New Brunswick Startup Helps Companies Become More Diverse And Inclusive
A New Brunswick/Toronto-based startup that helps make workplaces become more diverse and inclusive is kicking off 2019 with a new name and some big plans for expansion.
MESH/diversity, who came on the provinces startup scene back in 2017 as Enkidu, offers a Software-as-a-Service platform that helps businesses and organizations create a more inclusive and diverse culture for their staff.
The comprehensive platform helps clients recognize and develop this culture through the implementation of training and management solutions that are relevant, practical and applicable. It can help companies do things such as address and change behaviours and help hire people who will work well within a diverse and inclusive company culture.
Since making is debut as part of the Propel cohort in 2017, MESH has secured clients throughout Canada and the United States, where they made great inroads last year.
“We got clients from financial services, health care, software. They typically tend to be on the larger end, but we have some organizations who are on the smaller side,” says Mike Wright, the company’s CEO.
“We’ve expanded into the United States and spending a lot of time developing that market place now.”
One of the biggest sales drivers for Mesh over the last year has been its chief diversity officer Dr. Leeno Karumanchery, whose research is the basis on the company’s platform.
Karumanchery has more than 28 years of experience and is world-renowned for his expertise in the fields of Emotional Intelligence and Diversity. He’s spoken at conferences and events all around the world. He gave the keynote address at the Men of Colour conference in New York and spoke at the Chief Diversity Officers Summit in Boston last year.
“At these events, the number of potential clients that emerge from people in the audience when they have an opportunity to hear how we put things all together, it’s an incredible way to engage clients,” says Wright.
To support this growth, the company plans to hire around 10 or more people this year. Right now, the team mostly works remotely with people based in Saint John, Moncton, Fredericton, and the Greater Toronto area, where Wright himself is based.
A good chunk of these new positions would be on the developer side. It’s a pretty hefty platform, and there’s still more feature they want to add.
“We got a fairly lengthy roadmap of the area just based on client feedback that we want to continue to evolve,” says Wright. “Adding some development horsepower to the team is really important.”
The goal is to hire these new developer positions our of New Brunswick. They will also be looking to fill positions for a sociologist, sales, customers support, and marketing.
The main goal for 2019 is to continue to grow their client base in the United States and Canada as well as Europe.
“We want to continue to grow in the areas that we’re in and it really it’s driven based on the interest level,” says Wright. “We wouldn’t have the specific plan to say, ‘this is the year we’re going into Europe,’ but based on what’s happened with us and these events in the past, I fully expect by the end of the year we will be in Europe.”
Wright says the company also has partnerships in the works with OSL, a 2018 winner of Canada’s Best Managed Companies; The University of Charleston’s baseball team, and Moncton-based company Intelisys.
There’s no denying that the importance diversity and inclusion have been brought to the forefront in recent years with global movements such as #MeToo and Time’s Up. For Dr. Leeno Karumanchery, the number of businesses wanting to make meaningful efforts to become more diverse and inclusive is only going to grow.
“For organizations, on the whole, I think there is a wakeup call that this kind of gender disparity is real. Have a look at what’s going on in your organization,” says Karumanchery.
“The tricky part is organizations are still doing the things that we did 20 years ago. We as a company are directed towards those organizations that recognize there is a need and really want to do more than ‘tick the box’ and move in the direction they need to go in.”
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