Dan Roberge
Well, thank you, ad for joining. I appreciate your time. And, you know, we talked before we did a mini podcast on, at a trade show and, and, you know, I, I was interested, obviously, we know Serge learning very well there partners of maintenance care. And we wanted to talk a little bit more in depth and and maybe we can just start off with who you are in the company for people that haven't seen the original and, and, we'll go from there.
Edward Robeznieks
Sure. Yeah. I'm at Nick's. I am the VP of sales and marketing. So really brought into the organization to try and help grow the organization, its reach, expand the revenue portfolio we have. And I'm excited to be here. The healthcare space is a growing and interesting space. It's not going away. So I'm quite enjoying my time here so far.
Dan Roberge
Yeah. So you're fairly new, but, now you're starting to get, acclimatized to the company, to the, you know, to the products. And, just in general, the healthcare industry. I mean, what are your thoughts about the healthcare industry? And, you know, the compliance related items that are really dominant in this industry for good reasons. But, you know, what's been your exposure to that, your challenges and so on.
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah, I think if you look back at, the Covid era, I guess is the best way to look at it because I wasn't in in health care during Covid, but we were all impacted significantly. And there was a lot of, news and information that was surrounding long term care homes, facilities that had patients in it that required special care. And that outbreak really showed us the lack of understanding that we had on how to take care of the elderly in very vulnerable situations. So, so I think what health care is looking at now is how do we ensure that we can make it safe for everyone, make sure the workers there know how to deal with situations that come up. And that's that sort of, in, infection prevention and control sort of scenario. But but I think that's what really piqued my interest in health care was during the Covid scare, the amount of people that were impacted that were elderly, that were innocent victims, that that I think we could have probably done a better job with. So led me to think I would love to be in the health care, industry in some fashion. Didn't know I'd end up at surge, but it sort of worked out that way. And, and our compliance training is really designed to help, organizations make sure that all the health care workers that are in their facilities, know how to operate properly, understand women's, understand infection control, understand how to, draw blood, how to everything that goes with health care compliance.
Edward Robeznieks
And I think it's important because it keeps our elderly safe.
Dan Roberge
Yeah. And it's incredible. I can tell talk from experience on, on the maintenance care side, we had, a pandemic planning, like, kind of workbook that was pre-COVID. Like, it was like maybe 5 or 6 years before, because it was always pertinent and it was obviously heightened during that time. And it's still pertinent now because outbreaks happen. And, and, you know, it's not just in during the Covid times and, but all the same applicable steps were there. And it's under big scrutiny, obviously, because whenever there is some negativity around a compliance issue that gets high, high media attention. So how do you guys deal with that? Like how do you use that? You know, the kind of, the media attention on the negative to try to help kind of, push, I guess better compliance training.
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. I think you have to focus on our compliance training is, regulated by the government so that we have obviously, certain requirements that have to be met to be compliant in different provinces. Every province is slightly different. There are federal regulations also. And then we have our own content that we've created that also supports the healthcare worker in different facets that are outside of the mandatory regulatory and, in things. So when we see government changes or policy changes or things that might impact these long term care homes, we will typically then either create content to support what's going on if it's not available, or we will modify and use the government regulated content to ensure that these long term health care support workers, are compliant and can and can take care of the people to the level that is required.
Dan Roberge
And, you know, that's one of the things we we talked about briefly last time was that the government dealing with government is always an issue. It's a slow process. You know, they're they're at a different pace for different reasons. But so you have to deal with them because when you see a new regulation come through, you need to learn about it. You need to develop courses around it and education around it. So how has that been in that in that situation.
Edward Robeznieks
It's good when governments change like the current government has come in now. Even though so a Liberal government, he might have different views around how to deal with health care. So we might change some policies or modify. One of the things that, service learning provides is a benefit to all organizations is because we're a one stop shop, we actually help the content stay current to.
Edward Robeznieks
So we'll revise and do revisions to ensure that everything is up to date. So that you're not required to do anything. You just go in there and we've update the content to reflect whatever changes and policies have come into place. And that's a huge benefit for organizations. So we're managing your library, for lack of a better term of compliance training, to ensure that if you ever were ordered it, you could pull a report and show everybody has everything that is current based on what regulations are in place at that time.
Dan Roberge
Well, that'd be huge. So imagine, so somebody has gone through the course already. There's been a change. Did they get like an alert? Like, how did they know that they have to kind of review something new?
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. Our learning management system manages and pushes content out and pushes reminders out and gives, scheduling, set ups so that the organization doesn't have to worry about that. So we have that, as long as, as well as our, quality risk management and our policy professional. So that allows you to upload your own policies and quality risk is auditing capabilities. If you do have things like the Covid outbreak, you create audits to say what do we do in the future if something like this sort of happened? So our system manages all of that, which again, makes it simple for somebody who's overseeing the program in a number of long term care homes to be able to administer this in an efficient manner and ensure that nothing gets missed. We take care of all that.
Dan Roberge
And these days there are so many regulations. What do people do? Like what do these companies do when they don't use your product? Like how did they even manage? Because you got so many people, so many moving parts, what do they how did they tackle this?
Edward Robeznieks
Well, unfortunately, it goes back to the old days where there's cabinets full of paper and multipart forms. There's a lot of that still, unfortunately. And some of it is just, you know, some organizations find it costly to make changes and put in things are learning management system is very cost efficient for the robustness of what you're receiving. So that's a benefit. We do that on purpose. We keep the cost low on purpose to provide the benefit to the health care workers and to the, long term care homes that are using it so that we're not burdening costs to them that are exorbitant. Because that's always a concern in health care. But yeah, it's a lot of them are using old school ways of doing it. And it's the reason things get missed. And when they realize that they miss something typically happens after an audit. So if somebody comes in and says, we're going to audit your facility to make sure that these patients are being taken care of properly. So we want to know that they've done all these different courses. Well, now you're going through file drawers trying to find stuff, and you realize that, you know, Mary Jane didn't do her training of this, this and this, and then you can get penalties and, reprimands based on the fact that you're not compliant. Our system makes sure that that doesn't happen.
Dan Roberge
Yeah. And, you know, the other thing you mentioned about pricing, it's it's, it's a big deal for, because you get a good ROI from your product. I mean, it's excellent. And and like you said, you can avoid penalties and you can make sure everybody's been taken care of. You know, the best that they should be. And that's the biggest win, right? There's, there's you can't put, dollar value on human life. And so that's the, the biggest value. But still you're, you're looking out for the cost of the home in general because they have a lot of costs. And I know from experience that, there are many tools out there that overcharge for what they have. And so it's a it's I think it's a, it's a good business strategy because people talk about you as being a viable product. They can keep long term. So that's, that's really good to hear. Now, as far as the, you know, the company's past, like where, you know, you're you're still newer in the company and now you're pushing a new agenda and you're wanting to grow. How what are some of the things that you're looking to do at surge to, you know, to keep expanding?
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah, I think we have to look at it in sort of three facets. So we look at the Canadian marketplace. Where are we now? Where are we strong and where could we potentially expand to inside of the health care community in Canada? Then you've got the US market and then you have global markets. So so we'll sort of pass them into three in the Canadian market where, we're effective in rural hospitals. But we would love to do more. We that we see that as a large opportunity for us. A lot of rural hospitals, they're not like Sunnybrook in Toronto that has billions of dollars and can build their own systems, because of the donations they receive. If you go to a smaller hospital in northern Ontario, they don't have that kind of support and funding. So they're looking for solutions that can help them. And they're typically the ones that are a little more antiquated in how they're dealing with paperwork and facilitating training and doing things that we would help them with. So we see that as a viable market. We also see the staffing agencies and individual care workers that work for staffing agencies as a good opportunity for us. We work with some now. But we just signed a partnership with Wiltshire Care. And Life care focuses on that field, and they like being partners with us because they need that, with the customers they're dealing with. So that's an exciting foray for us to move into different markets in the in Canada. And again, this is across all the provinces. Quebec is still, something that we're a little challenged with only because the amount of contact we would have to have in French language, can be challenging, but there are areas of the Quebec marketplace, and we do have French content now. It's not like we don't, it's just we would have to have a complete library of French content. So there are certain markets we can get into in Quebec which we find interesting. We're strong on the East Coast. We're moving into Manitoba, which is a French speaking province. So we're doing good things there. We're very strong in Ontario. We have a large market share. And then of course, in B.C., in Alberta, we have some in Manitoba, and Saskatchewan is a bit of a juggernaut for us in the sense that the the government provides a lot of funding at no charge to the long term care homes. So there's less of an incentive to use outside agencies because it's a cost that they would have to burden. So there's a little bit of a challenge there. So that's sort of the Canadian marketplace. So lots of opportunity still to grow. We have lots of market share we can capture in Canada. And and because our brand is well recognized and a lot of people have used it, it helps us get into some markets that we're not in. Now let's look at the U.S.. So there's been talk about getting into the U.S marketplace. You could take some blue states that are big focus on health care. And, and you look at that market and you think, well, the U.S, everyone thinks the U.S is such a great place to go. And what's a huge market? It is a huge market, but there's lots of competitors too. So you have to take a look at the market dynamics of what can you really get out of that marketplace. One, we're a Canadian company. We're not American. So that can work potentially against us. Americans want to deal with American companies, especially in today's climate. So so there's less of an incentive for us to run to the US and start to deal with that. U.S. companies are trying to get into Canada, but they're facing the same dilemma that a lot of Canadian companies want to deal with Canadian companies now, which is us, where I think the larger long term opportunity lies is outside of North America. So if you go into countries, whether it's Vietnam, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, markets that are bringing people into the country that are getting landed, immigrant status, that are moving into the health care field because a lot of them do so there might be a potential for us to sort of get out ahead of the curve there and train people before they get here with what compliance they will require to work in these long term care homes. If we can do that, they have accreditation that they then, when they're looking for a job, can say, I've already used surge learning and I'm compliant. That'll help them potentially get work. So it's a it works for them in getting jobs and it works for us and expanding our marketplace. Now, this doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to work with companies in the Philippines. We're going to work with individuals who might be going through, lawyers and, immigration firms that are getting them landed status in Canada. But when they come in here, they say, well, I was a nurse in the Philippines, but I'm not qualified to be a nurse here, but I want to work in health care. If we can provide them the training and certifications that they require and give them badges that they can then show saying, I've done this, that might be a large market for us to expand at a global level versus a North American level.
Dan Roberge
Wow. So you're going to need a lot of people to, to do this. How much are you going to grow here? That's a that's a big I mean, you know, there's a lot to do. We talked before about the benefits of getting outside funding versus, you know, kind of funding by growth. And what's been the strategy at surge and how how do you see that mixing in with your growth strategy as far as, different geographical areas?
Edward Robeznieks
Our CEO and owner, Tulio Ferreira, she's, use sort of organic growth as the way that she's, been developing the organization over the last 15 years. And it's worked very well for her. She's grown a very healthy, profitable business. To expand, you know, there's two ways to look at expansion. One is to bring in outside money. So you say, okay, we're going to sell off a piece of the company, and we're going to use that money to reinvest in, to your point. Well, we need a lot of people, right? That if you if you require that, the other way to look at it is we don't necessarily have to expand. We can expand still organically. If you look at markets outside of Canada, because if we're doing an individual level, we don't necessarily have to staff up to do that. We can have a situation where people go to our website, enroll through staffing agencies, get access to our library, and it might be a limited library. We might say, okay, it's only this part of our learning management system that is applicable to what you need. And then they would pay to have that service. They would do all that. They would get recognized when they complete their courses, and then they could use that. That's a very automated process. And because it's all cloud based, we don't necessarily have to staff up and have an extra 50 people running that. If we got to critical mass where we were doing millions of more in business, yeah, we would probably need teams that are focused on that alone. But right now, we're still in a position where we can expand without having to invest a huge amount of money and in just adding resources, meaning bodies or people to the to the problem.
Dan Roberge
Yeah, because that often results in having to go and get investors and then you end up, you know, kind of changing your business model to focus on the investors profits as opposed to the services that you need for your customers. And that's why we did that. I mean, it's there we stayed internal. And I think that's probably, going to be a wise approach if you can build it that way.
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. I think that, again, I don't want to speak for Trulia. You need to have to talk to her directly. But I've spoken with her many times about what what she sees as part of her sort of long term, and ideally, she would love to obviously in the next 2 or 3 years or whatever it is to exit the organization, whether that means selling the organization or it means selling part of it off or however that works. But I think she does want to see the company continue to grow and expand. And again, you know, unless we were to change our model significantly or move off with health care, the Canadian market is only so big, right? We only have so much we can deal with. It's not an endless pipeline. So if you go into global markets, you might have a situation where you can expand without having to necessarily increase your own footprint significantly.
Dan Roberge
Nice. Nice. Good strategy. So you mentioned partners. You had a new partnership. What are some of your partners like, what are the strategic alliances that you've had that have helped benefit grow the business, get it other people to get to know you and so on?
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah, I mean, we have lots there's we have upwards of 40, different versions of partners that we would have, some have their content on our learning management system. And we provided at no charge for our customers as a benefit. So, so there are those types of partners there are the partnerships like the Alliance care, the staff schedule care, the, the conveners of the world that are staffing and scheduling companies, that allow us access to, to support when they're in an organization that may need extra compliance training or doesn't have our service, or has somebody else's service in there. I mean, we have competitors, clearly. So so we might be able to provide a more robust solution. So we use our partners for things like that, and then we try and help them move into, for example, in allied care, who really focuses on home care and individual, professional service workers, they'll look at us and say, we want to get into long term care homes, and we control a lot of that. For example, in Ontario. So there's a good, you know, symbiotic relationship between the two organizations. We can help them. They can help us. So we really work with them on that. And we're continuing expand that. And that's why I was saying if we ever took our reach outside of North America, we would start working with, immigration firms or firms that are bringing people into, into Canada to get landed status and that need to work. And that one would work in health care. Yeah. I think that that that's a good opportunity.
Dan Roberge
It's exciting. And, you know, the thing is it's a smart way to do it. I always find partnerships work best when, you don't have to work at it. You know, it just kind of fits well and everybody benefits and it kind of just, you know, works itself. And that's typically the best type. There's different types, obviously, but that's when it, I find it works the best. So what do you have going on right now. Like what's happening and what's your next little challenges? You know, in the, in the near future and, and, because we talked about long term plans, but what's going on right now.
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. Right now we're doing great. We're having a good year. So that's the you know, surge is is strong in the marketplace in Canada. We've got promos. We're running east West, we have promos. We run for our what we call our base accounts. So people that are using us now, some of them are just using our learning management system. They don't have necessarily policy professional or Shrm. So we have promos we're running to try and, attach those services to, to their portfolio. And those services provide a lot of benefit to them. So there's reasons that they want to go this way. Some are using competitors for those services right now. So we really try and differentiate what we how we do things versus what others do. And again, if you have a one stop shop like one platform that can facilitate everything, your own policies are learning management system with all the compliance, all your auditing capabilities, it makes it very easy for you to manage that system. You don't have competing agendas with different suppliers in there, and I think that's a huge benefit for us.So we're really focused on things like that right now. The expansion is something obviously we're going to look at doing. We're finishing off, we invested it or our owner truly invested a large sum of money to upgrade our learning management system to a new platform. So we're just transitioning everyone over to the new platform that should be completed shortly, where everyone will be on the new platform. We still haven't migrated the policy professional piece and the Shrm that's next. So that'll be over the next little bit. Through the fall that will migrate them over, and then we'll have everybody on the new platform, the new look and feel. And that'll make it easier because right now, if you're on the old platform, you're just using the old if you're on the new learning management system and you have a policy professional, you're right now sitting on two platforms. So we're quickly migrating people over. But once that's done, I think there'll be a lot of benefits. So that's kind of what's happening right now in our world.
Dan Roberge
Nice, nice. It sounds like a lot of, a lot of a good future, even even though, like, the software I remember, you know, the, we've done it with us, too, when we've upgraded people. And there's always, like, a bit of a hiccup at first because people want to don't want to learn or change, but once they get to the new, they see all the benefits of that. Now what? Just for people quickly, for people that don't know your products. You mentioned three in all three different silos there. What are your how's your product structure?
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. So it for most organizations, they sign up for our learning management system. So if no one's ever used a learning management system or an LMS, it's basically a, cloud based system. You can use web browser so you can access it via your phone and things like that to provide training. And it gives you a library. So we give you an access code to get in, password. You go in, you log in, and you're now on the search platform. Inside of that platform, there's our learning management system library. That library has all the compliance training that's required, whether it's limits, as I said, or, you know, pick a health care topic. What are.
Dan Roberge
Those? What are those like? Like what are the training packages like? Is it a video. Is it a PDF. Like what do you what do they see.
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. So they're all they're gamified first of all. So we have it. So you can have some fun with it. And they are they are video. So imagine watching a 3 or 4 minute in some cases, sort of a a video production and of a, of a scenario that's going on. We were talking about Covid. You know, you might have something where it says, you know, if you're a health care worker and this and this happens and, and then ask you questions and you sort of walk through the process and once you complete it, then it gives you a completed, a badge for that particular course. And then you move to the next one will manage that system for you. So we'll push out when you're required to do it so that you don't miss out on things. Right. And you don't want to get late in the year and think, oh, I haven't done all this training. So we sort of manage it throughout the year and, and space it out to ensure everything gets done. So that's really what the learning management system provides. It gives you a suppository and a simple way for an administrator to ensure that they can deal with all of their health care workers, and in an efficient manner. Then when you add in things like policy professionals. So policy prevention was brought in because a lot of organizations we've talked about this, you know, multipart forms for all these things, we all create our own policies and you probably have it at your organization. We have our own two, right. We have internal policies how to onboard somebody. How do how do you, do you deal with, whatever it is, you know, pick a topic. You but you've created your own policy because it's something that you do internally to yourself only, and it's not applicable to other organizations. Policy professional allows you to take all of those and load them up, too. So now if somebody does onboarding your organization, you can refer them to the onboarding procedures that you've uploaded in the learning management system. So they can use Serge to get access to that. So now that is something you don't need to worry about. It keeps everything housed in this one library for you. Quality risk management. Same thing you want to create audit. So I want to figure out why, you know, this happened on this floor to this individual. We want to make sure it doesn't happen again. So let's create an audit process so that we don't we ensure that these things don't happen in the future. You can upload that. So your audits can be uploaded into the system. So again if I'm a new worker and I'm thinking what happens when this happens? I can find that in the library. Or it can be pushed out to me saying, hey, this happened last month. You're new to the organization. You need to know how we deal with this so that quality risk management will push that out to you and allow you to then understand what the auditing process was and what you might need to do for your own audits on your floor, let's say if you're running it. So all of that is this is why the integrated system is so valuable to organizations and why we created the policy professional and the quality risk management to go with the learning management system.
Dan Roberge
Yeah, great. And so you can buy each separately or you can buy the whole package together.
Edward Robeznieks
Basically you can we have organizations that have other learning management system partners that are in, in right now, that they, they for whatever reason, they've connected with them. Maybe it's a US based company and they're using some AWS platform, but they don't have quality risk management or they don't have policy professional. So they'll look at, you know, we want to sign up for your policy. And then down the road we try and obviously move them onto our LMS. Also, the LMS is the main platform that most people will take out of the gates, so to speak. But no question, we can attach them separately if need be.
Dan Roberge
Nice. Well, it's been great learning more about your learning platform and about, you know, the future of service learning. Where do people find out more if they want to sign up or talk to anybody? Where do they go?
Edward Robeznieks
Yeah. Search learning. Okay. You can go to the website and take a look at the information. There's all sorts of things that we've uploaded. We have links to talk about how we're a learning management system works, how our code works, how our policy works. You can reach out to me directly. It's Edward Robeznieks at Surge learning. Okay. You can reach out to sales at Surge learning. If you want to talk to somebody about information, we have entire teams that work, account managers that work with our customers. So when you do get onboarded, you have people that are dedicated to helping you, onboard your people. And, so the whole process is quite efficient and, and will help them.
Dan Roberge
Excellent. Well, thank you for doing this. It's been great to talk again and, you know, that's it. Everyone. Hope you enjoyed it.
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