2021 FASTEST GROWING COMPANIES Construction firm Highbridge building strong foundation for growth When Leam Hamilton first launched Highbridge Construction alongside cofounder Pat Violette in 2015, he saw it as a “fun project while we were doing other things.” Six years later, that project has blossomed into a booming business. Hamilton, who is also a principal at a local real estate agency, says the residential construction company owes its growth to its knack for hiring the right talent and a track record of happy customers who’ve generated buzz for the firm through word of mouth. Highbridge also puts a lot of effort into generating new leads using an online system that flags hundreds of new potential opportunities every month. While COVID-19 initially slowed
HIGHBRIDGE CONSTRUCTION YEAR FOUNDED: 2015 HEADCOUNT: 51 THREE-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH: 276% Pat Violette and co-founder Leam Hamilton. PHOTO BY MARK HOLLERON the construction industry to a crawl, Hamilton says the pandemic ended up benefiting the company. Unable to travel, homeowners began spending more time and money on their houses, he explains. Housing values have skyrocketed in Ottawa’s red-hot residential real estate market, he adds, allowing people to “refinance their homes
and do the renovations they never got around to doing.” He says Highbridge plans to expand its operations across Ontario and eventually Canada. The company is already working on a few projects in Thunder Bay and the Greater Toronto Area. Hamilton says now that Highbridge has created an established, repeatable process
for generating leads, it can quickly and easily establish itself in new markets. “Like a McDonald’s with a fry guy and a burger guy, a lot of our back-end systems are structured similarly,” he explains. “We have people performing in specific roles and honing their skills to the point where it’s a well-oiled machine.” — Matt Horwood
SPRING 2021
The IT factor: Lightship Security becoming a tech darling
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Jason Lawlor and the team at Ottawa’s Lightship Security are no strangers to exponential revenue growth. The only previous winner on this year’s list, Lightship appeared in OBJ’s top-10 rankings in 2019. The six-year-old firm has also cracked Canadian Business Magazine’s prestigious Growth 500 list of Canada’s fastest-growing companies in recent years. But navigating through one of the most tumultuous periods the global economy has ever endured makes this year’s honour extra special. “There was no playbook going into (the pandemic),” says Lawlor, who founded the firm in 2015 with business partners Greg McLearn, Brad Proffitt and Lachlan Turner. Still, Lightship continued to post
LIGHTSHIP SECURITY YEAR FOUNDED: 2015 HEADCOUNT: 32 THREE-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH: 264%
impressive numbers in 2020. The firm kept adding to its headcount throughout the year and has grown from 13 employees two years ago to 32 today. Lightship automates the process of verifying that IT hardware such as switchers and routers meets rigorous government security standards before being sold to governments themselves. Its customers include tech giants such
Two of Lightship Security’s business partners, Greg McLearn and Brad Proffitt. PHOTO BY MARK HOLLERON as BlackBerry, Cisco, Dell and Samsung, and the company now has offices in Vancouver and Austin, Tex. Lawlor says its product certification software, known as Greenlight, has distilled a process that used to consume as much as a year’s worth of manual labour down to less than a month. “There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in our industry over the last several years,” he says. With 5G networks rolling out,
the bootstrapped enterprise is now partnering with local startup Field Effect on a government-funded project to automate the cybersecurity certification process for mobile technology such as smartphones. In addition, Lightship plans to make its test automation software more widely available on a subscription basis. “That’s a whole other revenue stream, being able to license that capability,” Lawlor says. — David Sali