PathFactory is one of the fastest-growing companies in Toronto. CEO Mark Opauszky tells CBRE Forward how his team have created an environment for success.
My name is Mark Opauszky, I’m Chief Executive here at PathFactory. PathFactory generates a new class of first-party data for marketers. This is data about how marketing is being consumed, and how that consumption of content influences purchase decisions. PathFactory takes B2B marketing and makes it behave in an on-demand way, just like the experiences that we all have in our lives as consumers.
What was the company’s journey to get to where it is now?
The journey at PathFactory was all about, initially, falling in love with a problem: How do people consume content to become better buyers, and how do marketers become more efficient in creating better buyers by generating the required trust and velocity. When you’re in love with a problem like this, the most important thing to do is to find other people who can equally fall in love with the problem with you; who can contribute to your point of view and help your company grow.
What makes your corporate culture unique?
Our corporate culture here at PathFactory is based on learning. We created Path University, where people inside the organization design a curriculum and run weekly courses for their colleagues. We teach everything from “a day in the life” of one of our customers to some nuanced product decision and how that got made.
Culture also comes back to our people. We are a collection of very smart, very proactive people with a strong point of view. And the best way to feed that is with knowledge and understanding. Curiosity breeds knowledge, and knowledge breeds confidence. Confidence is the basis for all performance. If you’re confident in how you relate to your customers and how you relate to your co-workers and your own compact with work, then your life gets better and our work gets better collectively.
How does your environment create success?
Our environment is set up to create multiple levels of connections between people and their work. That’s very important to us. There’s a practical connection to your work, but there’s also the learning aspects, the social connections, the moral connection, the intellectual connection; people need all these different ways to stay connected because work is such a big part of their lives.
What do you offer to employees beyond compensation?
Every company should be a great place to come from and we strive for that at PathFactory as well. We absolutely think that the value at PathFactory should be that this is the place you want to come from. Not everyone is going to stay here all the way until the end. We think that if we’re a great place to come from, on that day that you leave, you will be sad about it. Hopefully you’ll stay, but if you can’t, we’ve prepared you for even bigger and better things than working here.
What’s next for PathFactory?
We have one of the largest databases of its kind in the world right now, which really gives the company 4 or 5 more major gears it can shift into. For us, it’s all about finding the right people to make sure that we can take on those big challenges.
PathFactory
PathFactory’s Content Insight and Activation Platform helps B2B marketers understand the role of content in the buyer’s journey and discover a new class of data to optimize the path to purchase. PathFactory uses this data and insight to optimize content delivery across every channel, connecting buyers with the most relevant information whenever and wherever they click.