Dot.com survivor connects with clients.

Irene Kozlowski admits to facing a steep learning curve during her first year as head of Sencia Canada Ltd. With no marketing experience or material, Kozlowski says it was a tough challenge to pick up a phone to makes a sales pitch to a prospective client or start door-knocking to get some one-on-one face time. "I'd never sold anything," says the managing director of the Thunder Bay-based I.T. firm. But she approached it with an almost evangelical belief that her e-business and e-learning systems were the best available on the market and would help them grow as a business or institution.

"We wanted to make sure what we were going to offer we can deliver better than anyone else."

The nine-employee firm specializing in database driven Web sites, e-learning applications and content management software, has experienced 270 per cent revenue growth over the last two years, says Kozlowski, who has her sights set on new business partnerships in northeastern Ontario and Manitoba.

Three years before, Kozlowski and her business partner Joe Quaresima became casualties of the dot-com bust when they were pink-slipped on Good Friday, April 13, by iPares America Ltd., an international software maker and Web hoster.

Her suddenly-orphaned colleagues from the Thunder Bay office all scattered to set up their own IT businesses only to crash again. Like the constantly evolving software and Web systems they once designed, they failed to learn that high-tech markets and customer needs had changed as well.

In forming Sencia Canada Ltd., Kozlowski, a former iPares project manager, realized she had to adapt to this fluid landscape or risk closing her doors too.

Gone were the iPares days of working on $200,000 to $400,000 contracts with major U. S. clients in Chicago or Arizona.

Sencia had to scale down to meet the needs of medium-sized businesses, municipal governments and learning institutions in their own backyard in northwestern Ontario.

"We had these huge clients down in the States, but no one knew who Sencia Canada was in Thunder Bay and hardly anyone knew who iPares was because we would do all the development work for the parent company," says Kozlowski, 46.

Initially working out of their homes, Kozlowski and Quaresima set about creating a company of experts in their field, "hiring the smartest and most passionate people" who believed in what the company was doing and understood clients' needs.

Rather than concentrate exclusively on developing proprietary systems, Sencia developed hosted applications that could be leased to businesses and government institutions and later customized to fulfill their needs.

They developed content management systems to provide customers with tools to optimize their Web sites and better analyse and organization their data content.

Sencia has a stable of clients that includes Lakehead University, the Thunder Bay Health Unit, Home Hardware, Wilson Memorial Hospital in Marathon and Intercon Solutions, the third-largest U.S. electronics recycler and Web designer.

Kozlowski says their success centres on understanding what their business focus is and in doing their homework.

"Too often businesses veer off into different areas and lose their main focus. We felt once we developed own our business plan or idea, we had to understand the market conditions had significantly changed then when we worked with the previous company.

"It's knowing exactly what you do best ... and building on that."

They had to understand their target market, develop a pricing strategy to suit all budgets and deliver the "most exemplary" service to clients.

Kozlowski says the fact that clients continue to renew their licensing agreements at a 100 per cent rate is from knowing her company has their best interests at heart.

They also know Sencia is constantly striving for product improvement in the next generation of software management tools.

"It isn't going to be just another stale piece of software."

Sencia does dabble in some proprietary work, including a partnership project with Lakehead University's Paleo DNA Laboratory on a secure Web-based software application featuring thumb and retina scanners to gain access to sensitive and confidential documents.

Another exciting project with an undisclosed U.S. client is an online fantasy sports league featuring pro sports player draft list supplied by ESPN, the American sports cable giant.

www.sencia.ca

By IAN ROSS 

Northern Ontario Business