What makes for a happy workplace? Good
pay? Strong leadership? A cappuccino
machine in the lunch room?

Well, it all depends on how you look at it.
Ten-year old Mississauga-based Nytric Ltd., an
innovation consulting company, won the RBC
sponsored 2008 Toronto Region Immigrant
Employment Council award for Best
Immigrant Employer. You don’t win an
award for “hiring and nspiring” immigrant
workers unless you’ve managed to create
something special in your workplace.
Something truly unique.

“We’re very proud of winning this,” says Av
Utukuri, president and CTO of Nytric Ltd.
“We’ve been growing for the last eight to 10
years and we’ve had some very different
philosophies on how we run our business and
what our employment strategies are.” How did
Nytric end up with one of the most ethnically
diverse and talented workforces in the City?
According to Utukuri who was raised and
educated in Canada, it was a total accident.
To understand their philosophies on hiring
and how those philosophies have distinguished
their workplace from others, it’s necessary to
understand Nytric’s business model and how it
came to be.

Back in 1994, Utukuri and a few friends
who had all recently graduated from university
decided to start their own technology company
developing virtual reality simulation systems
and arcade systems. “We didn’t have much
Canadian experience. We didn’t know what it
meant for someone to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to us.
We stubbornly said, this is what we’re going to
do,” recalls Utukuri. He attributes his current
success to that same drive and passion for
innovative technologies with which he began
his career. Things were going well for a while.
They went public with Dynamic Visions Ltd.
on NASDAQ:OTCB B in 1998.
Unfortunately, that’s about as far as it went.
The company turned out to be one more
doomed innovative vision swallowed up by
Canada’s existing procedures for start-up
technology companies.

If you’re a small to medium sized business
or an entrepreneur with an idea for a new
technology that you want to take to market,
there are really only two ways of going about
it, according to Utukuri. “You can spend cash,
raise your own money, you can hire your own
team—product development specialists,
engineers, hardware guys, software guys—
whatever’s required, or you hire a team of
consultants that tries to figure out all the
problems,” says Utukuri. In both cases it’s
only a matter of time before you run into
cash-flow troubles.

Hiring your own team seems like a smart
move initially. Everything is contained, but
therein lies the problem. “A lot of times you
can’t see the forest through the trees,” says
Utukuri. You hire more people as you need
them, but with a growing start-up company,
the skill sets required can change all the time.
“Today you need an engineer with this type of
talent [but] six months from now the project
has shifted and you need a different type of
talent,” says Utukuri. “What do you do with
all of the old staff? You can’t just let go of
them because then you’re losing all of your IT
capability.”

Hiring consultants won’t fix the problem,
unless you have a lot of money you’re willing
to throw at it, according to Utukuri. The
problem with consultants, he explains, is that
your success is not an “incentive” for them. If
you go to a consultant with a problem and he
or she knows that you have $50,000 to spend
on that problem, “well then it magically
becomes a $50,000 problem,” says Utukuri.
It became clear to Utukuri and his
colleagues that there was a real need for a new
type of company to fill that gap, to facilitate
the process of getting a new idea to market.
That’s when Nytric Ltd. was born. Nytric is
part venture-capitalist and part product
developer. It’s the best of both worlds. As
partial investors in a new company, Nytric is
automatically motivated by the success of that
new venture. “We only make money when
you’re successful, either with stock or royalty.
So it becomes our incentive to try and get you
to market as quickly as possible,” explains
Utukuri. For that you need the right people -
special people.

“The philosophy behind the company has
been, hire the best individual for the job,” says
Utukuri. “Because our business model is so
unique—today we’ll be in the medical
industry, tomorrow we’re going to be in the
defense or aerospace industry—we never know
where the next client or investor is coming from.
For such a multi-faceted company, only
a multi-talented and experienced workforce
will do.

The best individual for the job is self-
motivated and passionate about what he or she
does. “When an engineer comes in, whether
it be from India or the Ukraine and he has a
huge passion for the job that he’s doing, to me
it doesn’t matter what school he went to. I
mean you could go to MIT and couldn’t care
less about the education, or you could’ve gone
to a no-name university in the Ukraine and
you were taking cars apart from when you
were six years old and you know mechanical
engineering inside-out,” says Utukuri.
Utukuri says they’re always shocked at the
incredibly gifted individuals who walk through
their door who are only making minimum
wage because of where they went to school.
It’s not that Nytric Ltd. doesn’t care about an
employee’s education, but it’s certainly not the
first thing they look for in a potential
employee.

Nytric’s philosophy on employment strategy
is as ground-breaking as their business model.
Utukuri and his partners at Nytric are leaders,
in their industry and in the way they view
foreign-educated professionals. Nytric now
launches five to six new companies every year
and Nytric also sponsors the Great Canadian
Invention Competition in partnership with
Canadian Business Magazine.
All of that makes Nytric Ltd. an exciting
place to work.

By Sayward Spooner

February 2009 - Mississauga Business Times