I had these two guys in my office while I was eating my lunch and they just went off. By the time I finished my banana, I knew there was something special

Donovan Bailey sprints to Olympic gold in the men’s 100, Mr. Dressup puts away the tickle trunk for good, and Jim Balsillie’s little wireless company starts causing traffic jams in Waterloo.

Up the road in Toronto, Bill Lipsin is quite content as an executive with Bay Networks. “I had a great office with a view of Lake Ontario,” he reminisces.

Then he gets a call from Larry Wasser, a friend and chair of a Toronto investment company.

“(Wasser) said, ‘I bought a chunk of this startup called Ironside and I need a CEO,’” Lipsin remembers. “I told him I wasn’t interested.”

“(Wasser) said to me, ‘Bill, you’re about as smart as I am and you work a lot harder. But you’re not as rich as I am. Why do you think that is?’“

As a former employee of IBM Canada and Crowntek, among others, Lipsin had a reputation as a top-notch tech executive. But because he’d worked for larger organizations, he hadn’t taken the risk—or reaped the reward—that came with leading a young company.

Wasser had pulled the startup card.

Ironside armors up

When he met with Ironside’s founders, Lipsin was impressed with their vision for the company. But it was also pretty clear to him that it was going to take a crackerjack team to bring that vision to life.

“I started thinking about who could help make Ironside successful,” Lipsin says.

Dale deFreitas

“Bill came to me and told me he was going to a startup with no money, no customers and no business plan,” says Foster. “I joined about two months later.”

You would think that would about do it in terms of our line-up of characters. But like a lot of good startups, Ironside’s story required an ensemble cast.

There’s Andrew Abouchar, an early financier: “I had these two guys in my office (Lipsin and Smyth) while I was eating my lunch and they just went off. By the time I finished my banana, I knew there was something special there.”

Kang Lu

Lori Allan, Philip Padfield, David Dalton . . . and the list keeps going.

Iron is a strong metal, but it’s a heavy one, too

Like any startup, the early days of Ironside were a little chaotic. For one, it might be fair to say there wasn’t exactly a business plan, per se.

“That would not be a presumption,” laughs Foster, now CEO of Covarity. “I think the Ironside business plan was a vision on where Bill wanted the company to get to and how we were going to nimble enough to get there.”

For the record, Ironside was a b2b ecommerce company. The company’s flagship product, Ironworks, provided an integrated go-to-market solution that let manufacturers and distributors give customers the ability to place orders online. Ironsides solutions could even be tied-in to a client’s ERP systems; pretty funky stuff for the time. Goodyear, J.D. Edwards and Cambar Software all signed on the dotted line.

But in late ‘96 the company was still a ways off from signing those kinds of deals.

“I went out to California to start an office there,” says Foster. “I was V.P of sales, but I was also a one man office. So, if a letter needed writing, I was V.P. of letter writing.”

On the opposite coast, Lipsin – busy rounding out his team and strategizing corporate direction – wasn’t exactly living the exec dream either.

“I remember my wife calling me one day and asking ‘What the hell is all that noise?’” he says. “I told her about the little cube I was in with the great big industrial dumpster outside my window,” he laughs. “She asked me If I remembered that view of Lake Ontario from my old office.”

The early days of a startup are always challenging.

“I can vividly remember laying in bed at night and sweating it out on a couple of occasions because I didn’t know if we had the money to make payroll,” Lipsin recalls.

Fortunately for the Ironsiders, adversity helped build strong, hard-working, focused teams.

Looking back: What made it Work

Ask any former Ironsider what they learned from working with Bill Lipsin and the first word out of their mouth is focus.

“Pick your priorities, focus and make sure you get those done,” says Foster. “Structure comes from aligning resources to those priorities. So, at the right point in time, your’e focused on building infrastructure, developing marketing expertise, getting into a new segment . . . whatever,” he says.

Abouchar concurs. “At a startup, there’s always so much to do,” he says. It’s dangerous to always be running after the next thing. I think Bill really stressed that.”

“It’s funny,” Lipsin says. “I just finished a meeting this morning and it was all about focus and ‘Let’s go back to the top three priorities.’ Once people understand that you knock off those three things and then move on, it really starts to resonate in an organization.”

Lipsin cultivated his style from studying under some of Canada’s finest executives: Mike Burns, and John Thompson among them.

“I took it from different mentors that I’d had. I watched their work ethic, how people like Bill (now chair of CIBC) Etherington treats people,” says Lipsin. “I also watched others who were the opposite and realized that I never wanted to be like them. So when I got involved with Ironside that all became part of how I wanted to hire people and run my piece of the business.”

An Iron Commitment to Communication and Autonomy

One of the first things Lipsin and his crew did was agree a on set of core principles by which the company would operate.

“I said, ‘Watch me compromise on a bunch of things, but I’ll never compromise on one of those core principles,’” says Lipsin.

Towards the top of the list was an organizational-wide commitment to open and honest communication.

“It’s the idea that you can have an open and active discussion but when you make a decision everyone is behind it,” says Abouchar. “That sounds pretty simple but it’s incredibly hard.”

The buzz on Bill Lipsin is that he let’s you run your own show.

“He’d say ‘Here’s where you need to get to. If you need help, call me,’” says Foster. “I couldn’t let the others down because I knew they weren’t going to let me down.”

Like a lot of companies, when Ironside started its growth spurt, competing energies were at risk of clashing. But the team always found a way to stay on track.

“We would discuss things behind closed doors but when we left we had an agreement and very prioritized goals and we focused on them,” says Foster.

Wasser puts it in a nutshell.

“The company was without a roadmap (but) it had a novel concept to utilize the Internet,” he says “The culture was about innovation . . . and the success was due to great leadership.”

The logo that launched a thousand ships

It’s what the people who were a part of Ironside have done in the years since the company was sold that really speaks to the success of the organization’s culture.

Consider: Rod Foster is now CEO of Covarity; Andrew Abouchar is a founding partner of TechCapital ; Kang Lu and Dale deFreitas are executives with pVelocity; Larry Wasser is president of LW Capital Corp and Entrepreneur in Residence at the Rotman School of Management; Derek Smyth is a partner with Edgestone Capital’s Venture fund.

Derek Smyth

“Derek and I still talk regularly, David Dalton worked with me in two other companies and Lori Allan is with me in New York today,” says Lipsin, adding that a new generation has begun to germinate from the old Ironside crew. “Rod Foster’s daughter is interviewing with the company I’m with now,” he says.

To a person, the many former Ironsider’s now heading up successful tech companies are doing so largely according to the mantras they learned under Bill Lipsin.

“Respect your colleagues, especially your subordinates. They work with you, not for you,” says Lu.

“Focus,” says Foster. “There’s a time and a place for ‘Let’s get it done’ survival, and there’s a time to mature as an organization.”

“Parking lots never lie,” says Abouchar. “Ironside’s was never empty.”

Lipsin is quick to deflect credit for his former team’s success and heap praise upon their own accomplishments as executives and entrepreneurs.

“I think we’ve watched each other grow and helped each other out where we could over the years,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like I’m altruistic because there has to be a selfish motivation in order to be successful, but there are different ways to get there.

So would it be worth it to go through the days of dumpster-dodging and payroll-sweating all over again to have one more go with the old team?

“Let’s just say if many of those people walked in to my office today the due diligence process would be pretty quick,” says Abouchar.

“I don’t know,” laughs Foster. “We’d all probably want to be in charge.”

Lipsin is a bit more sentimental on the prospect of a reunion.

“If i had the ability to stop working full-time, I’d like to share the lessons I’ve learned – good and bad – and help others lay the foundation for their own success,” he says.

“If Rod or one of those folks called . . . I’d do it again tomorrow.”