How Moncton’s Garago is Changing Project Management
MONCTON – One hub city startup is changing how governments and organizations manage funding, projects and more.
Garago is a cloud-based software that stores information acquired during projects, action plan or directly from clients. Managers, funding agencies, consulting agencies, community and government partners can extract accurate data to assess measurable results. In short, it aims to take away everything that makes managing projects miserable.
It’s the platform that can be used for many different purposes, but it got its start as a tool for funding management.
“It happens to a lot of companies like us that offer software solutions: you build it for a reason and it turns out that it applies to other things as well,” said Robert Audoux, Garago’s vice-president of operations.
The Garago platform was developed in founder and CEO Francis Theriault’s basement in 2007 when the federal government wanted to track the results of funding they gave to some Prince Edward Island nonprofits. The funding was to promote the French language in community and in business. There were 22 regions involved, 100 partners and 400 projects. That was a lot to manage.
“What was missing at that time was a means to collect the information that would help demonstrate the results of this project,” Audoux says. “So Francis developed the original solution. He developed a database where on a regular basis all the partners in P.E.I. would send in all the information in a central office and they would put the information in a data base and they would pull out all the reports they wanted.”
They were easily able to extract information like how many jobs were created, how many minorities were being affected and how much money was being spent in each region.
“They were able to demonstrate results with such preciseness and timeliness. They were getting results in almost real-time,” Audoux says. “So the federal government at the time was really impressed by it and wanted to adopt it internally and give it to their partners to manage their own projects.”
On the flip side, Garago also helps non-profits show stakeholders exactly how funding was spent.
“They were doing great stuff in the field, but they couldn’t show that on paper,” Audoux says. “So at the end of the year, the tool would help them shine a little bit more.”
The platform can also take the pain out of things funding and grant applications, something you often deal with whether you’re a non-profit or a business.
“You ask any startup and any other company, the issues that arise are always the same. It takes a long time to get the funding in place, there is no means of looking up my application and knowing where it is and getting information basically other than picking up the phone and trying to get my account manager,” Audoux says. “It’s that whole process that we’re bringing online using Garago and we’re streamlining that work and automating that flow and giving the power to the organization to clearly demonstrate the results of what they’re funding.”
Garago may seem like a dream come true for huge institutions like governments. In fact, the government of New Brunswick is currently using Garago in its social development, tourism and education departments. Garago’s other clients include Canadian Tire, municipalities, regional service commissions and various non-profits. Most of these clients are in New Brunswick and P.E.I. but the company has ambitious global expansion plans. And with ten fluent languages among their six person team, they definitely have a leg up.
“In the next 12 months our goal is to multiply our revenues by five or more and expand our team [to almost double]. Mainly to offer more services everywhere in the world and be a fully automated platform” says founder and CEO Francis Theriault. “Because right now most of our clients are government agencies and require more training and support on-site. But if we want to to expand that, we need to create partnerships all over the world.”
Since taking part in Propel ICT’s most recent Build cohort, Garago has been out of the spotlight for a while, but that’s not because things took a downturn. Theriault says they have a lot to be proud of.
“We’re small. We keep a low profile but what we do is great,” he says. “When people take the time to look at what we offer, they’re quite impressed because we’re just two guys who started this but we’ve accomplished a lot for just two guys.”