A West Vancouver woman whose company deals with thousands of high profile clients in the global financial sector has been recognized by a national business publication.
Shannon Rogers, 43, president of Global Relay Communications, was recently named Canada's Top Female Entrepreneur by Profit magazine, beating out 99 competitors to claim the number 1 spot.
"It was exciting," says Rogers, who attended a ceremony in Toronto to celebrate all the winners at the end of November. Applicants are ranked based on the size, growth rate and profitability of the companies they own and manage.
Rogers' Gastown-based firm, which has an annual revenue of more than $20 million, specializes in the cloud-based archiving of email and other message types including instant messages, texts and tweets, allowing businesses to keep a perfect track record of all their transactions. Its list of 16,000 clients includes 22 of the world's top 25 banks as well as the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in the U.S.
"It really is a beautiful, prestigious customer base," says Rogers.
But it didn't all happen overnight. After graduating from law school at McGill, Rogers found herself working on Bay Street in Toronto for a couple of years before eventually realizing she was "on the wrong side of the board table," and that her passion was really in business.
She made her way back to Vancouver and began working closely with the three founders of Global Relay, who had started the company in the hopes that businesses would eventually want to store emails.
At first, no one was really interested. At least not until accounting scandals with major corporations like Enron and Worldcom broke out in the early 2000s.
"That's what really brought down a lot of the rules in financial sector, saying 'You can't just delete all this data, you need to store it,'" explains Rogers, noting it was a similar situation when the financial crisis hit in 2008.
"We got in just at the right time as compliance rules and litigation sort of came about and email became a more popular tool."
Although Global Relay faces stiff competition from major players such as Google, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, it manages to stay ahead of the curve thanks to a great team of employees, according to Rogers.
"On the technology side . . . we do all our own development, and we're very innovative, and on the front end, it's just a very smart, good service team and we're very good at software as a service," she says.
In the seven years since Rogers has worked full time at the company, Global Relay has gone from having 10 employees to 165 and now has offices in New York City, Chicago, London, Singapore and Shanghai.
"We're growing quite rapidly," says Rogers. "It's a very fun, innovative team and we can't seem to hire fast enough."
"I think we're good for Canada," she adds, noting that 95 per cent of revenue generated by the company is foreign.
Looking ahead, Global Relay plans to open up a $20 million eco-friendly data centre to house its files in the City of North Vancouver. It will use 35 per cent less energy than traditional data centres and is slated to be up and running by September 2012.
For more information go to www.globalrelay.com.
