Winter might be moving in, but Jeff Thompson is lacing up his sneakers and hitting the road. One of the region’s most successful serial entrepreneurs, Thompson has recently moved on from his executive role at Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) provider Serenova. Now, he’s intending to get back to another passion—running.

Serenova was formed after Thompson sold his second company, UserEvents, to California-based LiveOps in 2014. The UserEvents product analyzed a corporation’s data to detect when a customer was having problems with a communications channel and then notified the company’s call centre.

Shortly after the sale, UserEvents’ LiveOps Cloud platform was separated from the LiveOps business process outsourcing business. LiveOps Cloud was bought by private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners and became known as Serenova.

At Serenova, Thompson’s roles included CTO, managing strategy for M&A, and overseeing Fredericton-based office comprising product, engineering, professional services and tier two customer support.

It was a new level of challenge.

“The level of expectation is very different with private equity compared to venture capital,” he said. “When you’re part of a private equity portfolio, there’s the expectation that the company will grow organically through gaining clients and sales and inorganically, through acquisitions.

“The question is--what big step up will we make, especially through acquisitions, to become a disruptor in the industry?”

As UserEvents showed, exits have been a boon for Atlantic Canada

Thompson had already gained experience of this kind of inorganic growth after he sold his first startup Conseros Software, which prioritizes and distributes work to a company’s best-skilled and available employees. Conseros was bought by Genesys Telecommunications in 2009, and Thompson worked with Genesys for the next three years, taking the product into the Asia Pacific region and garnering big clients like Telstra and PayPal.

He said Serenova became like his third startup.

“It was like being thrust into a marathon you have to win,” said the marathon-runner. “You have to get it right.”

Serenova has indeed grown, both organically and inorganically. Three years ago, Serenova had about 25 staff in Fredericton. The company has just hired its 47th employee.

The company recently made its first growth-boosting acquisition—of Dallas-based TelStrat, which offers a workforce optimization suite.

Thompson said the acquisition, and the fact a new CEO Tom Schollmeyer recently took over from Thompson’s longtime colleague Vasili Triant, made it feel like the right time to move on.

People keep asking him what he’ll do next. At 47, he does feel too young to be even semi-retired but he is determined to “take the time to really kinda chill.”

“I look forward to winter running. I’ll have the flexibility to run in the afternoon when the sun is high,” he said.

“It’s a welcome change, an opportunity to take a breath. People assume I’ll do another startup, but no, that’s it for me. I’m happy with three under my belt.” 

He plans to step up his community involvement. He will remain a board member at regional startup support group, Propel ICT as well as at Ignite Fredericton and Knowledge Park.

He said that when he mentors young entrepreneurs, and those who think they want to be entrepreneurs, he does not mince his words.

“I leave them with the message that it’s incredibly rewarding and challenging and it will test your confidence in yourself and test your relationships at home,” he said.

“It places stress on you and the people you share your life with. It’s easy to forget the drawbacks, even when you have prior experience of founding a company.

“I’m happy to be a mentor, adviser, and board member, to cheer from the side lines, to help grow the industry and the ecosystem. I’m happy to be an angel investor to the one or two startups you run across every year that look really good.”