#34 - Managing Through Market Cycles, with Ben West

Building a business is hard, particularly when growing revenue depends on the staff needed to recognize that revenue. When growth is fundamentally tied to scale—as it is in service-based businesses—market cycles and other factors can create serious challenges. For instance, what happens when your enterprise becomes the hot commodity? How do you manage through meteoric growth without compromising quality? And when revenue drops, how do you protect morale and preserve the company’s culture through the hard choices of downscaling? As a three-time company co-founder, Ben West has lived through the booms and downturns of the past decades. Here he shares stories and lessons from his long experience in growing businesses and steering them through the unpredictable economic landscape. Guest - Ben West, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Eventbase Ben West oversees design, product management and technology strategy for the event app platform, Eventbase. Formerly, he was CIO at StockHouse.com, growing the company from 2 to 250 people worldwide and making it, for a time, the highest-trafficked website in Canada. Ben also founded digital agency Intergalactic and co-founded a digital rights protection software company used by leading record labels. Ben is a previous winner of the “Top 40 Under 40” award by Business in Vancouver. In his spare time Ben volunteers with branding, marketing, and knowledge-worker training, and he funds a granting program for small businesses to build digital tools as well as a scholarship program. For this work, he was a finalist for the Prime Minister's Canadian Volunteer Awards in 2016. Host: Alex Langshur