At FRAMEWORK, our mission is to help visionary entrepreneurs build and scale world-class companies. We believe that “a GREAT COMPANY is a great place with GREAT PEOPLE.” Without great people, it is really only a place. When looking to invest in a company, we begin with the entrepreneur and their team as it is one of the four core principles we founded the firm on. As such, we are excited to announce that Barbara Dirks has joined us as Partner.

Barbara brings more than 20 years of experience launching, building and re-imaging businesses in large, global corporate to startup environments. For many years, she has been advising capital providers and a portfolio of young technology companies with their startup or scaling concerns, across North America, all of whom participate in our growing and vibrant global tech ecosystem.

How will we accomplish that seemingly momentous task?

At FRAMEWORK, we want to help entrepreneurs identify factors that have brought financial and cultural success, while mapping talent requirements for growth accelerants. We aim to leverage the proprietary tools, network, and knowledge that we have built over our years of experience, to arm management teams with the advice, mentorship, and when appropriate, coaching to not only build their teams but increase cohesiveness and augment the values that drive company culture.

This process while seemingly simple is actually fairly complicated. Why?

At our core, human beings are a composite of behaviours, experiences, and personalities. As teams scale, they become more complex. The interplay of individual goals and objectives needs to blend with the overall objectives of a company, which, in the context of a rapidly growing company, can be a monumental task on its own. . Alignment towards a common goal, solving customer problems for example, can get lost or muddled. Our experience has shown us that the combination of a founding team with a seasoned talent executive can de-risk this process through the use of data and experience to help reduce the challenges and complexity that come with scaling a strong team.

That is just one of the reasons we are so excited to have Barbara on our team! She will work with our entrepreneurs to help them and their teams amplify their cultures in order to build high-calibre teams executing on a common vision.

Often, the job of a founder and an executive team can be lonely and filled with many emotional ups and downs. We believe that in order to make it through those events, need someone they can trust and speak openly with about—well, people problems. We believe in a safe place to explore the limitations and inhibitions that all of us have, that keep us from reaching our potential.

We believe so strongly that people — aka TALENT — is what makes or breaks a company that we have made it a core pillar of our investment process. To achieve success in our investments and for our entrepreneurs to be successful, we find it necessary to double- and triple-down on the most non-technical aspect of our jobs: PEOPLE!

Each week our team meets seasoned executives and great talent in the ecosystem who are interested in our portfolio companies. In addition to our Talent Growth Framework, we also enable an efficient and effective recruiting process by working with our companies to identify who in our network and/or database could make sense for any existing or future position. While complimenting any recruiting efforts, this engagement process can also de-risk one of the largest tasks facing our companies: — hiring/recruiting and the science of “How to hire?”

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