With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1515520
46 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 24 It's doubly impressive when you consider the size of the team. Optimal has just four employees, including its founder and president Stone, whose company is now old enough to rent a car and not pay a young driver fee, is ready to take it to the next level. He's looking to hire new talent to flesh out the cur- rent quartet with developers and programmers as Optimal ramps up its platform. The company is looking to double in size over the next five years as it embarks on this new era. Optimal has been essentially a consultancy for the majority of its life. The team would meet with leagues and collect data, send back a preliminary schedule and then go back and forth with revisions until it was game-ready. Now, Stone envi- sions it becoming a software-as-a- service (SaaS) company. "The new software we're develop- ing is a lot more intuitive," explains Stone. "It's going to be hands-on, it's going to be web-based. Leagues will be able to log in and, in some cases, completely build the schedule by themselves." Optimal will also be embark- ing on a robust sales and market- ing push. "There's a huge group of leagues that we have to introduce ourselves to," maintains Stone. "When leagues can do it themselves there is a slightly reduced cost. The new software will kick up a much larger base for us to market to." —J.M. Bone DruGS- n-Harmony Mesentech CEO Jonathan Polak gets down to the bone "I'm from Uruguay," says Jonathan Polak over the phone. "My family were Holocaust survivors. They got on a ship that was leaving Europe and didn't care where it was going, as long as it was going." Polak still gives credit to his grandfather, who passed away some 30 years ago, for allowing him the life he's lived. He eventually went to the University of Toronto to study engineering. Then came a few stints with companies in Helsinki, Shanghai and Miami CAPITAL PUNISHMENT The successes that Jonathan Polak has had with Mesentech haven't come easily CARTILAGE COPY A scanning electron micrograph of a subchondral bone at full thickness