Gasbuddy CEO says local workers still play a key role in the company

Developers of popular app scale back staff, but no ‘discussion’ of closing city office

Despite staffing reductions and a cultural shift at Gasbuddy’s Regina office, Sarah Mccrary said she still believes it fills an essential role in the international company.

“The Regina office is the heart of our engineering team,” Mccrary, the CEO of Gasbuddy, said during a recent phone interview from the company’s Boston office.

Founded by Dustin Coupal and Jason Toews in 2000, Gasbuddy is a consumer app that helps users find the cheapest gas in their region. The website and app have become a huge success, with more than 70 million downloads. Mccrary said it’s the Regina team that essentially brought the original Gasbuddy product to market.

In 2013, Oil Price Information Systems (OPIS), a subsidiary of the private equity firm UCG, bought the company. OPIS was later sold off, but UCG retained ownership of Gasbuddy.

The Gasbuddy team then expanded, adding another 60 employees in Boston.

The Regina office, located at Innovation Place, currently houses the company’s engineering and customer-service support teams. Gasbuddy’s Canada staff now numbers 38 people, all of whom work in the Regina office except for one sales executive in Toronto.

Over time, staffing fluctuated at the Regina office from 47 in 2015, to 64 in 2016, then down to 58 in 2017, before being reduced again to the current workforce.

Mccrary said the initial expansion came from evolving the product, from a price-discovery app to building out Gasbuddy’s systems.

“We just ended up hiring more people, and whether it was in engineering or it was in product or it was in design, we expanded a little faster than I think was, in the end, called for,” Mccrary said.

Another reason for reductions stemmed from a 2016 decision to make Boston the home of Gasbuddy’s product and design team. This led to layoffs for the Regina employees who worked in those departments.

Mccrary said there are currently no plans for further layoffs, and dismissed any notion that the Regina office would one day close.

“Since I’ve been in the business, there has not been that discussion. I think there is just universal recognition for the team there, their capabilities, their knowledge,” she said.

Mccrary acknowledged there has been a cultural change at the Regina office over the years. When she first came on board as CEO two years ago, staff in Regina told her the office was like a family. Many people had known each other since university, and would hang out after work.

It’s a philosophy Mccrary doesn’t think fits with a business atmosphere.

“I don’t believe that work people are family members, right? You have to make hard decisions about the people that you work with. You don’t look at your sister over Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner and say, ‘Yeah, this isn’t working out. I’m not gonna see you ever again.’ ”

Mccrary wants Gasbuddy employees to look at their jobs as an opportunity for professional development, and says the company wants to help them grow. If they decide to take those new skills elsewhere eventually, that’s OK too. That scenario has become more likely in Regina’s growing tech ecosystem, which Mccrary said is now seeing a lot more competition for talent.

She said the company also tries to be accommodating for staff with families.

“I hope that it’s still becoming a culture every day that people feel empowered, they feel like they’re invested in, that they can grow and they feel supported and they have the flexibility they need to meet their family commitments as well,” she said.

The Gasbuddy product is still evolving. For U.S. users, the company offers Pay With Gasbuddy, a membership that offers savings of five cents a gallon on fuel purchases. There’s also Gasback, which lets users earn free gas by shopping at certain retailers. Both of these features are available only in the United States, but Mccrary said the company plans to bring them to Canada in “some form or fashion.”

Mccrary’s vision for the company’s future lies in its data engineering and operations capability, and the Regina office will have a central role to play. Gasbuddy deals in a high volume of data, and Mccrary’s goal is to make better use of it.

That presents a number of challenges. There’s the task of managing all that data, finding a way to make it meaningful and finally being able to show performance changes and insights.

“So across our entire data engineering, data operations and analytics capabilities, I would love to see that grow. And that’s one of my priorities for the future, and those are really hard specialties to find,” Mccrary said.

She said she thinks Regina remains the best place for Gasbuddy’s engineering team. Having customer support in the same building is also beneficial, she said, since the staff building the product are right next to the people getting feedback from clients.

“We’re committed to the area and to us that makes business sense. At the end of the day, it’s good business to be there.”

I think there is just universal recognition for the team (in Regina), their capabilities, their knowledge. GASBUDDY CEO SARAH MCCRARY