VELA Podcasts

In this episode of the Polestar Podcast by VELA Wealth, host Kevin Parton interviews Ali M. Qureshi, founder of SideDrawer. They explore Ali’s entrepreneurial journey and the evolution of his company, which has transformed the way people manage and share important documents. Kevin and Ali discuss the key challenges and milestones in the startup world, highlighting the significance of adaptability and innovation in business growth. Tune in to gain insights into Ali’s background and the experiences that led him to create a solution that addresses the complexities of digital document management. 

Podcast Highlights: 

• Explore the entrepreneurial spirit that drove Ali to start SideDrawer. 

• Discover the challenges and triumphs faced during the company’s growth. 

• Learn about the innovative solutions SideDrawer provides for document management.  

• Gain insights into the importance of adaptability in the startup landscape. 

 

About the Guest – Ali M. Qureshi 

Ali Qureshi is the Co-Founder of SideDrawer, an idea born out of a personal need for him and his family. The fear of his family not knowing where the insurance policies, investments, banking information in an increasingly digital world, was the catalyst behind the idea. The platform now is being used by financial services firms ranging in size from independent advisors to Tier1 banks to securely exchange and collaborate on sensitive information. Prior to joining SideDrawer, Ali was the Executive Director and Deputy Head of International Equities, for CIBC Global Markets, as well as UBS Securities Canada Inc, and KPMG LLP. Ali has also been involved in helping corporates raise equity, debt and convertible debt financing across a variety of industries. Ali has both CA, CPA and CFA designations, and graduated from Trinity College at the University of Toronto with an Honours in Business Communication. Ali lives in Toronto with his wife and three young children. 

To learn more, visit Ali and SideDrawer on LinkedIn:  

• Ali Qureshi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alimbqureshi 

• SideDrawer: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sidedrawer/
   

About the Host – Kevin Parton 

Kevin Parton, CFP professional, specializes in personal and business financial planning, tax reduction, and estate planning. Kevin diligently concentrates on client education as a powerful strategy for building financial certainty. As no financial situation is the same, Kevin and his team monitor clients’ plans and implement personalized strategies to reduce their personal and corporate taxes, and protect their income, assets, and loved ones against the financial consequences of a serious illness, injury or death, ensuring clients maintain financial certainty and peace of mind. To read more, please visit the VELA team page. 

The episode is also available on:

  

  

 

The Podcast Transcript: 

Kevin Parton: 

Welcome to the Polestar Podcast by VELA Wealth, where we bring together financial experts, visionary entrepreneurs and passionate philanthropists who share not only their expertise but also their personal stories, reflecting on some of the remarkable experiences and offering inspirational insights. I’m Kevin Parton and I’m your host for this episode. I’m really excited for our guests today, welcome and thank you for being here, Ali. 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. Super excited to be part of this. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Amazing. So, I have a personal relationship with you that lasts a little bit longer than my time here at VELA. I met you about five years ago, in the early stages of SideDrawer. Which has been fun getting to see how it’s evolved since then. A lot of what we talk about on this podcast is focused on the growth and development of startups and how companies grow. There’s a lot I want to go over in the next little bit of how SideDrawer came to be and how it’s grown and what that’s felt like for you. But I think everyone’s always a bit interested in who starts a company and how they became the person they are. So, I’d love to get a bit of a bio on you. Kind of what life was like for you up until the start of SideDrawer and also learn what life experiences created, Ali – the founder of the company. 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

That is an awesome question. I think I’ve always had a very entrepreneurial spirit, which I believe is one of the reasons you and I bonded so much, because you were always of that same caliber, and you wanted to be your own and drive your own destiny. It’s interesting, because even though I had a finance job for 20 years, the sector that I was in was the most entrepreneurial sector of finance. I was in equity research and equity sales. Those jobs lend themselves to people who are very entrepreneurial, resourceful and will do whatever it takes to help the client, help themselves and help their teams grow, and so on. It was a really interesting position to be in, and I feel very fortunate about it. Then if I go back prior to my career in finance, I was an accountant. And even before that when I was a kid, I was a hustling salesperson selling shirts or selling gas contracts or selling perfume bottles or things like that. So, I always had that drive to want to try to grow and control the outcomes for myself. And that history is basically what led me to shaping the path and getting to a point where I was fortunate enough to find some amazing partners and a team that were able to put this project together. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

You do have some interesting stories of growing up. Before we dive into that, could you share where you grew up first of all? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

So, I grew up in the Middle East up until Grade 11. We moved to Halifax in 1993 and I did finished Grade 11 and 12 there. And really when you grow up in the Middle East, you only really hear of the University of Toronto, Queens and McGill University. Those are the only schools you think there are in Canada. And so, when we moved here, I applied for the University of Toronto, because Queens was in a smaller city and for McGill, I didn’t speak French. So, it was natural to apply to the University of Toronto and when I got into the accounting program, we moved to Toronto from Halifax. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Okay. From an entrepreneurial side, you’ve shared a story with me before from your childhood, about your uncle who sold shirts wholesale to Walmart. I found that story really interesting for a lot of entrepreneurial reasons. Can you retell that story? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

For sure. So, my uncle had a contract to manufacture dress shirts. The kind of $20-30 shirts that you would find at Walmart or Costco or those types of big box stores essentially. He would make them in the Middle East and typically, you get a bulk order for 100,000 shirts for example. There were always some extra leftovers, either by accident or by design, I’m not really sure, but there was always extra inventory. And with that, was an opportunity to sell this extra inventory at large exhibition centers where you set up your stall, which might be 15 feet wide, and you have all these shirts on display there. During the event you’re negotiating with other people who are trying to buy them for smaller local stores. So, I was about 9 or 10 years old, and he invited me to come and be the salesperson at this event. I was super excited because they were always late at night. So, the day started at 7 or 8:00 PM at night and normally I’d be getting ready for bed in a couple hours, but I’m now going to work as a 9- or 10-year-old at that point. I’m basically engaging with all these people who are trying to buy these extra shirts wholesale for their own stores and distribute them.  

It was a great opportunity because not only did I engage in sales activity, I was counting hundreds and thousands of dollars at the end of the night and doing inventory check. This gave me exposure to accounting basically, which was a nerdy obsession of mine, from back in the day. Not something that you want to publicly admit necessarily, but I did end up becoming an accountant. So, I guess those were the roots for it. So, I was doing inventory checks, cash balances and then he paid me at the end of the night with a kidney shawarma, which was one of my favorite sandwiches at the time and it tasted really good. And that’s how I got paid! It was exciting because I was there from 7:00 or 8:00 PM until probably midnight for 3-4 nights in a row. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

So not necessarily the standard 8- or 9-year-old lifestyle that you would experience today. You had mentioned as well when we were talking that you were reading the Wall Street Journal at 8 years old and were looking at stocks. How did reading prices of stocks in the Wall Street Journal at 8 years old inform the evolution of your life to graduating from university and getting into finance? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

I think it goes back to my obsession with numbers and balancing things. But even though I love math, I was never actually good at it at a university level. It was one of those things where I had to default to something else that was numbers oriented but was a bit easier. So that’s how accounting came in. But my obsession was mostly that I liked learning about new businesses, and in the Middle East you always had the Wall Street Journal section at the end of the newspaper and it had the market update as well as the different stock prices. I followed the companies that I knew at the time, Nike, Dell, Microsoft, and those types of companies. And I used to watch the prices of the stocks and convince my dad to make some trades. He had a broker, and he ended up doing it.  

And so, when we moved to North America, my dad opened a trading account for me at RBC and I used to call in between classes in grade 11 and put in trades. And we learned the hard way, the lesson about the CRA, that they’ll always come after you. So, my dad got a call about six or seven years later saying that he didn’t pay any taxes on his capital gains that he had. It wasn’t a lot of money, as a 15-year-old, I made about 6-7 hundred dollars every year. So, I used to call in trades and that got me really excited. It was something where I was constantly learning. I learned about new companies and how the movement of the stocks was very dynamic, I think that’s what got me really interested in the sector because things were fast moving, things could change at any moment, and there was opportunity for risk for losing money but also there was opportunity to make money and that was very exciting and thrilling. That’s what paved the path to get into finance in the future. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

So, you got the young experience with the entrepreneurial hustling, you’ve got the affinity for the stock market and finance. You graduate, you get into the job market and you’re in the banking sector in a position where it’s a large corporate environment but very much sort of eat what you kill, so you still have that little bit of hustle. What was the moment you decided, “I’m going to leave this environment and I’m going to start something new”. What occurred in your life where you realized this was the thing to jump ship for? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

It’s a good question. I think from my perspective, the finance sector changed in the last 10 years, where there were some technological changes that occurred in the industry. The introduction of high frequency trading started to impact the relationship between the service provider and the client, and I found that that dynamic shift started to be the beginning of the end, let’s say, for the equities relationship. It’s still a decent business, but it wasn’t the business that I grew up in and so I wanted the opportunity to keep learning and keep growing and be in control of my own destiny. I think that’s the best way to pinpoint where that shift started. And then when you have that thought, you’re always thinking, well, what’s going to be the catalyst for me to make this change? What’s going to be the point where the risk/reward makes sense. I think that assessment is what took a long time, because there’s always opportunities, it’s just which ones are the right ones, which one makes sense for you and your family, your children and so on. It’s never the right time, but there is a point where you just have to make a decision, and I think that decision was made for me when I found a phenomenal Co-founder, Gaston. He came in to get the business going, and then at that opportunity, when we started to see the business grow is when I decided to end up joining full-time. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Okay. So, we got the opportunity to learn about the origination of SideDrawer, where it came from. What made you decide on “SideDrawer” as the name? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

So, the original idea came to me when I was on a flight and I thought, if my plane was to crash, my wife would have no idea where any of our important documents were. I was the accountant and the “CFO” let’s say in the household and I was responsible for managing that stuff. But because life is so busy, it’s not something that we have a normal conversation about on a regular basis. Like “Hey, babe, just so you know, all the stuff is here.” When in reality, “here” was spread across 800 files in my Google Drive, Dropbox, my iCloud drives, my various laptops that we’ve had over the years, so we couldn’t really keep track of all those important documents. And as we got older, we had more children, we started to accumulate more things and you just have to keep track of those important documents, and we just didn’t, and I found that most people don’t either. So, I had the idea of creating something simple to keep it all in one spot, and the initial idea the name was called “DeathFile” and so when I started sharing that with people, I’d said, “Hey, I’ve got this great idea for something called DeathFile.” People would respond with, “Are you nuts? No one’s ever going to use something called DeathFile.” So, we thought okay that’s probably right, that’s not going to work. So, we were sitting around in the house and my wife was upstairs and, like most people, we have a side table, and it’s just full of junk. Like all of my old passports, even the ones that they give back to you with a holepunch in it, I still hold on to those and they’re sitting in my drawer with things like batteries, iPhone chargers or whatever. And she was looking for something the other day and had to go through my drawers. And she just shouted from the top of the stairs saying, “Ali, can you please clean out your side drawer!” And I thought, Oh man, that’s really interesting because it’s such a great name. It’s right on the spot. All your important stuff is in your side drawer! And it’s always messy. So the idea was to flip that and say, hey, you can actually have an organized side drawer. So that’s where the name came from and it seems to stick now and when we’re having conversations with people, they get it. When Gaston came in, he made the comparison to a filing cabinet, which really works because you’ve got a filing cabinet, you open it up and there’s a drawer inside and you start going from there. The name has actually worked really well for what we’re trying to accomplish and for the business. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Which is always fun when there’s a good history behind the name. It gives a little bit of life and character. I like that it evolved from DeathFile, because as cool as that sounds, I don’t know if it has quite the scalability as SideDrawer. One of the reasons I like SideDrawer so much is because in wealth management and estate planning, this is where we become removed from our clients. Often in this area we work with other professionals, with lawyers, accountants, specialists and there’s all these documents and so ultimately clients are left to their own devices to keep them all in an organized place. And so, this became this kind of mechanism, where we could collaborate more and add value but also create the opportunity for an individual to store all their important documents somewhere and access them. 

How did you find the implementation of that as an idea into reality? Did you start going directly to individuals and is that what you’re doing now or is it straight to businesses or to large organizations? What does the model look like now that the business has grown? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

That’s a good question. Because as any business evolves, you always pivot, and I know that it’s usually attributed to startups because they have to figure out what the product market fit is. But every business has to pivot at some point. Even Tim Hortons, they never used to do lunch, and then they started serving lunch as well, right? But from our business perspective, when we first launched, it was a little bit more B2C oriented. Actually I would now call our model a B2B2C – Business to Business to Consumer. Where we’ll go to an advisor and say, your client would really like this and the advisor would say yes, you’re right. Then they would offer it out to their clients. The challenge with that model, and I joke and say that there is a graveyard of tech companies trying to create digital vault solutions and if you go back over the last 10-15 years, there are companies that have tried to do that, and they don’t really work because the reality is that individuals and customers are lazy. I am lazy. That’s why I had this problem. I have 1,520 files spread across – everything. I’m lazy. People are lazy. They’ll do it when that thought or the fear comes to them. And you’ll sit there and you do it, but then you won’t do it until you have to again. Which might be six months, or it might be two years, maybe even five years later, and then you’ve had all this gap in between, where nothing was updated and now you have to essentially start from scratch. That effort was for nothing. So, what we found was that’s the behavior from the end customer perspective – and I’m exaggerating because you always have a bell curve – but it definitely is the tendency in that direction. If you have a product that caters to the advisors, so that advisors can actually engage with their customer on a more regular basis with their most important documents, which today would be flying around via e-mail attachments or file sharing links or something like that – which leads to more disorganization and complete chaos. But if you give the advisor the platform to be able to do that, that’s where that efficiency comes in for the advisor. And then also for the end client, the benefit is that their SideDrawer ends up becoming populated with all of those important documents, so you don’t have to sit there and do it two years later. It’s on a live basis being updated. That’s the nut that we ended up cracking. And that’s what’s driven the success that we’ve had because from there it becomes extremely scalable.  

Because now we can sell to individuals, advisors, to teams of advisors, to wealth management firms, to banks that run wealth management platforms or to national wealth management firms. It’s all based on the advisor-client relationship which you want to promote, but then also meeting the compliance, governance and oversight from the organizational perspective, which we provide and that’s been a game changer for us. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

I mean it’s huge because that’s something that I experienced as well. A tool is only as good as the ability to be used and be used well. And so, finding ways to make that stick and solving the problem like you said.  It’s super cool, I think in the same way that Willful has made wills more accessible, this sort of technology of integrating into the financial space and making it accessible is incredible.  

I want to switch gears and talk about some milestones that you might’ve reached within the years the company has been around. How old is the company now? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

2018 is when we incorporated. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Great. So, what’s the biggest milestone you’ve hit as far as scaling the company to date? The biggest celebratory moment, if you will. 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

Well, because you’re always pivoting, those milestones get bigger, and those milestones also change in terms of the future of what we’re looking forward to. But in the past, I would say obviously for anyone that’s starting a technology platform to sell to the biggest enterprises is a huge validation of what you’re doing from a number of perspectives. So, I think signing with TD Bank was big for us. They have a press release out there that they’ve issued on our relationship and I think that was a huge milestone moment for us. where, TD is the 6th or 7th largest bank in North America and to be able to meet their security requirements, their governance requirements, their technology requirements, infrastructure requirements, all of those other requirements that go along with that, was a great milestone for us. We felt extremely proud to be able to do it. It gave us a lot of validation for our business concept as well as the way that the business was architected. On a side note, if you and I wanted to start a vault company, we could probably do it over a weekend by spending about $50,000 and getting something going. But the reality is that it would be completely insecure, and would likely fall.  

There’s all kinds of things that can happen when you have a company and a product–you have to make sure that all the checks and balances are in place, and that the protocols are being followed. It takes a lot of effort to plan–we had to do a lot of that up-front. No one’s going to buy your product and say, “I hope you get there.” It has to “be” there. You have to show people it’s there and then they’ll buy. So, we had to have a lot of patient partners as we were building that capability out and infrastructure. So, to see it all come together with a large customer like TD was a great feeling. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

That’s huge. I’m sure there’s lots of companies that aspire to have that happen at some point in their 20- or 30-year business cycle, but to get there in 7 years from 2018, it feels like pretty rapid growth.  

I mean, I was in Toronto a couple years ago having lunch with you, and I think it was still dreams of this maybe happening. It’s so cool to see it happen in real time.  

So, I think where some real value can come from is in year one, if you look at the day you jumped into this, what is the biggest piece of advice you could give somebody in year one of starting a business based on your experience. 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

It’s going to be way harder than you think it’s going to be. Even though I’ve always been somewhat entrepreneurial and involved in the stock market, etc., I’m generally a risk averse person and I think that’s where my accountant training comes in, I try to have my risk reward ratio balanced, let’s say. But I think when you come and you look at the seat, you realize your relationships change. When you’re a certain title in a large organization, people will go out of their way to reach out, respond back to you, connect with you, etc. But when you are an unheard-of company, nobody knows. The interest level is not there in the same way, and you realize you have to make it on your own terms and drive value to people to engage with you. Those are the things that you learn when the wall hits right away. I think the second thing is, because you have to go through rounds of fundraising, there are client conversations that you must have. All those conversations require a lot of juggling, and you never really know which ones you should necessarily spend your time on and which ones you should avoid. I think it is difficult to know right off the bat. You just have to go through the motions to realize and recognize those patterns and then tell yourself this type of engagement is going to go nowhere–I should focus here instead. So time management is a really big aspect of that startup life. You do only have a finite amount of time, and it’s very, very precious in those early days. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

That’s super helpful because I think a lot of times, at least in my experience, when you move from a place that you’re comfortable into a new place, you oftentimes forget what it was like to be brand new to something. And even if it’s a similar line of work, you’re starting something new and so you feel like you’re floundering and that can be a very uncomfortable feeling. But I think what’s really important is, no matter what you do, if you start something up, it’s going to be harder than you think it is. And you’re going to be fully engulfed in learning. 

What did you do to mentally, physically, emotionally navigate the start-up phase? Because there’s a lot of people who might crumble under that pressure. I mean, we’ve talked about a graveyard of tech vault start-ups but there is also an entrepreneurial graveyard of people who start and then realize, “Oh, this is way harder than I thought.” And then they don’t see it through. What does someone have to do to be able to see it through those tough times? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

I think having the right people around you that you can have those conversations with and check yourself with is key. It’s easy to go down negative spirals and become completely destructive and start to think that it’s going to be a disaster scenario if this doesn’t happen, or this sale doesn’t go through etc. So, you need to have coaches around you where you can bounce those ideas off of and they can guide you and make sure that you are actually checking yourself and being realistic about the scenarios and how they might play out. One advantage that I had, I suppose, was when I was in finance, being in equity research and  equity sales, you’re dealing with a fire hose of information on a daily basis. You’re constantly juggling so many different news items that you then have to process, make decisions on, and think about how you’re going to support your clients through that. So having that experience allowed me to juggle all the different things that we were dealing with at any given point. But also having a great partner like Gaston, having our Advisory Board, who’ve done this many, many times before, having experienced staff, years of experience greater than mine or in life experience greater than mine, all this contribute to that mentorship model, right? I know that you’re very big on this because it’s something that you actively pursue. Is finding folks that can share experiences that can help you grow, and it’s the same concept when you’re going through these difficult moments, to have people that you can bounce ideas off.  

I found the toughest thing is just to make sure that you’re always focused. And most importantly, balancing family and making sure that you’re not giving up on that because ultimately, they’re going to be there for your support. So, making sure that some time is carved out to prioritize them is important.  You always look back and say, maybe I could have done more, but you never really know that at the time. So, carving out some time there and making sure that you are laser focused on what it is that you’re trying to accomplish.  

And everything that is weighing you down, think how realistic is this? Check with somebody, brush it off, put it in a box, tuck it away in your mind and then deal with it later and move on. Keep driving. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

I think a lot of people don’t necessarily realize what they’re getting into until they do. But having that mentorship, gaining perspective, surrounding yourself with people who’ve either done it before or just being part of a community so it doesn’t feel alone is important as well. That’s really good advice because you have the technical knowledge to know what you’re getting into, but also understand how your mind’s going to work, and how you handle adversity. Every successful entrepreneur has this struggle journey and a lot of times it’s consistent resilience and discipline that are the tools they use to get to success down the road. 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

Correct mentality is a lot of it. You can control it. If you feel like you’re going to get sick for five days straight, you will get sick. That’s the reality. It’s about how you think about situations and how you make sure that you’re not getting overly negative about them. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Awesome. You talked about the significance of having good financial partners. So how did you go about getting investors or financial partners and what has that looked like now, over the last seven years since the company’s been founded? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

I think it’s probably one of those make it or break it criteria for a business, because if you have poor relationships with your capital investors or you don’t have the right types of capital providers. It can really hamper your ability to do what you need to do. So, if I go back to one of the earlier comments about what we were building required a lot of upfront infrastructure, architectural work and technology work to make sure that we got it to a point that would attract the kinds of enterprises that were engaged with now. That work had to be done. So, when you go and pick somebody to invest and say, I have an idea for something, it’s going to cost a lot of money, I don’t know if it’s going to work, but we think it might, and our ideal clients are really large clients that take a really long time to decide to buy your product, that doesn’t sound like a good pitch, right?  

So, when you work through the motions and break that down to what it is that you’re trying to do, you must find folks that actually have that same, either thought process, patience, and also the vision of what you’re trying to accomplish. And so, we were really fortunate when we started raising early on, we went down the path of family office and Angel investors that had very successful businesses themselves. And businesses, as you know, take time to prove themselves out and you have to be patient as you’re building them and the folks that we ended up partnering with were amazing people. We would never have been here today, had we not had their support through the years. Because they understood the path that we were on and the struggles that we would face and the challenges in terms of getting these large customers. But they believed in what we were doing. And we had a milestone-based approach to our capital raising and we knew that if we didn’t meet certain milestones, we wouldn’t get the capital. We were fortunate that we hustled, and we met those milestones and were able to get to where we are today and we’re in a much better spot than we were obviously a few years ago and have many more enterprise customers and many more in our pipeline and many independent advisors and firms that we’re dealing with, and the business is maturing. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Is it traditional that as  a business grows would have to go and get more additional financial partners or is this more the standard, that you find a few partners and it works well and keep them to a minimum? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

It depends on the business to be honest. When I was on the other side and I was in capital markets, we saw businesses raise hundreds of millions of dollars because they could. They had a story that attracted that type capital, but that also comes with different kinds of handcuffs. In our situation, we found our objective was to grow and to build a sustainable business where our partners had influence over the direction of the business. That was something that was important to us and we wanted to make sure that we were going on a path that allowed us to do. Our capital partner decisions aligned with that vision.  

  

Kevin Parton: 

So, now you’ve got a relationship with TD, you’re into the big banking industry. What’s next in the predictable future? And then what are some aspirational goals for 5-10 years from now? 

  

  

Ali Qureshi: 

In the near term, we see ourselves working with more banks and national wealth management firms. The need has clearly been established from an advisor’s perspective as well as a client’s perspective. The engagement is extremely high when it’s deployed. That’s something that we’re working more with our clients to find the sweet spot. Every client is different in how they utilize the platform. So, there’s a number of different types of unique use cases. The aspirational dream is to make sure that everyone on a flight and scared about something happening would know that their families would be taken care of. The aspirational aspect is that can we help millions of people, Canadians, Americans, people around the world with making sure that their important information is organized in a secure place so that their loved ones, advisors or accountants can access that information when needed. That’s sort of an extension of the original dream. So, we’re definitely focused on that wealth angle, but we are seeing a huge need from individual use perspective as well. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Another thing I wanted to ask is, I know that sometimes for people who start companies, the vision is the exit. To build something up until it’s large enough that it either becomes attractive and the goal is to sell, or in some cases, if you get too big in a space with big players, you don’t get a choice. You get bought and forced out.  

But in any case. What’s your goal like? Has there been discussion in the early days or even now about the idea of getting bought out? It is conceivable that a bank might want to make you just their product, or do you want to stay at the helm? Where do you sit at with that as one of the founders of the company? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

It’s a good question. Naturally, because we have shareholders, we do get asked that question and the honest answer is that we have to do what’s right for our shareholders. But we’re having so much fun and the plane is starting to take off and we see a long runway ahead of us in terms of where we can take it and I’m obviously a shareholder, but I believe our shareholders would say the same thing that there’s a lot of room left in this. We’re really just starting to get going. Currently, we’re only in Canada and know that expanding into the United States is on the horizon. 

I also wonder if I did exit, what would I do?  You have to find something else that’s also fulfilling, right? You can’t just sit at home all day! 

My kids are too young, I know some people who say that after they had their exits, they started driving Ubers because it was something to keep themselves busy. Fortunately, I’m having a ton of fun still. I think my biggest driver is when my learning stops or slows down, that’s when things start to get a little boring. I also don’t know if I’ll be in full control of making that decision when the time comes. That decision may be made for us, like you said, or we’ll have to make the call on our side depending on how big we get. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

I think there’s the idea of selling and then the practicality of doing it. And sometimes you don’t get a choice, and you have to figure things out. I think that journey can be just as scary and harder as starting a business in the first place. Especially when you’ve been at the helm for so long, you identify as the person who operates the business. Now, who are you in the absence of the business? That’s another area we spend time talking to clients about. Selling the business is this goal, but then when you do, who are you and what you do identify with? And so, there’s a lot of components to selling a business, more so than is it saleable and does someone want to buy it? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

Correct. Most folks that were working outside of their home and then had to start working at home during COVID got a harsh reality from their partners at that point that maybe it wasn’t the best thing to just work from home. I think that’s when reality hits you and says, hey, maybe I have to keep working and do something else. If you sell the business, you have to do something to occupy your time. And I know I can speak for Gaston on this as well, we just love tinkering. We love building something important–something new. But the thought of having to go through those same struggles in another 5 or 10 years is a lot of work. Your energy levels are different, health levels are completely different. Family obligations are different, so we have to see. I think knowing what the plan is, is very important.  

I was one of the co-heads at CIBC that ran Movember and one of the things that shifted was when they changed the marketing around November from prostate cancer to men’s mental health. That was in the second year that I was involved in it. I remember that my interest level completely shot up at that point because that’s a huge issue and a lot of times the stats showed that when men stepped away from their jobs or got downsized or quit, mental health issues became more evident. That’s when their mental health started to decline because their friend groups were all associated with the folks that they worked with. So that was something that I was keenly exposed to through the Movember organization. I very much liked being involved in a lot of the mental health issues that men face, and that’s something that’s always in the back of my mind that if we’re not doing this, we have to have something else that occupies the same amount of time so that you can be occupied mentally and physically in something otherwise. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Totally. Having passions, community outside of work is important. And it can also be exciting. Instead of it being a scared about “what’s going on in the next chapter”, it’s “I get to paint on a blank canvas”.  

I want to wrap this up with getting SideDrawer in the hands of everybody. If someone’s listening to this, who is an individual and wants to get access, how do they find you? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

Easy! Sidedrawer.com, click on the top right where it says “Sign Up” and it will take you down that path. If you’re an individual that wants to use it for your family, it’s free to use. That’s the whole idea of serving everybody. If you’re an advisor or professional like an accountant, lawyer or somebody like that, and you want to use it for your business, you can also go down that path and sign up. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

Great. And if you work at a big bank and you want your bank to adopt this so that you’re not lagging behind TD, can they just reach out to you as well? Do they find you? 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

That’s right. Or even through our SideDrawer contact page. We welcome those calls, and we’ll help you navigate through the digital transformation journey, which is typically what we end up being a part of, which is awesome. 

  

Kevin Parton: 

The more we integrate this technology to create a better experience for clients, the more value we have. Well Ali, it’s been an absolute pleasure to speak to you today, from meeting through a friend introduction five years ago, to seeing the company grow and to witness you realize the success you are doing, is something that I feel equally passionate about. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. 

  

Ali Qureshi: 

Thanks for having me, Kevin. You have such a dynamic personality, and you completely got what we were doing and were completely on board from day one and I’m really glad to have met you.  

All the best.