Irene Kozlowski: Private Sector Award Winner, Thunder Bay.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: A Decade of Honouring Achievements - Company overview

Getting pink-slipped on Good Friday, April 13, 2001 proved to be a mixed blessing for Irene Kozlowski.

The project manager for iPares American became a casualty of the dot-boom-bust when Minneapolis software and web hoster, elected to close their Thunder Bay development shop.

But she quickly got over the shock and disappointment when, within days, clients began calling her at home pledging their support for her to get back into business.

She contacted her out-of-work iPares colleagues Joe Quaresima, now her 50/50 business partner, and organized a team of software developers and creative designers to form Sencia Canada.

"I guess I thought we'll try it for a few months."

Kozlowski admits facing a steep learning curve during her fledgling year as head of her own start-up.

With no marketing experience or material, it was a tough challenge to pick up a phone to make a cold call to a prospective client or start door-knocking. But she realized her fledgling company had to adapt to the always-fluid IT landscape or face closure again.

"We had to look at the business much different from our iPares days and it was probably one of our best moves."

From the beginning, Kozlowski wanted a very service-oriented shop built around a solid team of technical and project managers who understood their clients' needs, providing free training and support, and stayed on top of industry trends.

Rather than concentrate exclusively on developing proprietary software that goes out of date, they choose a totally different strategy of creating hosted applications that could be leased to businesses and government institutions and later customized to fulfill their needs. It provided a more affordable solution that eventually became a huge success for their clients.

Along with web design, the award-winning, 14-employee IT firm specializes in e-learning applications and content management systems. Their flagship Informetica, a web-based training platform, can be customized for specific training or reporting needs.

The good thing about hosted applications is sustaining revenues from the renewal of annual licences.

"It's far less rocky and more stable because if you've satisfied your customer by doing a good job you'll continue to work with them," says Kozlowski.

Located in the Northwestern Ontario Technology Centre, Sencia has continued to secure larger contracts with long-serving U.S. clients such as Prosoft Learning of Phoenix, Ariz. and Employee Continuum of Minneapolis...