Ross Paquette is the CEO and owner of Maropost, North America‘s fastest-growing marketing automation company, according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. After he founded Maropost in 2011, Ross has doubled annual growth every year since turning a one-person operation into an international business. While acting as the strategic center of the company, Ross Paquette is also in charge of determining both development and business direction.
As all the light and noise springing from Silicon Valley creates enormous pressure on business owners to look for investors for their ideas, it is hard to conceive the old business method of just creating a product and selling it still works these days.
According to Ross Paquette, one does not need investors if one makes a superb product that helps an actual customer better than anything the customer has come across. Ross Paquette did not plan to build a quick-growing SaaS company, not until a friend recruited him while in college to a sales role in a SaaS company, and he learned sales on the job. Disappointedwith the approaches and tools everyone was using, he built an improved mousetrap.
Ross concentrated on what he perceived were the missing fundamental metrics in most email marketing product lines: customer service and deliverability. Maropost was initially conceived to bridge this gap in the market directly. Ross intended that he would find a few steady customers who will agree with his vision of the missing link in the market, maybe enough to set him up with a cozy lifestyle company.
Unexpectedly, his innovation touched a nerve. Today, he leads a team of 150 employees that‘s been rated as one of the best five fastest-growing companies in Canada for three years consecutively. This achievement came without raising any funding for the first few years.
Maropost is B2C revenue optimization suite, cloud-based, that helps companies to grow the cross-channel customer engagement in order to maximize revenue. Through sales automation and integrated marketing, Maropost provides strategic guidance, essential tools, and support needed to create more custom-made customer experiences through a 360-degree business view—from marketing automation to commerce, CRM, and customer support.
Maropost had challenges in building a team. It functioned with an unbelievably small group, just five people, until the year 2015, before they started recruiting considerably. In the long run, they had to grow to meet the demand that had surfaced. But, obviously, that only resulted in more problems.
Ross learned the tough way about the need for having a good culture, being transparent about one‘s values, and recruiting for fit rather than the details on the resume. Today, when people join Maropost, they are aware of the exact things the company expects of them, and one of the strategic goals of Maropost is Professional development.
Ross is now gathering a first-class C-level leadership team to help him in taking Maropost to its next level. This will probably be his harshest challenge yet. “Succession and delegation are all about trust, but you can‘t just trust a skillset — you need to be able to trust the person,“ said Ross. “We were more competitor-focused than we are today, as compared to the first few years, but that‘s changed over time as Maropost has learned to align more closely with customer needs and to build features to address those needs,“ he added.
Maropost has a charity Maropost CARES, that is focused on global environmental concerns and programs to keep the planet and its many ecosystems free from the pollution that is doing all that it can to take it away from us. In the long run, they also plan to run their events and programs where their team can make more contribution with Maropost‘s support.
Maropost is looking to build a new category — something they can possess — not just compete in anymore. With that, their focus is now a lot more internal. It‘s much less about what their competitors are doing and much more about what they could be doing to make their customers‘ lives simpler.
