Canadian Business Article, August 12, 2011
Julia Rivard, 35
CEO, Sheepdog
When the average CEO tries to rally the troops, it’s often with a reheated story about Vince Lombardi, Dan Jansen or some other sporting staple of management literature. Julia Rivard talks in the first person. “We ran six kilometres around Lake Banook for training,” Rivard recently told her 32 staffers at thriving Halifax IT firm Sheepdog, recalling her days with the national kayak team in the run-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. “And there was one place where you could cut a corner.
“It would have taken maybe two steps off my run—it wouldn’t have made any difference— but I’d think to myself every time, ‘Don’t cut that corner.’ And mentally, when I got on the starting line [for a race], I always knew that I had done the extra two steps ahead of everybody else who’d cut the corner. Physically it made no difference, but I believed that I had done something over and above. And that was important.”
The top level of amateur athletics is a familiar place for Rivard. A product of North Bay, Ont., she was a competitive swimmer before taking up kayaking at 19. After the Sydney Games, her competition career at an end, she went back to school, opting for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. When she couldn’t find an agency to hire her, she freelanced, saved, then bought a heritage building in Dartmouth, N.S., and created Queen Street Studios, an incubator for independent marketing professionals.
There, she met another young entrepreneur named Brandon Kolybaba, and through him got involved with Sheepdog, which Jevon MacDonald, co-founder of the blog StartupNorth.ca, says has become “one of Google’s most important partners in the enterprise applications business.” Launched in 2008, Sheepdog’s early clout came from partnering on the search giant’s Apps for Business venture, a suite of cloud-computing programs for businesses. By late 2009, though, the company was foundering, and product development specialist Kolybaba took over its leadership. Last year, with the company on a sounder footing, he returned to development, and Rivard, who had been Sheepdog’s VP of marketing, succeeded him as CEO. “It’s definitely something she excels at,” Kolybaba says. “She’s accustomed to working with high performance teams, and she gets people inspired—she has all the qualities that really talented leaders have.”
Despite ascending to the top job at Sheepdog, Rivard, 35, remains active in amateur athletics. She’s a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, acts as vice-chair of marketing for CanoeKayak Canada, and served on the board of the Halifax 2011 Canada Games. In fact, it’s in the public sphere that the single mother of three envisions her future—in sports or politics.
But for now, Sheepdog is the priority, and with more companies seeking out its custom software, one of Rivard’s biggest challenges has been to improve the company’s culture, which had suffered before Kolybaba’s appointment. Culture is crucial in young companies. “When you have one person who’s not on the team, it affects everyone,” she says. “As soon as you start to have a culture where people are like, ‘I’m going to do my 9 to 5, and I don’t have to do any more and that’s not in my job description— more of a corporate culture, not an innovative one—you start to suffer.”
She’s spent the past year fostering more open communication, with regular town hall meetings and one-on-one sit-downs with employees. She calls every staff er a “rock star.” Sheepdog sends developers down to Google headquarters every year and, says Rivard, “I love it when they see the best of the best and realize, ‘Geez, that guy’s no better than I am.’ It’s so powerful for our guys up here in Halifax.” The company, she feels, is near to breaking through to the next level—so long as she can keep its employees from cutting corners.
