry segment perspective. I see three main factors: 1) The certification process. This pro- cess makes it more difficult and time- consuming to innovate. However, the process is absolutely necessary so one just has to think harder to make it happen. 2) Intellectual Property (IP) protection impacts true partnering relationships and the efficient exploitation and commercialization of IP. 3) Supply Chain management and con- solidation often by nature prohibits the exercise of innovation that often comes from small businesses. Q What is your parting piece of advice? Do what is in you to do. Push yourself to ac- complish more and don't just settle for the status quo. We are fortunate to live where we do and have a world of opportunities available to us – go do it and be happy. John Mannarino President Mannarino SySteMS & Software inc.

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