London Inc. Winter 2021-22 - 37

Joel McLean with team members (from left) Nora Fisher,
Laura Hansen-Kohls, Annalena Eichenseer, Hussein Ahmed,
Taylor Pritchard and Gord Harrison
Set to mark 25 years of
business and closing in
on 1,000 employees,
Joel McLean has built
Info-Tech Research Group
into one of the city's most
successful and sustainable
enterprises. And he still
gets excited for what's
next by CHRISTOPHER CLARK
gathering research and providing support, your members
will benefit from better information and cost savings.
One without the other is like having a Zoom account with
crummy Wi-Fi
When McLean started the company, operating from one
small room, his primary technology was a fax machine,
used to deliver reports to early members, outlining IT
trends and solutions. Now, on the cusp of the company's
25th anniversary, he runs an organization with more than
820 employees, a figure that's jumped 20 per cent in the
last year and is expected to flirt with 1,000 by next summer.
They are split between London (334), Toronto (318),
the U.S. (139), the rest of Canada (33) and Australia (12).
The pandemic was an enormous challenge because of
changes both to Info-Tech's daily operations and in the
expectations of its members, all of whom were scrambling
to adapt as well.
" We worked flat out, really hard, to create pandemic
playbooks to support our members, " McLean says, speaking
from home via Microsoft Teams, as he has been doing
since March, 2020.
" It was rapid work to support our members who were
at all different levels of preparedness. We helped them
to become more efficient, no matter where they were
starting from. Some, of course, were already comfortable
using a lot of technology. But we also helped a lot of doctors
to change their processes. It was across a wide spectrum. "
In the last year, Info-Tech revenue has increased by
50 per cent. It's tempting to credit such success to the
pandemic alone, but that would be missing the point of
how Info-Tech has grown for more than two decades -
and the services it has added in recent years, unrelated
to the pandemic.
Perhaps the most important element of the company's
success has been its relentless commitment to following
repeatable processes, and thus collecting gigabytes of
WINTER 2022 | londonincmagazine.ca | 37
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London Inc. Winter 2021-22

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