Bio

Mark is a “doer”, whether it be as an entrepreneur and founder or as a leader within a larger organization and his bias to action leads to results. In every role Mark has taken, he builds and supports user centric products that delight the client and the business alike, a gift he first discovered while working with the WHL’s Lethbridge Hurricanes.

At the Hurricanes Mark created his first products, designing game night promotions and sponsorship activations that were fan-focused while simultaneously solving the business problems of the business partner. Using data to guide his decisions, Mark created a strategy that led to 4 sellout games that season - breaking a 5 year cold streak. All of this was achieved despite a losing record. After several years of sales in the sports industry, it was time for a new challenge: becoming a founder.

Natural Mattress and Furniture was a customer-centric product focused on providing tangible impacts to the day to day lives of their clients. With a relentless focus on feedback and iteration the company turned a profit in year two and retained 40% year-over-year growth while expanding their offering to a virtual experience. Growing the business Mark took the learnings from his brick and mortar offering and successfully applied them to the online retail space. After 4 years, and a valuation 13 times the initial investment Mark wanted a new challenge and joined Prolegis.

As the Director of Sales at Prolegis Mark made no assumptions and challenged how sales previously worked. Research told Mark that their sales strategy was not aligned with the buyer's needs and re-vamped the strategy to appeal to this new persona. Using this new strategy the sales team under Mark was a massive success with monthly sales increasing from 100 to 1,800 with minimal changes to the core product. Through these efforts, revenue increased 10-fold resulting in the eventual acquisition of Prolegis by Simplicity.

After Prolegis, Mark joined the Shopify team and continues to leverage his experience in e-commerce, sales and as an entrepreneur. In this role, Mark focuses on developing the talent around him through traditional leadership and non-traditional mentorship opportunities. Mark also made a focused effort during this time to develop further skills with research and data analysis, employing a multivariate testing strategy with email communication, ensuring that he had data to know which strategies were leading to his best results.