2019 Winner
Wise 50 Over 50 Award™
Garry Brownrigg – QuickSilk
www.quicksilk.com
My journey into entrepreneurship was driven by circumstance. In 1990 I lost the functional capability to speak. I had to find a way to make a living. I turned towards the internet, which was in its infancy at the time – Google hadn’t even been founded.
I had been an eight-year career banker with RBC when my voice gradually faded away over a three-month period. I went fifteen years with no voice; ten of those years with no confirmed diagnosis. My voice has slowly been returning for the past ten years. I keep telling friends and family I plan to sing one day.
This is my fifth start-up experience. The first was a services consulting firm that helped small businesses identify and secure government funding. Next, I worked with Ottawa-based start up JetForm in the COO & CIO’s office. Then, I joined a bricks and mortar training company and built a web-based learning management system that was sold to Calian (TSX: CGY) in 2000. After Calian, I started a small web development company called SohoPortal that focused on web applications for small to medium size business.
At 50, I started QuickSilk with a vision to build a better content management system.
Having worked with 20 different content management systems (CMSs), my team and I had identified a built-in compromise in the market that forces organizations to chose simplicity or affordability, over security.
We don’t believe organizations should have to make this compromise. To date, we’ve invested more than 90 person years of development effort on a SaaS CMS platform that now hosts websites for The World Bank Group, all levels of government and national corporations and non-profits – Securely. Simply. Affordably.
My team and I are strongly committed to our community, quietly donating our time and services to more than a dozen worthwhile causes. Likewise, QuickSilk continues to evolve through its own community, with a 99.5% client retention rate since inception. We continue to expand our focus, individually and as a company, with that same sense of purpose and service to community.