2017 Winner
Wise 50 Over 50 Award™

Lori Schmidt – GO Productivity Corp

www.goproductivity.ca

Having worked with a range of businesss over my career, I became aware of the challenges our small businesses have in continuing to focus on continuous improvement and adding value through innovation in an ever complex global environment. It has been a passion to help businesses scale up and grow in an every changing and complex global environment.

I started Productivity Alberta, now GO Productivity, at 52 years old. I started the business because I had spent my career working with businesses who struggled and often lost their competitive advantage by not really understanding how to look at efficiencies and innovate to keep up with change in the global environment. I had spent years looking at methodologies and tools that could be valuable to address productivity and collaborative approaches for these firms and felt that there needed to be a way to bring these tools to broader industry in a cost effective way.

GO Productivity was first incorporated as Productivity Alberta – a provincial not for profit corporation in 2011. It grew in demand nationally so was incorporated nationally in 2014 as GO Productivity. The organization’s revenue growth has increased an average of 30% per year for the past 4 years. GO Productivity is an industry led not for profit social enterprise with the mandate to support productivity improvement, increase innovation, build s skilled and competent workforce to improve Canada’s competitiveness and economic sustainability.

GO Productivity has been recognized with work being published through the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils and currently sits on the board of directors. With a culture of giving back, GO Productivity continues to support a number of not for profit organizations and the team logged an average of 1500 volunteer hours in 2016.