When Givex (TSX:GIVX, OTCQX:GIVXF) Information Technology Group was founded in the late 1990s, the business sold online gift cards for merchants, usually restaurants.
“People would go online, get the certificate they wanted, and we would send it to their mother or their father or whoever by email,” CEO Don Gray told Proactive. “Then they would take a printed copy of this email to their favorite restaurant to cash it in.”
Within a year and a half, the Toronto-based company began producing plastic gift cards, followed by loyalty offerings. Now, more than 20 years later, the company has 310 employees in 12 offices across 10 countries and is a global provider of cloud-based customer engagement, point of sale, and payment solutions, all in a single platform.
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Givex (TSX:GIVX, OTCQX:GIVXF) was founded by Gray and his wife Debra Demeza, who currently serves as the company’s executive vice president of human resources, in 1999 following the couple’s success in starting up one of Canada’s earliest internet service providers in 1994. After building that company over two to three years, it was sold to a telecommunications company, and the couple was looking for another way to use their expertise in web development and websites.
“I’m an entrepreneur and I have lots of experience in all the things necessary to run a company like this,” Gray said. Since starting his first company when he was 19 (“I won’t tell you how long ago that was, people can look it up,” he joked), Gray has grown, sold, and shut down 18 companies, at his last count.
“My wife and I have grown Givex (TSX:GIVX, OTCQX:GIVXF) on a nominal amount of money, it was $3 million at the time, that we were able to make use of over the first almost 20 years of the company before we went public in 2021,” he explained. “We were very careful about how we used our capital because we didn’t have a lot of cash available to us.”
Their cautious spending and leadership put the company on the path to success. Givex (TSX:GIVX, OTCQX:GIVXF)’s platform is currently being used by some of the world’s largest brands in more than 100,000 locations across more than 100 countries, including Swiss Chalet, Wendy’s, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, and Marriott International (NYSE:MAR).
Fully integrated, single source of truth
Givex’s omnichannel platform provides merchants with valuable data insights, supporting gift card processing, custom loyalty programs, payment processing, online ordering apps, and much more. But what makes the platform stand out among its peers is its flexibility.
As Gray explained, the platform can be fully integrated with third-party products that a client may already have in use or prefer to use across point of sale, loyalty programs, and so on. “We believe that the combination of having a full-blown system that can give everybody all they need on one platform plus the ability to stay flexible and allow people to integrate with us is unique,” he added. “Many of our competitors don’t like to integrate and push back on this.”
As the company has grown, Givex has not relied on third parties to build or sell its services, making it convenient for its clients as they only have to deal with one point of contact. “We've developed everything ourselves so our customers can look to us as a single source of truth,” Gray told Proactive. “We’ve made sure our customers have a partner that is going to provide them with all the services and support they need so that if they have a problem, they can call us.”
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Just over a year after going public, Givex’s financial success is nothing short of impressive. The company achieved revenue of $55.2 million for the 2021 financial year and, according to Gray, boasts an organic growth rate of 5% to 8% on top of acquisition-led growth.
“With the acquisitions we’ve made this year, we’re going to add at least another $8 million to $10 million dollars in revenue, so we should have revenue somewhere between $68 million and $70 million (for the 2022 financial year),” he said.
He added that the company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) varied annually depending on product investments and the like, but it usually ranged between 8% and 12%.
In terms of growing its global footprint, Gray said Givex is focused on expansion opportunities within its existing markets, including the UK, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.
“We’re not really going to expand beyond those markets for the next little while,” Gray said. “There’s plenty of business for us to do in those particular markets that we understand and where we have a presence.”
A culture of keeping promises
When asked what sets Givex apart from its competitors, Gray highlighted the company’s team over its offering.
“We have a low turnover,” he said. “Many of our team members have been with us for more than 15 years, many of them joining right out of school and university, and they’ve been able to grow through the organization because we provided lots of opportunities for career growth.”
Gray added that Givex’s team was a testament to the company’s culture of keeping its promises. “We’ve worked hard to keep our promises to our employees, customers, vendors, and investors,” he said. “When we say we’re going to do something, we do it.”
Contact the author at emily.jarvie@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter @emilyjjarvie