'Building Something That Lasts in a World Obsessed with What’s Next' with ThinkOn's Craig McLellan

In this Snippets episode, Leon Goren sits down with Craig McLellan, CEO of ThinkOn, to discuss what it takes to build a company that lasts through multiple technology cycles.

Craig reflects on one of the most difficult transitions leaders face: evolving from founder to CEO. He shares lessons learned scaling a business from a close-knit startup culture to a high-performing organization, why the people who help you reach one stage may not be the people who take you to the next, and how leaders can navigate those decisions thoughtfully.

The conversation also explores why leaders should approach AI with discipline rather than hype, how organizations can drive meaningful adoption, and what Canadian business leaders should be thinking about when it comes to sovereignty, innovation, and long-term competitiveness.

Listen in for a candid conversation on leadership, resilience, and the realities of building a lasting organization.

Transcript

00:00

Special thanks to Sherrard Kuzz for helping us bring you today's PEO Leadership Innovators Alliance Snippets Podcast.

00:13

I'm Leon Goren, CEO of PEO Leadership and Innovators Alliance, and welcome back to our Snippets podcast.  Today I'm sitting down with Craig McClellan, CEO of ThinkOn.  Craig and I go back a long time. He's been a member of PEO Leadership for maybe 20 years or more. I'm scared to actually look back at this, Craig,  and a valued member of my own Pat group, Pat4. I know, watching what he's built at ThinkOn has been genuinely impressive. ThinkOn is a Canadian cloud solutions provider built on a channel-only model, putting partners at the center from day one.

00:43

Craig has spent more than 25 years building through the dot com era, the financial crisis, the cloud wave, the cyber wave. And now we got AI. Always with a bias for discipline over hype. He's the kind of operator who's earned his perspective the hard way. Craig, it's great to have you with us. Well, I'm delighted to be here. And that introduction, I should have had that copy of that ahead of time. I could use that every time. It's great. Thank you. Well, you could just lean on me. I'll come in and do the interest for you all the time. All right. So I picked a theme today.

01:13

about building something that lasts and we're all obsessed with what's next. And I thought we'd start with a little bit of an opener around, and I've sort of been a little bit on your journey. And so what's been the most difficult adjustment you've had to make as a leader? You know, it's been 20 years, I've seen you grow, but through your own eyes, what has it really been?  It's a great question. And I'll summarize it this way. You know, it's a constant balance between culture and commitment to  the organization and

01:42

When you start your business as a founder, you really have to almost treat your organization like a slightly dysfunctional extended family. We've got to convince people to join you on a journey. They may have some idiosyncrasies that  show themselves later as you grow,  but you're so committed to them  because the one goal is to get everyone to the Thanksgiving dinner.  And so it's a euphemism. You can imagine going through that where you've got to.

02:10

people that maybe you wouldn't rather spend time with, you,  and then you get to this point where you grow in them,  you know you have, but they've become so ingrained in your culture  during your  startup and early stages of scale-up phase,  but inevitably you reach point. And I've had  some  wonderful interactions with other CEOs where they've used this as an example. I just like to say you go from being this dysfunctional extended family to the professional sports team.

02:38

I think that hits somewhere between 30 and 50 million. It's inevitable it's going to hit you because the people that get you there aren't going to get you there the next, the next phase.  And you've got this amazing relationship with these people. You've learned how to tolerate each other in ways that  you wouldn't necessarily tolerate  someone on a professional sports team. And and hockey is the analogy to use here, but  you know, the punchline is if you find yourself still taking face-offs for your team at times, then you're not.

03:06

building the foundation to keep scaling. And inevitably you'll tap out, you'll reach that level.  But  to answer your question specifically, the  biggest challenge is knowing when that is, I think on your journey, because every company is a little different, but also breaking those ties to those people that got you to that first  significant milestone  is  really hard. And it kind of coincides with moving from being a founder to being a CEO. And  no one really wants to teach you that.

03:33

But the reality is they are two separate jobs. Was that the hardest thing that sort of didn't come naturally to you just because you hadn't experienced it at first or?  For sure. That was the beginning. was uh something that I'd never experienced.  you've got great people in your life  that  you  can talk to and get advice. But  the real challenge is you don't know what questions to ask.  You just don't realize this. And people don't always prompt you for these sorts of questions.

04:01

Yeah, like I think if I step back and look at things like sure, there's been  tactical challenges throughout the journey of the business. But  I think if the one thing that has changed over the last two years for me has been that evolution of myself from founder to CEO. Let me ask you, because you have really gone through multiple cycles, especially on the tech side, and it's been multiple cycles. The latest one that we're in is the the AI boom. It's certainly

04:30

different, at least it feels different than the others. Through your eyes, should leaders be thinking about this one differently? What should they be paying attention to right now?  For someone that's in tech, you'd expect me to be a lot more enthusiastic about the potential, but  I look at this  existing  AI boom,  let's call it a bubble.  I think every  large tech activity or event over the last 50 years has really always had a bubble in it.

04:59

And in my experience, what comes after the bubble is the meaningful bit. So you look at the dot com bomb of 2000, where all these organizations that had no business being online businesses, but still were following the lead of, of, uh, Amazon and other, some of the, some of the other early adopters and it blows up, you know, there's a, there's a large reset, which you end up with as a great asset base on which to build real businesses. So then you start to see the acceleration of those businesses.

05:28

You'll see the early stages of cryptocurrency changed into something meaningful. I'm not going to get into the merits of cryptocurrency per se, but I think you'll see things that come after like blockchain is going to have very relevant implications. And now as you look at AI, I think what you're going to find there is there's just an unbelievable amount of money being spent on infrastructure that is inevitably over

05:58

specced,  even though everyone says they're incredibly deficient and we're seeing the pain in the market of not being able to get supply of  components.  But what you're going to see is the vendor,  the vendors and the technologies they create will react to these  and they'll literally create so much  change in the market that the bubble will inevitably burst. So then we'll be left with a lot of infrastructure overspend,  predominantly driven out of the U.S.  and that'll have to be absorbed. And that absorption  will  create

06:29

new  levels of business. And we're already seeing it. Like we're seeing technology vendors come out and say, can,  I can deliver AI processing using different technologies. You're going to watch, watch closely for what Intel does next year  because their chips are going to start taking on more of the GPU like capabilities at a fraction of the cost, fraction of the energy.  These are all things that inevitably happen. So,  you know, I think that  organizations need to be cautious about what they do and adopt.

06:58

and they have to never lose sight of the outcomes  because those are the things that will survive  any sort of bubble that's burst. If I'm solving a real problem for my company, I'm going to be in good shape.  Do we need to have 28 ways to get, you know, unique cartoons of my dog? No. Do I need to have a tool that can help me  shorten the time  to outcome?  Absolutely. Here's the other thing I'll just say. I think it requires

07:26

changes within your organization to really  drive adoption and evolution inside your environment. We had the good fortune of  having an opportunity to add a CRO to our team, a new CRO.  And with that, that hire came this  amazing amount of  critical,  but common sense AI tooling. And now it's permeating the company. And I think every CEO out there has the opportunity to accomplish the same thing. And I would just caution you.

07:56

Don't go all in, be cautious. It's interesting. Actually, we were going to talk about that at our Pat meeting next week. It's on my agenda. Turn to figure out what over the next 12 months is going to be redundant. Where do I put the money in terms of an investment, AI investment, either into people or some tools and stuff? Yeah, I put the money into people, teach people how to use it. And everyone's complaining about the cost of tokens. And  the reason why token costs are high is because people are

08:25

clear how to use it and they disabuse it because you get into these gamification opportunities that percolate up and the individual contributors inside most companies get excited about, hey, look at me, I blew my token budget in two hours.  That's not good business. You wouldn't give every employee a thousand dollars cash every day and  reward them for how fast they could spend it.  It really has to be common sense.  And there are really  interesting ways  that you can use AI.

08:54

I'll give you an example. If you're in the business where you're responding to RFPs, when an RFP comes to you, it's really interesting if you put that into your AI tool of choice and you ask it for,  what do you  view as the winning formula in the response to this RFP and what questions really need to get answered? Oh, and by the way, can you assemble the answers to those questions based on our library of existing RFPs and answers?  And then as humans, then you get to start with something that's not from blank  page.

09:24

There's nothing worse in the world than responding to an RFP, right? Cause you got to organize a team. Well, why not use the tool to do that? And I would say that that saves you between 10 and 12 hours of real human capital time just to get organized. The problem is how many people take the output from AI and say, Oh, this is good. I would never suggest that. I think you use AI on the initial phases to get a good start. Cause then you put the humans on it and the humans.

09:51

actually determine what's relevant or not. And then the AI learns from that too. It's all judgment. It's actually, the questions you got to push AI with. That first piece of paper, even the second or third is probably not the right answer.  It's going deeper. I teach every person in the company how to write a good prompt. Learning how to write prompts should not be an experiment and a journey of oneself. It should actually be a team sport where everyone learns how to write better prompts. So in your organization,

10:18

How would you say, have you been successful in getting everybody engaged  using some of these tools or is it still a work in progress? Like what's worked, what's not working? It's definitely a work in progress. And you think a tech company like ours wouldn't really have naysayers inside the organization, but there are people that are genuinely concerned about their futures.  And, you know, I think the honest answer is if you're concerned about your future, then you should be looking for ways to augment your skills.

10:48

Where I see this going is everyone's going to have an AI friend and that friend, regardless of your job, that friend is going to help you through your day.  If you  use it that way, if you ask it mundane questions, well, that's no different than having an encyclopedia at your desk when you're in high school. This is a really different, a different thing, right?  And we're, so we're seeing, I think, stronger amounts of adoption in different areas of the business. I'll give you an example. We just are in the process of

11:18

rolling out a tool we have called Ticket Sense. And all it does is it walks through all of our support tickets  and then it creates reports every week for our service delivery managers  so that each one of their customers, now the service delivery manager, can absorb an unbelievable amount of information in five minutes and they can take action based on what that report's telling them. Because it's based on real data, it's not hallucinating, it's all based on...

11:44

real data in our environment. So if you think about your life as a service delivery manager  and you're supporting 10 customers  of significance, it's wonderful if you can get a report once a week to maybe one a day every 10 days  that tells you, hey, this particular customer,  this is what's going on with this customer. Like that to me is very exciting. And we're just really scratching the surface on that level of intelligence. All right. I know that our conversation, we can't end any conversation without talking about sovereignty of data here.

12:14

Cause I know you're sitting on all these panels all over this country, you're traveling around. How important is it for us? You you got all these Canadian leaders listening to this podcast. How important should they be thinking about this? It's a great question. And my answer may come  across as a little different than what you would expect. So I did my 36th panel this past week,  in at e-health in, in Halifax. And I'll make an observation there, healthcare.

12:43

is finally starting to understand that residency and sovereignty are not the same thing. As a country, we have effectively outsourced our entire hospital operational systems to three US vendors where we spend  almost $4 billion a year. So there's a classic just pure economical challenge. Like, why would we spend $4 billion a year so that three American companies can  harness  our expertise and our knowledge and make their products better?

13:12

So take that and turn that around and say, purely from an economic development of our country, when we work together  and we work with each other,  we make each other better, right? So  if someone  has a business where they make chairs  and we need chairs,  well, if I buy chairs from a US distributor or US manufacturer,

13:39

I have no, or say a European manufacturer, I have no doubt I could get a high quality chair,  because the reality is that's all that's gonna be available for me.  Unfortunately, the chaired builder, the chair maker, the chair designer in Canada never gets an opportunity to improve. And we as a country have forgotten that. I would say it almost aligns completely when we signed the free trade agreement,  because for some reason we all decided to get stupid after the free trade agreement where we felt.

14:08

You know, we thought we had this wonderful market in the U.S. that was  completely aligned to our capabilities. For a long time, it worked that way. But what we were missing was in the U.S.,  they always align to the economic development of their home teams.  And for some reason in Canada, we just decided to stop worrying about the competitiveness of the home teams.

14:32

So it's not gonna just be a switch and it's gonna change overnight. But I see this now in our industry and I see it in others where  people are finally talking about working with someone that's local.  I an interview on CBC radio last year and  the interviewer said, well, what should we be prepared to pay for the Canadian premium? And that's one of those things that irritates me because we've been bullshitting Canadians for a long time that somehow they should pay more for the home team. That is bunk.

14:59

The first thing we have to do as Canadians with each other is we have to make sure that we're economically competitive. And then  we'll gain the advantage of working with other members of the home team. So to take it back to your question, sovereignty is about the ability for a country  and individuals in that country to chart their own course  without influence, undue influence from others.  And we're not there yet. So that means  economic sovereignty. It certainly means supply chain sovereignty.

15:28

and knowing where we're leveraging others.  And then the third is data sovereignty. And that really is about making sure that the data is exclusively ours, because that is our competitive advantage. Are you seeing a shift? 36 panels. Like, can you feel it? I  can.  So here's how it played out.  just going say,  employee of month Trump shows up  in uh office, and there's this quiet period where Canadian

15:55

companies just didn't know what was gonna happen because he starts making,  as he should, he starts making noise about supporting his own country. Which by the way, when I say employee of month, what I mean is  he drives more business for us than anyone else because of the nature of  himself. But at first there was this panic and there was about six months  of,  my God,  can we just wait? Will this just pass? Will the wind blow past us and everything go back to normal?

16:22

There's a lot of people, I noticed this in public sector and in  larger commercial enterprises, who literally thought this is just going to pass. And then in the fall, I would say around the end of the third quarter, I started to see this  belief that, wait, we don't actually  need to be subservient to that market. We need to step up.  We need to align. mean, it certainly had something to do with the election in Canada, I'm sure. This middle power conversation  eventually evolved.

16:51

I think is really important. But what I've noticed now since about October  is  most Canadians now believe that it's changed for good. But the other beautiful thing that's come out of this is it's making us a better country, which in turn makes us more attractive to our other markets. Right. What's the old saying? uh A good fence makes a great neighbor. Well, the same thing applies here. And so I don't think it's about the craziness that of the U.S. administration. I think it's a

17:21

absolute call to action for us.  And I'm seeing it now all over the place. Like  for sure, public sector, federal first, then the provinces started to get on board by Ontario or by Alberta or by BC,  which is great because it's again, it fosters local innovation. And then what I've noticed now is a lot of the larger enterprise customers,  finance and insurance are starting to feel the pressure of not having a sovereign supply chain themselves.  And while the noise

17:50

in my industry from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google is just off the charts. The reality is that people are realizing that,  this is something that we need to take advantage of, and we need to use it as a breakout moment because it will make us a stronger country. So the message to our members and those listening is ask the question, where is your data going today? You should ask that every day.  And I think that you need to ask that to your supply chains because these little subtle questions

18:19

can sometimes trigger big actions, then you don't even know the ramification of it other than it will undoubtedly make the country stronger because every time a vendor's challenged to do better, they either do better or they fail. Well, Craig, thank you so much for this great conversation. I had other questions, maybe another round we go at sometime in the future. Yeah, for sure. But again, thank you for time. in, I should get two, right? 20 years in, I should get two sessions. Yeah, two, maybe three. Three, for sure.

18:46

For anyone watching who wants to connect with the peer community CEOs and senior leaders who are committed to growth and building something that lasts, I'd love to have that conversation. You can find us at peo-leadership.com. You can also just follow our snippets and our other podcast called The Way Forward if you want to listen to some other thought leaders, both from our organization and around the world. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.