Nelson Ford is the Founder of Pilotcore, a company focused on cloud strategy and DevOps consulting. Pilotcore has helped startups headquartered worldwide to build their applications’ architectures in the cloud, build cloud-native solutions, manage workloads, and adopt DevOps processes and tools to maximize cost savings and increase the agility and efficiency of development teams.
Nelson’s career has spanned more than 20 years, from the early days of building websites in the late ’90s to various technical roles for companies throughout the west coast from Vancouver to Silicon Valley. He knows how to produce great results for clients and is building Pilotcore on the principle of “Make It Work, Make It Right, Make It Fast.” Pilotcore is the product of merging Nelson’s obsession with technology and his passion for entrepreneurship
What is Pilotcore all about?
Pilotcore is a cloud services company focused on helping clients leverage the power of AWS and other cloud platforms. The company was founded to make reliable, secure, and well-architected cloud infrastructure and support accessible to all companies, organizations, and teams, no matter how small. We help clients build and move their workloads to the cloud and optimize and manage them while there. Our goal is to enable our clients’ growth and free them to focus on their core mission. For technical clients who wish to become independent and manage their environments, we assist them with knowledge transfer and learning support.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
My IT career started with web development and systems administration in the mid-90s. In those days, web developers did everything for clients, including design and development of front and backend, databases, and hosting websites and email. By the early 2000s, as web development began to split into specializations, my focus shifted to web front-end development. I spent the next fifteen years or so working for well-known Canadian companies like Intrawest and Vision Critical. After a stint in Silicon Valley, I returned to Canada around the time adoption of DevOps and Agile and their related processes and tools was accelerating. Eventually, I changed focus to DevOps engineering and cloud, became AWS certified and worked for one of the world’s largest AWS consulting partners. It wasn’t long before my desire to get back to my roots working directly for my clients inspired me to start Pilotcore and build it into a solid, dependable and profitable company. The rest is history.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
As someone with a mostly technical background, I’ve had to learn a lot about marketing and sales to move the company forward. Web interface developers work closely with marketing on the implementation side. I’d done a lot of that, but I hadn’t had the occasion to immerse myself in the challenge of developing a marketing plan and working directly on sales to grow a business. To kickstart the process, we had the opportunity to work with marketing students from several different schools in Canada, the US and the UK. We benefitted greatly from their knowledge, enthusiasm and energy.
Thus far, my marketing and sales challenge has been a fantastic experience, and I’ve been excited to learn these new skills. I look forward to continuing the journey.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
Not putting more focus on building relationships with potential hires right from the beginning. In an industry with such a profound skills shortage, one must take every opportunity to bring quality talent on-board. So, I would work on networking more with prospective candidates.
Secondly, I underestimated how hard the marketing challenge was going to be. It’s an iterative process of continually brainstorming, testing, tweaking, monitoring for results, and getting as much feedback as possible. It takes a lot of energy and creativity, and most importantly, time. The results have been worth it.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
My most recent favourites:
- Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
I’ve found direct outreach to my network through LinkedIn to be highly effective because of the significant number of connections I’ve amassed over the years. It’s not something one can repeatedly do with the same contacts, however. My initial effort to reconnect with people and ask what Pilotcore can do to help them in their mission has revealed some exciting opportunities. Beyond that, I’ve enjoyed working on the website’s effectiveness and social media as marketing tools.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Early on, I found myself unprepared for submitting proposals and making compelling pitches to potential clients. If I could do it over, I’d make sure I had a professional, custom-designed proposal template and a pitch deck ready to go. It’s great to have materials like this in your back pocket when you need them.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Just do it. As they say, looking back, you won’t regret having tried. You’ll only regret not having tried. If you can, go all-in. Immerse yourself in every detail of your business. Obsess over it. Get out of your comfort zone and be honest with yourself: if you think you aren’t pushing yourself far enough, get a mentor who will give you the nudge you need to break new ground. Most importantly, remember that you’ve chosen this path for you, so never mind the naysayers.
What is your favorite quote?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Alexander den Heijer:
“When I talk to managers I get the feeling they’re important. When I talk to leaders I get the feeling I’m important.”
This principle is essential for building a team. I want my employees to be happy and feel important and genuinely valued at work. There’s no room for ego at any level of the organization.
Riipen for access to students and interns for class projects. This has been great for uncovering new ideas and experimenting in new areas.
We’ve found the BDC advisory services for Canadian companies very useful.
Mouseflow to help find U/X issues on our website and analyze how customers use it. We’ve gained a lot of useful insights from it.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
I’ve always been driven by competition and independence. Being independent and working for oneself is enormously rewarding (as long as the bills are paid!). When I wake up in the morning, knowing that the company’s success rests on my shoulders is motivating like nothing else. I like keeping the stakes high, and what drives me to work harder is knowing that I have to succeed to maintain the life I want to live. This approach ensures that if I do fail at something, in the end I know I gave it everything I had. It also helps that I enjoy the work to such a degree that it doesn’t feel like work.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
I take copious notes in meetings and just when brainstorming solutions. I review them regularly and build action lists. Every evening I set goals from that list for the next day and tackle them first thing in the morning. I don’t schedule meetings early in the day because I like to tackle my most significant challenges during those highly productive hours.
How can readers get in touch with you?
Contact us through the Pilotcore website and sign up for our newsletter to keep in touch. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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