Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,

Building a global company can be messy, and sometimes the things you have to do take you off track from the things you want to do. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leverage those circumstances for your benefit; just ask Andrew McLeod, Co-founder and CEO of identity verification provider Certn. Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Andrew shared more about how he approached go-to-market in the early days with fierce practicality—and how he’s bringing the company vision into the future.

Key takeaways:

• Review and update multi-year plans on an annual basis; this helps you stay on track and capture novel changes you couldn’t have predicted.
• Your vision will often be bigger than your initial product; focus on building trust with customers first, then think about bringing vision into the conversation.
• Even if you don’t bring big vision into sales conversations at the beginning, always communicate vision internally so the team knows where the company is heading.

On the heels of raising over $100 million CAD since 2022, Certn, a global provider of identity verification, is considering a 2027 IPO. But this ambitious goal can’t happen without a plan to grow into an attractive valuation.

For co-founder and CEO Andrew McLeod, it’s about continuous planning and bringing the company’s vision more prominently into go-to-market planning. Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Andrew pulled back the curtain on Certn’s path to IPO—and why he’s more vision-focused than ever.

The annual five-year plan

Every year, Certn updates its five year plan. The 2027 IPO plan, for example, was part of a

5-year strategy laid out in 2022. But at the same time, Andrew doesn’t want to find himself in a situation with no strategy for the day after a potential IPO.

“I always want to have an eye on the future as to: what does five years from now look like?” said Andrew. “What happened until now, and then what does five years down the road look like? And are we still on track?”

The goal behind annually updating a multi-year strategy helps Andrew—and Certn—accomplish a few key things:

• Stay organized: An annual review means you can more easily spot what needs to happen in any given year to make progress. From there, Andrew said he can break things down into quarterly goals that help him “pin down” his weekly activities.
• Stay on track: If something isn’t working properly or a better plan of action comes along, the annual update is a time to bring those changes naturally into the plan without jarring the organization.
• Stay flexible: Sometimes, the market forces you to change or something completely new—like GenAI—comes along that you can’t avoid, but couldn’t have predicted.

“If you were sticking to a five year view from five years ago, [GenAI] wouldn't have been a factor that you would have considered,” said Andrew.

When it comes to Certn’s annual revisions, Andrew said everything from product development to sales, marketing, and operational systems have changed over time. For example, Andrew spoke with BetaKit about how the company had acquired multiple other businesses in the past. However, that strategy is shifting to more organic growth.

In conversation with INNOVATEwest, Andrew clarified that he never specifically wanted an M&A growth strategy. Instead, he leveraged acquisitions where it was necessary to enter certain markets—like the UK and Australia—that would have been nearly impossible to penetrate organically. Now that they have the foothold, it’s easier to focus on different expansion levers that help shore up the business for a potential IPO.

“We're now looking at businesses more holistically,” said Andrew. “So it's not just an employment screening process. It's ‘How are you building trust with your stakeholders?’ And that could be your employees or contractors, your vendors, or even your customers.”

Embedding vision into go-to-market

When Andrew first co-founded Certn, he used to talk about “NFTs for degrees.” Few people understood him at the time, but the vision was ultimately clear: giving people unimpeachable proof of their credentials, whether that’s university degrees, credit scores, or background checks.

However, that big vision didn’t enter initial sales conversations. When going to market with Certn’s first product (tenant background checks), Andrew said the team focused on clear wins for customers—a quicker and less expensive background check compared to the existing, tedious process.

“The advice that we had [in the] early days, which was good advice, was ‘Show the market that you can do this,’” said Andrew. “And then and then take them on the ride towards your vision.”

Once Certn got larger property managers onboarded to its tenant background check platform, Andrew looked to build enough trust to expand. And it worked—companies began wondering if Certn could help background check their employees just as easily as they checked tenants. This became the first wedge for bringing Certn’s broader vision into GTM conversations, and it’s one Andrew is looking to continue.

“Our mission is to power inclusive opportunity and greater futures everywhere by making trust frictionless and accessible,” said Andrew. “... We had to build credibility, which was our first phase, and now we're going to break the industry.”

From five to 50,000 feet (and back again)

As CEO, Andrew has gone on a wild ride the past few years. Back in 2017, Certn had fewer than 10 employees. Now there are over 400. And Andrew is focused on ensuring everyone understands the vision deeply enough to navigate the company’s product and GTM evolution.

Andrew is working on this primarily through how he communicates to the team. He admits that he goes from “five to 50,000 feet” and back again on a daily basis—a privilege that almost no other employee gets. As a result, he isn’t just creating workback plans and asking people to execute; he’s adding increasing communication about why the workback plans are changing, where the team is heading, and what the team is building towards.

“I'm in the clouds a lot; not everyone gets to be like that,” said Andrew. “So recognizing people and the things that we're doing to get closer to that vision is huge.”