Last Tuesday was a pretty good day for Paula Morand: she got to present her company at the Launch36 Demo Day and found out she had been named the New Brunswick Female Entrepreneur of the Year for 2012.

The reason for all the excitement is that her company, JumpStart 720 International Inc. has developed a corporate mental wellness performance platform called GoLead that’s already gaining huge traction and boasts a stellar pipeline. Morand, who has spent more than 20 years in the leadership coaching and training field, aims to push the product out to 100,000 individuals in more than in 100 companies by the end of 2014.

As well as witnessing the personal and social costs of mental health problems, Morand has come to understand that poor mental health causes huge and measurable corporate costs due to absenteeism, presenteeism (people coming to work unable to perform at their best causing overall company low productivity) and turnover. Studies have shown that one in five people in Canada and the United States at some point suffer from mental illness, and that this problem costs businesses a staggering $900 billion a year.

Morand, who founded JumpStart 720 in Moncton in 2008, understood the business proposition of helping to solve this issue so she devised GoLead, a software-as-a-service solution that helps companies identify and mitigate employee stress, increase productivity, decrease absenteeism, measure the results and therefore improve the company's bottom line.

Companies can subscribe to GoLead for as little as $39 per person per year. The process begins by helping employees identify the top three factors that create stress in their lives – stress that could impact their job performance.

The individual can then use the program to find ways to mitigate their soucrces of stress through a variety of personalized means. The software encourages each person to do just one thing each day to reach his or her goal. There is also a community team building and gamification aspect of GoLead that engages employees to move up in levels and gain rewards and prizes ( for example, retail vendor discounts).

Finally, GoLead helps the employer measure the success of the program. The goal is to lower employee payroll costs by reducing the impact of presenteeism, absenteeism, turnover and by increasing employee engagement. The company has already saved the Government of New Brunswick $3.5 million in social expenditures, said Morand.

Morand is now looking for a capital injection of $650,000 to support the roll out of GoLead. The company will book revenue of about $78,000 this year and expects to be cash flow positive in 2013.

The company’s pipeline now comprises 20 companies, and includes such household names as Pfizer, Target, Microsoft, and Bell Canada. Already committed to partner with GoLead are Grand and Toy, Purolator, Ramada, Friesens and Advanced Savings Credit Union.
It’s the type of performance that wins a CEO an entrepreneur of the year award.

Editor's Note: This isthe fourth of several articles on the Launch36 accelerator.