THE BUS STOPS HERE
KEVIN DESMOND HAS BEEN QUICK TO BRING CHANGE AS TRANSLINK CEO–AND TO PUT HIMSELF FORWARD AS THE VOICE OF THE TRANSIT AGENCY
Armed with a pack of M&M'S and a wallmounted transit map, Kevin Desmond is ready to embark on a virtual tour of the Lower Mainland. As he moves through Richmond, the Translink CEO sees a Canada Line expansion southward. On the right side of the map, Desmond runs his finger across a TriCities suburb, pausing before he recalls the name of Port Coquitlam. Fifteen months in, the 59-year-old Seattle transplant is new to the job and the region, but he's learning fast.
Energetic and thin, with a mop of white in his otherwise grey hair, Desmond has spent more than two decades in the Pacific Northwest, but his New York accent still shows through. Born in Waco, Texas, and raised in Westchester County, north of New York City, he moved to Washington State in 1996 after earning his master's in public administration at NYU. He rose through the ranks as a transit planner, first in Tacoma and then Seattle, before becoming general manager of King County Metro Transit, Greater Seattle's equivalent of Translink, in 2004. By the time Desmond left, he had overseen a 44 per cent increase in ridership, his chosen metric for success.
At what is officially known as the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority, he faces a new set of challenges. Translink, which has 7,000 staff spread across four operating companies, recorded 386 million trips in 2016, up from 364 million the year before. With Metro Vancouver projected to add another 950,000 residents by 2041, demand for the transit authority's services will only keep growing.
Desmond succeeded Ian Jarvis in February 2016, during a time of upheaval. The referendum of early 2015, which had asked the region's voters if they approved of a 0.5 per cent sales tax increase to help fund a $7.5-billion transit plan, had delivered a firm no. Besides scuttling plans for necessary upgrades, that plebiscite put what critics regarded as all of Translink's negative qualities—from bloated executive pay to system tardiness—under the microscope.
Desmond's timing proved fortuitous, though. Last July, Translink finished its longplanned rollout of Compass Card and of fare gates on Skytrain, which helped boost 2016 revenue by $30 million. In December, the opening of the Evergreen Extension introduced rapid transit to new parts of the Lower Mainland. Later that month, Translink sold its bus facility near Vancouver's Oakridge Centre to Intergulf– Modern Green Development Corp. for $440 million. By the end of 2016, systemwide boarding was 4.5 per cent higher than the year before.
Translink's fundamentals were always strong, Desmond contends—even throughout the organizational tumult that saw three CEOS depart in less a year. “We started out as an agency with very good metrics for efficiency and effectiveness that had a reputation problem,” he says.
As an outsider, Desmond has already made his mark. He's introduced a new accountability centre that tracks performance indicators as diverse as system cleanliness and fleet availability. He's also steered phase one of Translink's 10-year vision through the planning phase.
Outside those duties, Desmond has become an effective advocate for the transit authority. “I've got to be CEO of this very visible, very publicly prominent, always-in-the-media organization— I'm the spokesperson,” he says. “If there's something challenging, the buck stops here. But I'll also tell you all the good things that we've got going on.” His message: “Positivity, positivity, positivity.”
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Alexander Fernandes takes issue with the proverb that you can learn from your mistakes. “I don't see that as wisdom,” says the 48-year-old founder and CEO of Avigilon Corp. His preferred alternative: “Don't make the same mistake twice.” With an almost scholarly knowledge of the bromides and mantras of business texts by authors ranging from Dale Carnegie to Napoleon Hill, Fernandes makes a convincing case that his alternative education has served him well.
Since launching Avigilon in 2004, he's overseen its rise from a fledgling security camera outfit to B.C.'S fourth-largest technology company by revenue. The digital surveillance hardware and software provider has lost some of its lustre of late: its stock was trading at about $15 in late May, well below a high of $34 in 2013, and overseas upstarts have eaten into its market share. But the Vancouver-based company remains a top performer on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Revenue jumped 33 per cent last year, and dividends have been climbing.
Born in Montreal, the son of an accountant, Fernandes was obsessed with personal finance as a child. By age 12, he knew The Wealthy Barber well enough to pick apart its flaws. “I figured out at a young age that I'd be a multimillionaire,” Fernandes says.
To get there, he spent five years in the Canadian Armed Forces, studied computer and telecommunications electronics at Vancouver Community College and went on to work at a series of startups. After several exits—he always took equity instead of pay when possible—he reached his goal. “I woke up in my mid-20s, and I was a multimillionaire,” Fernandes recalls. “It happened much faster than I expected.”
In 1999, Fernandes founded his first company, Qimaging, which built cameras for medical and industrial use. Three years later, he and his partners sold the B.c.-based business for $20 million. Flush with cash, Fernandes set to work on his next venture. The idea was simple: digital video camera technology had moved at warp speed in the early 2000s, but the security industry—one of the largest markets for such technology—was still dominated by analogue cameras.
Avigilon grew swiftly. By 2013, two years after the company's initial public offering on the TSX, its market capitalization passed $1 billion. Then the growing pains kicked in. When Avigilon went public in 2011, its high-definition cameras had a technological edge over legacy competitors like Canon Inc. and few new rivals that could cause concern. That began to change in 2012 as low-cost offerings from Chinese players like Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. Ltd. flooded the North American market.
Fernandes has met that pressure on price by emphasizing innovation. Since 2013, Avigilon has invested heavily in video analytics, securing patents for automatic licence plate recognition and face appearance search. The company has another advantage, too. With its Apple-like end-to-end product offering and its factories in Richmond and Plano, Texas, Avigilon is well suited to meet the cybersecurity needs of finicky clients. “To my knowledge, not a single piece of our hardware or software has ever been hacked,” Fernandes says.
But as always, his focus is on the bottom line. Fernandes points out that by reaching $126.2 million in revenue in the final quarter of 2016, which puts Avigilon at a run rate of $500 million for the year, the company achieved a goal he set out in his personal post- IPO five-year plan. He's quick to share what he believes to be the recipe for success, learned all those years ago: “Perseverance and determination are two mandatory elements; most challenges are mental in nature.” •