Regroove
Based in Brentwood Bay, Regroove is a technology company that helps businesses grow by coaching them through using Cloud Technologies. They are always looking for ways to help their clients be more productive and effective, and that support continues well beyond an initial Cloud integration. We sat down with Kayla Whitesel, Regroove’s Senior Business Solutions Analyst, to learn more about Regroove and their community-oriented mindset.
What does Regroove provide and what is your mission?
“Our mission is to help businesses revolutionize the way that they practice their business by moving into the Cloud. That looks like a lot of different things for a lot of different businesses. But for the most part, they are taking their file structure, their communication, their collaboration, and moving that into a place that’s easily accessible, that enables remote work, and that helps them be more secure and increases their organizational security.”
How did the pandemic affect the type of work you do for clients at Regroove?
“We’ve seen a lot of clients who definitely moved very quickly to the Cloud at the beginning of the pandemic and needed help making sure that the quick move was done properly–or maybe redoing it so that security and proper procedures were in place. So that’s been a lot of our business the last couple years. But our clients have also been struggling through the pandemic and so we’re trying to help them as best we can while working within limited budgets and limited resources for our clients.”
How do you think Regroove positively impacts the community?
“I think there’s a couple ways that we help impact the community, and one is just by improving businesses’ capabilities through things like the pandemic–we helped them make sure that they could enable remote work, that they could continue their own business throughout the trying times we’ve had. But another way we do that is just through our people, our staff. Our people are so engaged in the community on their own, that each one of us brings something different to the community–and working in this environment helps us do that. So many of us volunteer, and we’re able to work with those organizations to improve their Cloud systems because of the work that we do here.”
“Myself, I work with the Military Family Resource Center. We have some people who work with Junior Hockey organizations. Lots of sports, and all different kinds of organizations in the community.”
How did you get involved with Regroove and what is your role?
“I moved here in 2018. My partner is in the navy so they’ve been a huge part of my ability to move here and meet people. I actually met Sean (Regroove’s founder) through LinkedIn. I had worked in a technology company previously, so I had a little bit of experience there. I came into Regroove with the Cloud and Microsoft products being pretty new to me. So he was able to build that skill set for me, to the point where I’m now the Senior Business Solutions Analyst at Regroove. My role is specifically to work with clients at the beginning of a project to help them envision what a Cloud process could look like. I feel like I have the most fun job–work with clients, figure it all out, kind of lay it all out on the table for them, and then I hand it to people who are much smarter than me who can actually build it into the technology.”
What is important to you and the Regroove team when hiring?
“Number one–you have to like dogs. We have a lot of office dogs, and they bring so much to the office that we couldn’t live without them.”
“We’ve recently kind of shifted away from looking for people with specific technical skills and towards looking for people who are a personality-fit instead. We want to work with people who are engaged in the community, who volunteer their time, and who enjoy working with other organizations and helping improve their processes. If we can find those people. Then we can teach them the Microsoft Cloud and product side of the business! So we really focus on an ethical fit, on a personality fit, and then we can bring the other skills up if needed.”
What values are important to the Regroove team?
“Friendliness, the ability to chat, and to talk to clients. But there’s a couple key phrases that we have. One is ‘do the right thing, and do the thing right.’ So we’re very focused on making sure that clients know what the right options are and doing those properly, rather than taking shortcuts or figuring out work-arounds. We want to build the systems properly for longevity, for remote working, for all of those things.”
“And then another one is just the ability to constantly learn, because not only are we hiring people that don’t necessarily know the technology, the technology is also always changing. So people need to be able to constantly learn, to be excited about that, to be engaged with the technology, and to just be looking with one eye towards the future of work and of our client’s work.”
Do you have any best memories or favourite aspects about working at Regroove?
“I love that beginning phase of a project with clients where I’m not only learning about their business, but also their personalities, what their fit is going to be, and what’s going to help them. Because at the end of the day, we’re technology consulting, but we’re also business consulting and change management consulting, and all of those things that come along with making a big move in your technology systems. So just figuring that piece of the client out at the beginning and helping them see the path forward is my favourite thing to do at Regroove.”
“Also, because we hire based on personality, we’ve had so many barbecues and staff events that just feel like hanging out with friends and family. We work to build that above all else because if you have the right people around you, you can teach them anything, and they can teach anyone anything. So that’s the most important to us.”
“Aside from that, some big memories–we used to have office space in the arena downtown, and so I definitely remember Bo Horvat practicing there when the Canucks were doing their pre-season. That was fun.”
What makes Regroove unique from other similar technology companies?
“I think we’re unique in the fact that we do technology consulting but we do so many other things in combination with that. When we’re working with clients at the beginning of a project we’re talking about moving their solutions to the Cloud, for example, but with that comes so many business decisions, financial decisions, and change management. We really hand-hold the client all the way through so that they’re not left to make those decisions on their own, or manage change on their own, because it’s huge–it’s huge and costly and time-consuming to move processes from one system to another. So we really try to mitigate that for the clients so that we’re taking on as much of the burden as possible.”
“Once we’ve moved a client over to the cloud we also have ongoing productivity consulting with them so that we can continue to help them as the technology changes, but also make sure that their users adapt properly and that they’re using it to the full capacity that’s available.”
Is there any special ingredient to making Regroove successful?
“There’s a lot. So Sean (Wallbridge) owns the organization, and he has been pretty visionary for us for a long time, so he’s definitely leading the change of the organization. He stepped into a bit more of that visionary role now–keeping up to date with technology that’s changing and the thought processes around that. But at the senior management level Regroove is completely female led. So that has been really cool to see grow organically. We have hired and promoted women naturally based on who has been around and their skill sets. And so that’s something that we’re really proud of at this point, is that we’re female led. We have a mostly female team, and we’re making a splash in the technology world in that sense.”
If someone had never heard of Regroove before, what is one thing you wish you could tell them?
“We are so driven to the future that it’s what we’re always thinking about. Not only for businesses, which is a huge part of what we think about, but also for ourselves, for the environment, and for the future of technology. We really push our clients to become carbon neutral, to cut down on their paper. So Regroove’s mission is always forward thinking, looking at the future, and trying to make things better in whatever way we can.”
“We’re not the company that we were 15 years ago, we’re not the same as we were 3 years ago when I started. We’ve really committed to shifting towards being concerned about the future and helping businesses be concerned about the future. That’s one of the reasons we offer so much change-management consulting as well in our projects. We push our clients to get rid of printers, to get rid of those things that are holding them back from being more carbon-neutral. And that takes time and it takes effort, so we like to push them, but we like to help them through it as well.”
