Not Sorry for Winning: Neil Cawse
100 billion daily data points. $1 billion in revenue. Six million vehicles. And not one cent of venture capital.
The longer you play, eventually you’re going to get double six. And when you get double six, you need to go big.—Neil Cawse
It was January 2004 when Neil Cawse’s phone rang in his Oakville office.
“Neil. Nothing’s working.”
His brother Clive was calling from Orkin’s headquarters in Georgia.
Clive was there to demonstrate Geotab, Neil’s tracking system, to one of North America’s largest pest control companies. The company’s fleet manager was on his way in, expecting to see 3,500 service vans glowing on a live map, each one tracked in real time by a small black box under the dashboard.
Instead, he was staring at an empty screen.
For years, Neil had been trying to convince fleet managers that GPS tracking wasn’t surveillance or science fiction. That a device the size of a deck of cards could turn invisible, roaming trucks into a grid of actionable data. Orkin was the client that could change everything. Win Orkin, and Geotab would have instant credibility.
Neil and his brother Alan had spent two weeks rebuilding the backend to handle a client this size. They’d stress-tested every query and every load scenario, convinced they’d finally nailed it.
Clive was about to deliver the biggest pitch of their lives with a blank map, and Neil knew exactly which line of code had broken.
“Tell him to grab a coffee,” Neil said, keeping his voice calm.
He had ten minutes.
Behind the story
I interviewed Neil Cawse in person, brining the lens of a Stanford GSB case writer to unpack his personal journey and the strategic choices behind Geotab’s rise.
Read the full story below, or listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube
Hot Dogs, Star Trek, and One Thing His Mother Said
Neil Cawse grew up in Johannesburg with two younger brothers, Clive and Alan, and a younger sister, Lindy, in a household where “[e]verything ended up being a competition,” Neil said. “Who was better at school, who could run the fastest, who could eat their hot dogs the quickest—you name it.”
When Neil was around thirteen or fourteen, his mother said something meant to encourage one of his younger brothers, who was struggling in school. “You may be smarter,” she told Neil, “but your brother will be more successful than you. He’s always making money as an entrepreneur.”
She does not remember saying it, which is one of the small dangers of parenting. A sentence that disappears for the adult can lodge permanently in the child.
“It was like, no, I’m never gonna let that happen,” Neil said. “And it’s a silly thing. It really is silly, but in the back of your mind it sticks.”
Neil made a promise to himself that when he finished school, he would start a company. He didn’t know what kind, but he knew that if entrepreneurship was going to be the family event, he intended to compete.
At eighteen, Neil enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, known as Wits, and considered three possible paths: medicine, actuarial science, and engineering.
Medicine ended at a museum exhibit with preserved fetuses, which revealed Neil’s horrible phobia of blood.
Actuarial science ended even faster. He walked into his first lecture and took in the room. Everyone was staring at the floor and there was little apparent diversity among the students.
“Yeah, not doing that,” he said.
That left engineering. His father wanted him to study civil. Neil secretly wanted computer science. Wits didn’t offer computer engineering, so electrical became the compromise. It was close enough to computers that Neil could live with it, traditional enough that his father didn’t object.
To pay his way through university, Neil took a sponsoring company’s scholarship that would have to be paid back through years of work. The work turned out to be in sales, which he hated. But later, he understood what it had taught him: in those rooms, the best technical answer mattered less than whether anyone believed you.
When Neil finished university, he had saved enough to start a company. A university friend named Ken agreed to join him. Ken’s wife, an actuary, would support them while they got started. Neil’s parents let him keep living at home. They would spend nothing, save every cent, and build a Microsoft consulting shop with almost no overhead.
They called it Vircom. Neil’s younger brother Alan became the first hire, leaving a job at a bank for the uncertain promise of his older brother’s startup. Clive joined later. They took on the kinds of projects established firms either ignored or couldn’t move quickly enough to handle: prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and odd Microsoft South Africa assignments that seemed too small to be prestigious.
Then, one became too important to refuse.
In 1994, South Africa was preparing for its first democratic election after apartheid, and the Independent Electoral Commission needed someone to manage the database behind the vote count. Microsoft recommended Vircom. The job was urgent, messy, and risky enough that the bigger firms weren’t interested, so it landed with two twenty-four-year-old brothers and their laptops.
The Shoe Cupboard
For weeks before the election, Neil and Ken worked around the clock in what Neil describes as a shoe cupboard in downtown Johannesburg. Black South Africans were voting for the first time. Neil and Ken’s job was to take vote counts streaming in from around the country, add them up using Microsoft’s database software, and send live percentages out to the media.
Neil was working the late shift. Ken had finished his twelve hours and gone home. Neil opened a spreadsheet and copied in some values from the system, just to double-check that everything was coming through correctly.
“I looked at the percentage, then at the outputs, then at the percentage again,” Neil said. “And I realized this crazy bug in my stored procedure—I wasn’t adding up all the numbers in every case.”
The percentages going out to news organizations across the country were wrong.
“Goosebumps,” Neil said. “I ran out, tried to find my boss. I said, ‘Listen, this is going on. I made a mistake. This is a problem.’”
Neil’s boss disappeared. Twenty minutes passed. Neil sat there watching the clock, watching the bad numbers continue flowing outward, watching a technical error become more dangerous by the minute. Nobody came back.
“Every minute that goes by, these numbers are trending in the wrong direction,” Neil said. “If I don’t change it, it’s going to get out of hand. I’m making an executive decision. The twenty-four-year-old kid is making an executive decision to fix this.”
So he opened the code and made the change. Alone in that cramped room, with no one watching and no one checking his work, Neil corrected the bug. He had no idea whether he’d just made things better or catastrophically worse.
About half an hour later, people started emerging from offices Neil hadn’t even realized existed. Hundreds of them moving through the building. His boss still hadn’t returned. Then came the instruction that everyone was being sent home, immediately, in the middle of the election count.
Neil got in his car and drove back to his parents’ house.
He walked in and started to speak. “Mom, Dad—”
“Have you heard?” his mother said.
“Mom, I need to tell you—”
“No, have you heard? It’s all over the news. They’re saying there’s been fraud in the election. A hack.”
Neil went cold.
The sudden movement in the numbers had triggered alarms. Election monitors running validation models saw the percentages shift too quickly. They assumed someone had hacked the system. What Neil knew, sitting in his parents’ living room watching the news, was that the crisis everyone was panicking about wasn’t a hack at all. It was his bug. And his fix.
He explained everything to his parents that night. He went to bed not knowing what would happen next.
The election continued. Despite the chaos and concerns about irregularities, international observers and the Independent Electoral Commission worked through the challenges of managing South Africa’s first fully democratic vote. The election ran for four days, from April 26 to 29, 1994. More than 19 million South Africans voted. Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in prison for his opposition to apartheid, won the presidency and was inaugurated on May 10 as the country’s first Black president. The system held.
Neil took something from that night that would shape everything he built afterward. At Wits, he had studied control systems and the endless feedback loop they required. Measure what is happening, adjust, and measure again. The election had shown him what happens when that loop breaks—and what happens when you have the data to fix it. A single bug in the code triggered a national crisis during one of the most important moments in his country’s history, and the only way through was accurate data and the ability to act on it immediately.
Geotab would become the company version of that lesson.
Beers and GPS
Over the next several years, Vircom grew. The three Cawse brothers built a reputation for taking on Microsoft projects other firms either couldn’t handle or couldn’t move fast enough to win. They were profitable, disciplined, and increasingly successful.
By the late 1990s, Vircom had become something of substance. Another idea was forming in the background, helped along by Neil’s mother, a car alarm company, and a few Friday afternoon beers.
Neil’s mother worked at Sanji Electronics, an aftermarket car alarm business run by Larry Khan. In South Africa at the time, car alarms weren’t a luxury but a necessity. Security was a real problem, and alarms were often added after the vehicle was sold.
“Larry bribed me with beers on Friday afternoons to fix his PC,” Neil said. “Great guy. I’d get everything working, and we’d chat over beers.”
One Friday, Larry turned the conversation to GPS. The U.S. government had recently made civilian GPS dramatically more accurate, turning it from a military-rooted technology into something commercially useful. For the first time, anyone could know exactly where something was, anywhere in the world, in real time.
“That was like, whoa,” Neil said. “What could we do with that? How cool would that be?”
To Neil, who had spent his childhood reverse-engineering Star Trek, this wasn’t small. GPS meant you could know where something was without waiting for someone to tell you.
The most obvious application was vehicles. Companies owned cars, trucks, vans, and service fleets that moved through the world all day, generating information nobody was capturing. Information like where they went, how long they stopped, how they were driven, or whether a driver was telling the truth about what happened between leaving the depot and coming back.
Larry and Neil decided to find out if businesses would pay to see their vehicles in real time. They formed a joint venture between Vircom and Sanji Electronics. Vircom would build the software, Sanji would handle the hardware. But before there were customers, revenue, or much of a product, Neil had to sit across from a seasoned group CEO and explain why the twenty-five-year-old software kid deserved half the company.
Neil wanted fifty-fifty.
From the other side of the table, that sounded ridiculous. Sanji had the hardware background, the manufacturing relationships, the tenure. Neil had code, conviction, and his mother listening from the next office.
“I’m like, do you not understand how important software is?” Neil said. “Software is running the world. This is changing.”
The debate went in circles. Neil wouldn’t budge.
“I remember the group CEO eventually getting pretty frustrated with this twenty-five-year-old,” Neil said. “He’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve done whatever I can,’ and he kind of storms out. Mom was listening in the other office.”
Paul and Larry stayed in the room. The device needed both pieces to work—hardware to collect the signal, software to make it useful. One without the other was worthless.
“At the end of the day, they went, ‘Okay, that sounds okay,’” Neil said. “’We’ll do fifty-fifty and see how it goes.’”
They called the company Geotab (Larry was the marketing genius).
For a while, Geotab wasn’t the main event but a side project, small and speculative, while Vircom paid the bills.
Then, in 1999, Dimension Data, one of South Africa’s largest IT services companies, made an unsolicited offer for Vircom. Neil turned it down.
The offer landed inside a much bigger personal decision. Neil and his then-girlfriend Tammy wanted to get married and have children, but they didn’t want to raise those children in South Africa. Suddenly, selling Vircom was no longer just a financial decision.
So Neil did what any young engineer would do when making an emotional decision of enormous personal consequence: he built a model.
The Country Chosen by Spreadsheet
Neil analyzed every English-speaking country he and Tammy could reasonably move to. He looked at immigration data, including how many people moved to Australia and how many came back. He interviewed people who had left South Africa. He pulled statistics on healthcare, education, literacy, GDP growth, infant mortality, and gun violence.
The report pointed toward Canada, with the United States close behind.
“We looked at Canada as being on the doorstep of the US,” Neil said. “Access to the largest market in the world.”
In addition to proximity, Canada offered a safe and stable place to raise a family. Ontario’s schools helped, too. Later, that talent base would become part of Geotab’s advantage.
On paper, Canada won. But Neil wasn’t moving alone.
He invited the family over for a barbecue.
Parents, siblings, spouses. The people whose lives would be upended if the spreadsheet was right, gathered in the backyard. Neil was close with his family, and the idea of leaving them behind didn’t sit right.
“Tammy and I want to get married. We’re going to leave, we’re going to sell the business,” Neil told them. “Can we all make a pact we’ll go to the same place? Here’s the report. Tell me what you think.”
It was an enormous ask. Leave Johannesburg, the only home they’d known, and move to a country they’d barely thought about, based largely on a spreadsheet built by the eldest son. Classic Neil, turning an emotional, life-altering decision into something the family could examine, debate, and decide.
They didn’t say yes on the spot. They made a trip to Canada first, to see if the place matched the numbers. When they came back to Johannesburg, the decision was made.
Neil and his partner Ken put Vircom on the sales block and, eight months after the Dimension Data offer, sold the company for roughly $10 million each, including an earnout. After taxes and immigration costs, he netted around $8 million.
A side project over beers had become the thing he carried across the ocean.
The Market That Didn’t Exist
Geotab came to Canada almost as an extra piece of luggage.
Once he was in Canada, Neil reached back out to the partners in the Geotab joint venture. The business was still tiny, barely more than an idea, but Neil wanted to give them the chance to come along.
“I said, you know, you can put in some money and we’ll get it going,” Neil said. “And they declined.”
Vircom’s new owner didn’t want Geotab. It was too small, barely worth anything. The South African joint venture partners passed on coming to Canada. So Neil started Geotab fresh, this time entirely his own.
“It was a good way to give the family a livelihood,” Neil said.
Left to his own curiosity, Neil might have gone somewhere else entirely. He had nearly gone to MIT to study artificial intelligence.
“Kids—Ethan came along,” Neil said. “So that was canceled.”
Instead of MIT, Neil got Oakville, a few early employees, and a vehicle-tracking product that required a lot of explaining. He put in $250,000, then another $250,000. Revenue was beginning to come in, but the company was still small enough that every decision felt close to his own bank account.
At one point, Neil sat down with the team.
“Guys, how are we doing here?” he asked. “I don’t have infinite money. I could maybe put in another $500,000 if we need to. How do you feel about things?”
The team looked at the numbers, looked at the early traction, and made the call.
“No, no, look, we’re feeling pretty good,” they told him. “We’ve got momentum. It’s going well. We think we should be okay.”
“And we never looked back from there,” Neil said.
But momentum was relative. For years, Geotab kept selling into a world that still found the whole idea strange. The technology worked, so that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that in 2001, putting a tracking device in a company vehicle sounded less like fleet management and more like surveillance. (The original giant eyeball logo didn’t help.)
Neil would pitch fleet managers and hear the same response: “I don’t track vehicles. That’s terrible. My employees would never accept that.”
Most companies would have hired salespeople, opened offices, pushed harder. Neil knew better. The market was not ready, and spending ahead of it would not make it arrive faster. Geotab had to survive long enough for the market to catch up.
“We tried to measure our performance in terms of profitability per person,” Neil said. “Which is a stupid way to do it. Basically trying to keep headcount to a minimum.”
Unorthodox, maybe, but it forced clarity. If Geotab was going to stay small, it had to know exactly what belonged inside the company and what didn’t.
“We were not good at marketing and sales,” Neil said. “I knew nothing about how to sell a product across the US and Canada. I didn’t know anything about hardware manufacturing, even setting up an office and running an office.”
So Geotab focused on the software, the engineering, and the systems that made the platform work. Manufacturing, hardware, sales, marketing, even office space all got outsourced.
“Always ask yourself the question,” Neil said. “What is core to you? Don’t be greedy.”
But if Geotab wasn’t going to hire salespeople, how would it reach customers? Neil did what he often did when facing a problem he didn’t fully understand. He found someone who could figure it out. In this case, that was his sister Lindy and her husband Stephan, whom he paid to build a North American marketing plan for a couple of thousand dollars.
The report pointed to resellers.
Geotab didn’t have the money, the footprint, or the credibility to sell directly into fleets across the United States and Canada. But resellers already had the relationships, local knowledge, and installation capacity Geotab lacked.
Geotab would build the product. Resellers would get paid for every customer they brought in. The goal was to find people who believed in the product enough to bet their own time on it.
The first reseller Neil signed wouldn’t even agree to represent the product without a $5,000 upfront payment, on top of the commission he’d earn on every sale.
It wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence. “We literally had to give away the first one and hand-hold it,” Neil said. “But once you have a good reference, it just becomes so much easier to get your next sale. The first one is always the hardest one.”
That first sale led to a second, the second to a third, and slowly, the reseller network that would eventually scale Geotab across North America began to take shape.
Then came the call that would test whether any of it actually worked.
The First Big Break
Two weeks before Clive stood in Orkin’s office staring at an empty screen, Neil was on the phone with Orkin’s fleet manager.
Through one of Geotab’s resellers in Georgia, Neil and Alan had landed a call with Orkin. Founded in 1901, Orkin had become one of the largest pest control companies in North America, with a fleet of 3,500 service vans making house calls across the country every single day. Those white vans with the red Orkin Man logo were everywhere—in subdivisions, office parks, apartment complexes. If you lived in America, you’d seen one.
For Geotab, Orkin represented more than revenue. It was a fleet that never stopped moving, with technicians running routes from early morning to late afternoon, hitting dozens of stops a day. The operational complexity was exactly what telematics was built for: tracking arrival times, optimizing routes, verifying service calls, monitoring driver behavior across thousands of miles. If Geotab could handle Orkin, it could handle anyone.
Everything was going well on the call with the fleet manager until he asked Neil about the database.
“We’ve had a lot of trouble with Microsoft Access-based systems,” said the fleet manager. “Is your product based on Access?”
Neil paused. If he said yes, the fleet manager might hang up. If he lied, Clive would show up in two weeks and they’d find out immediately.
“It currently is,” Neil said. “But why?”
The fleet manager explained that Access crashed under load and corrupted data in ways that made people stop trusting the technology. If Geotab wanted Orkin’s business, it needed to run on SQL Server.
Neil knew the migration made sense long-term. The question was whether it could happen in two weeks.
“We’re working on it,” Neil said.
The fleet manager gave them the deadline. Demo it on SQL Server in two weeks, and Orkin would give them the business.
“It was literally day and night,” Neil said. “Alan and I were sweating blood to get this thing done.”
They migrated Geotab off Access and onto SQL Server, tearing apart the database, rewriting queries, testing what they could. The version they sent Clive was buggy, but it was what they had. Then Neil made one last change that morning before Clive’s demo.
That change broke everything.
Clive arrived at Orkin, started the system, and called Neil. Nothing was working.
Neil realized what he’d done and had ten minutes to fix it while Clive bought time. When the fleet manager came back, the map loaded and vehicles appeared across Georgia.
The fleet manager tested it for twenty minutes, then said they’d be in touch.
A few days later, Orkin called back. They were moving forward.
For a company that had been selling ten, maybe twenty vehicles at a time, and sometimes waited months between deals, Orkin was the proof point Geotab needed. Reference calls became easier. Skeptical fleet managers started returning emails.
“They put us on the map,” Neil said. “Everybody in America knew Orkin. As soon as you say you’ve got them as a customer, doors open.”
But a marquee customer wasn’t a market.
Around 2010, the world started catching up. Digital maps were normal. Smartphones meant everyone was already being tracked. Cameras were everywhere. The privacy objections didn’t disappear, but they stopped being the first thing fleet managers said.
The market was coming. Geotab was growing. Then the rules changed.
Double Six
On December 18, 2017, the Electronic Logging Device mandate reached its first major compliance deadline in the United States. Commercial truck drivers who had long recorded their hours on paper now had to track them electronically.
After more than a decade of Neil trying to convince fleets to connect their vehicles, the government had forced everyone’s hand.
“I didn’t appreciate the importance of that ELD mandate,” Neil said. “We talked about it, said it’d be important because everyone leaves things to the last minute. But I didn’t fully appreciate how big it would be.”
Resellers were flooded with calls. Installation schedules backed up for months. Support lines lit up. Fleet managers who had spent years resisting tracking were now scrambling to connect vehicles that had never been connected before.
During the ELD period, Geotab grew around eighty percent a year, the fastest stretch in the company’s history. The strange Canadian box was no longer strange. In many cases, it was mandatory.
Geotab had survived by matching spending to demand, but the ELD rush flipped that discipline inside out. The company now had to build capacity before customers went elsewhere.
“The longer you play, eventually you’re going to get double six. And when you get double six, you need to go big.”
So Geotab went bigger. It scaled manufacturing, expanded the reseller network, hired more people, and built the infrastructure to handle the flood of data coming off vehicles.
Revenue surged. The company’s owners were mostly family and early employees, people who had lived through the years when Geotab was small, strange, and far from certain. After the ELD wave, Neil wanted them to be rewarded for their work. In 2018, Geotab paid out roughly $100 million in dividends.
Winston Park Drive vs. Sand Hill Road
Around 2018, a different kind of competitor emerged.
Samsara had launched in 2015, founded by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, who had built Meraki and sold it to Cisco for $1.2 billion. Geotab had faced incumbents before—Verizon, Teletrac, others. But Samsara was different. They had technical founders, a modern product, and venture-backed speed. In 2018 alone, Samsara raised $150 million across two rounds, reaching a reported $3.6 billion valuation by December of that year.
Neil watched it happen and recalibrated. He’d just paid out roughly $100 million in dividends—a reward for years of patience. But watching Samsara raise $150 million in a single year made him realize the market wasn’t going to wait for Geotab to decide when to reinvest.
“I can categorically say that was my biggest mistake today,” Neil said. “Yes, we got some money out of the business, but that was never what this was about. That money should have been reinvested. We should have been building video technology and a whole bunch of other areas. I think the world of Samsara would look very different today.”
After that, the money stayed in the business. Geotab now spends roughly $200 million a year on research and development.
“The tech business is hard,” Neil said. “You’re on a bit of a treadmill. You have to make your product better all the time.”
Neil still didn’t want venture capital or the loss of control that came with it, but he understood what competing against Samsara required. Geotab would have to be disciplined about where it invested and how it executed.
The test came in 2022.
The United States Postal Service put out a procurement for one of the largest civilian fleets in the world. Over 230,000 vehicles, including more than 140,000 Long Life Vehicles originally deployed in the 1980s. The contract was worth up to $314 million over nine years.
USPS needed telematics that could work on everything from 1987 Chevrolet S-10s to modern electric vans, across thousands of depots running different routes with different operational needs. The older vehicles presented a particular challenge. They didn’t have the standardized diagnostic ports that came in newer cars. Tracking them required a custom cable and device that could plug into systems never designed to share data.
Geotab had spent years developing and refining their solution across various vehicle types and generations of automotive technology. Samsara didn’t yet have this capability. While the team committed to building it within six months, they couldn’t provide the Postal Service with technical diagrams or a concrete development roadmap.
In November 2022, USPS announced its decision. Geotab had won.
Samsara filed a protest with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, arguing the Postal Service had improperly evaluated their proposal. In May 2023, the court denied Samsara’s request for a preliminary injunction, and USPS proceeded with the contract.
Then, in January 2024, the court found an error in how USPS had evaluated Samsara’s approach. The Postal Service was ordered to reevaluate both proposals and, if necessary, make a new award decision.
USPS reconvened its evaluation team. The conclusion was the same. Samsara still hadn’t provided sufficient detail on how they’d build the solution, what it would look like, or how it would integrate with their existing system. Geotab’s technical score remained significantly higher.
On January 18, 2024, USPS reaffirmed the award to Geotab.
Twenty years of patient, disciplined work had won the contract. But in technology, winning once doesn’t mean winning twice. The next test was already forming.
The Next Game
The side project that arrived in Canada over beers twenty-five years ago is no longer a side project.
Geotab now generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than $125 million in operating profit, all of it reinvested in the company. It employs 3,500 people and serves more than 100,000 customers on every continent, including Antarctica. The platform processes more than 100 billion data points every day from 6 million connected vehicles.
Neil built it without raising a single dollar of venture capital. He still owns roughly two-thirds of it. His brothers, Clive and Alan, along with a few hundred employees, own the rest.
He made bets others wouldn’t, saw opportunities before they were obvious, and stayed true to the principle he learned in engineering: measure what is happening, change the input, and measure again.
But the game changes when you become the incumbent.
When Geotab was small and the market didn’t exist yet, Neil could afford to be patient. He could wait for companies to understand why tracking mattered. He could survive on discipline and low costs while the world caught up.
Now Geotab is what competitors are trying to disrupt. And the next technology shift—artificial intelligence—is moving faster than anything Neil has seen. For twenty-five years, the question was whether companies would connect their vehicles. Now it’s what those 100 billion daily data points can actually do, and whether Geotab moves fast enough or gets outmaneuvered by someone younger and faster.
“This is the most profound and important thing that’s happened in my lifetime,” Neil said. “And that includes everything—PC revolution, SaaS, GPS, all of that stuff. If I do not get this right, there will not be a Geotab. The company will be out of business, and nobody will be employed.”
Twenty-five years in, Neil still doesn’t know which bets will pay off. He just knows what happens when you stop making them.
The dice came up double six once. He’s betting they will again.
Neil’s Not Sorry
From Neil Cawse
I’m not sorry for ruthless transparency.
Being honest is not the same as being cruel. It means being straight with people early, while there is still time to help them get better. If someone is doing the wrong thing and you avoid the uncomfortable conversation, you are not protecting them. You are letting the problem grow until it becomes much harder to fix.
Three winning principles
01
Do the right thing for the long run.
Never compromise on what matters long term: your customers, your people, your family, your health, or your technology. Do not take the quick buck. Do not take the shortcut. Build for the long run as much as you can.
02
Check your ego at the door.
The worst, most powerful evil is to believe that you are somehow special, that you’re always right, or that you can’t be questioned. The more successful you become, the easier it is to fall into this trap. The more successful Geotab becomes, and the bigger we grow, the more important it is for me to keep reminding myself of this point. Surround yourself with people who can tell you the truth, and listen when they do.
03
Measure, reflect, and improve.
You cannot manage what you do not measure. Build feedback loops into everything: your work, your company, your relationships, your health. Look at what is happening, understand it, change the input, and measure again.
This really reinforced how even if you have the best tech solution you also have to have the business agility to capitalize on a marketing moment. In this case the government ELD mandate. Innovation+ business and operations agility leads to customer velocity. Thanks for evangelizing the Geotab odyssey!