Since its inception, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s Wings program has helped a diverse, eclectic range of entrepreneurs and innovators successfully launch their businesses. Run by a team experienced in helping startups take flight and drawing on experts in a range of fields, the program has taught participants how to recognize their strengths, focus on what it is they are really selling, and identifying their customers. The program welcomed its final cohort of fledgling startups this January 2023. These are their stories.
For Long Nguyen, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation’s (QPI) Wings program represented a great chance to gain helpful business advice as well as an opportunity to learn the ropes when it came to doing business in a foreign country – Canada.
Arriving in Canada in 2022 from Vietnam where he was a successful entrepreneur with more than 24 years’ experience in technology companies, Nguyen had an exciting idea that he wanted to launch in Canada. Looking at the spa and beauty businesses, Nguyen saw an industry with revenues of $106 billion in 2021 in North America that was projected to grow to $326 billion by 2031. He, and his partner Trung Huynh back in Vietnam, developed a cloud-based application that could help small spa owners (as well as massage therapists, nails salons and wellness clinics) better manage every aspect of their businesses.
Called BeaHub, it offers a complete subscription-based digital solution that lets their customers book and manage their appointments from their phones or tablets, helps them keep track of client appointments and schedule employee shifts, reorder products as they are needed, and even provides a way that spas can sell goods to their customers that are then shipped direct from the producer while giving the spa the sale, a neat trick that lets them compete with Amazon and Spotify. Nguyen established a new company called Lotusyn to market and sell the BeaHub software solution.
Although he was experienced in business, Nguyen was aware that trying to work in another country could be a challenge. “When we started Lotusyn,” he says, “we were looking for a program to help us understand Canada.”
“I found the Wings program and I contacted Rick Boswell. We told him about our company and product, and we were approved for Wings.”
The goal may have been to gain an understanding of his new market, but Nguyen soon discovered that the program had other benefits. “When we started the business, we did a business plan for our company,” he says. But when he learned more about customer discovery during the Wings program – who are your customers and what do they want – “I changed it.” Nguyen adds, “They also helped me find data that enabled us to target the kind of customer we should looking for.” He also gained insights into what made his product different from his competitors’. And, like so many others who have participated in the Wings program, he found the experiences and expertise of his fellow participants helpful. “One company,” he says, “wasn’t 100 percent similar but when the founders presented their strategy about how they acquire customers, I learned something from it.”
“The Wings program was very helpful for me,” says Nguyen. And while at present he has no immediate plans to work with QPI, he does expect that he may in future when Lotusyn looks for additional funding.
Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) offered the Wings Accelerator program, along with many other programs and services, with support from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, through the ScaleUp Platform, an initiative led by Invest Ottawa in Eastern Ontario and in which QPI is a regional partner.