Friday evening at Thin Air Labs. I stopped by to hang out with Ammar, COO and Co-Founder of Quickly to talk about what he has going on and how he approaches his work. Quickly shares a space in the Lab, it’s mark signified by the neon logo visible across the space.
Quickly works to solve working capital crises by handling business to business payables, providing the means to turn invoices into capital for sellers, and savings opportunities for buyers.
heck out what he and Quickly have going on at his LinkedIn, their LinkedIn, and their website.
Who is Ammar Memon?
I'm Co-Founder and COO of Quickly. I’m a University of Calgary person. I started with selling copiers door to door with Xerox. It was a really fun experience, going door to door. It changed me as a person, made me more outgoing, able to handle rejection, able to be confident. I did terrible for the first six months, then I did really well for the next six. I decided “I think I'm going to travel Europe for three months” and I quit.
When I came back – since I studied Energy Management at U of C – I thought I'm going to try to get a job in Oil and Gas, but just applying for jobs didn't work. What did work was networking, and I’ve carried that with me my whole life. Networking is key to getting essentially whatever you want. So, I got into the industry and got a variety of different experiences. I switched roles every year or two; accounting, finance, even engineering for a year.
Then I got involved with an energy services startup, STEP Energy Services. I came in to help set up a ~$60 million acquisition of a company that was in bankruptcy. The next year, we did another $60 million acquisition. The year after that, we did an IPO. Then we did like a $325 million acquisition in the states.
Along the way I kept getting promoted and convinced into staying in finance. The c-suite encouraged me to do the CPA program; it was awesome doing schooling later in my career. When I was in university, I just wanted to party and hang out with my friends, the schoolwork was whatever. Doing more education later in my career, I really valued it. I got a lot out of it. All in all, I am incredibly grateful for my experience at STEP and the amazing teammates and leaders I worked with. It really gave me the life I have now.
I was happy and comfortable, but I had desire for more. I was always entrepreneurial. I think it came from me wanting a seat at the table, I always felt like I was not enough. I was very close to the top by the time I left but the timelines in big corporations are so extended. You're looking at 3 to 4 years before the next step, and 5 to 6 before you become CFO.
In the summer of 2021, a mutual friend of ours introduced Kyle and me. He pitched me on his idea, and here we are.
How do you describe Quickly?
We create an early payment program for your company so that your vendors can choose when they get paid for their bills instead of waiting 30, 60 or 90 days.
What is it about Calgary that makes you wanna stick around and set up shop here?
I was born in Pakistan, and moved to Canada when I was 10, to Ontario. Markham, Mississauga, then Calgary for 9 months or a year. Most of my growing up was in Peace River, AB, a tiny town of 7,000 people.
It’s evolved over time - at the start it was university, and my brother was already here. Nowadays, you see all these posts around, like “Calgary is one of the most livable cities on the planet” or whatever, that's so true. It's a safe, clean, great place to live and to have a family. I think the people that don't end up liking it, is because they don't discover all you can do here. I love to ski in the winter, we have world-class skiing 45 minutes away. In the summer, Calgary summers are absolutely beautiful. Even if I do have to leave for some reason, Calgary will always be home. And it’s just getting better and better. The restaurants especially.
What did this transition look like? Coming from Oil and Gas and moving into the startup ecosystem.
Massive pay cut, hah.
I'm an accountant, I'm risk averse by nature - or by trade I guess – so I built up a little security before. I really commend the people that I see that do it really young as their first thing.
But I can't even put into words how rewarding it is. Despite the challenges and despite whatever hurdles we’re going to come across, coming in every morning and trying to figure this thing out; what it’s going to be, or if people are gonna want to buy it at scale. Now that I have a team, it’s even more rewarding. All of us are just trying to make this thing work together. It's really hard to describe how rewarding it is, but it's like this feeling of home.
There’s a huge mindset shift that you have to have. You come from a place where everything is capital intensive, but the capital is also readily available. You don't worry about where the next paycheck is coming from. When you have a Startup, that’s different. It’s an acute problem that’ll keep you up at night. In the early days, it was like we're taking a huge risk here, let's see if we can get early traction and kick the can down the road enough to get some capital.
Scary, rewarding, fun. A lot of different emotions. But I don't feel like I have a job, I just wake up and I'm like “OK this is what I do now”.
Calgary is very supportive too. Events are always going on, and people that show up will always boost you on, about “yeah keep going with that and see what happens”. There are all these resources, there's all these people that are trying to do the same thing and will help along the way.
What are the tenets that you personally try to bring into work? What does Quickly have of you personally?
I'm coming from traditional business; I want to just increase the odds as high as possible, within my control, to make this thing successful. I bring a more sustainable approach, which is “hey I'm not going to live beyond my means”. It’s something I do in my personal life as well, I think taking that fiscally conservative approach has helped. We don’t hire unless we're in pain. For example, this is a beautiful office, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, but we share a fraction of the space for a fraction of the cost. When we have the results, I'll go and get an even sicker office for us.
Fiscal conservatism. I do want to say that can actually bite you at some point as well. Fortunately, my Cofounder is slightly opposite, but that’s where the balance comes from. He can be more of a risk taker; he's got that knowledge and experience in growing a business out of nothing. I come from big business and I know how to keep a ship steady. I think combining those two makes a great team.
How was this shift in the operations? Coming from a corporation that tends to move a bit slower, what was adjusting to what can be done in a single day when you’re moving lean like?
The bureaucracy is relatively nonexistent now. There's no detailed policies about everything, there will be at some point, but right now it's ‘here's your role, here's what you need to do, just go do it’. Where you do it, how you do it, is really up to you. We do work in the office five days a week, but half the team isn’t even here right now (it was a Friday evening). Cutting out the red tape and that formal stuff is great. The lack of bureaucracy and inefficiency that large corporations end up with actually gives us a competitive advantage, we can pivot really fast.
The speed is an interesting concept, the speed is crazy fast but at the same time it's not fast enough. We meet with our external stakeholders every quarter, and they look at everything and say “this is really good, I see 50 companies every month and you guys are doing better, be proud of yourself.”, but at the same time I want to be doing double or triple the revenue.
How do you maintain a balance between the work and the life? Or is this the life?
It's always top of mind, it's non-stop for me.
You know people talk about when you go on vacation, you want to completely shut off, there's no such thing for me. I went to Mexico over the holidays, and I would get up in the morning at this beautiful beach but in the back of my mind is work. Luckily, my partner is the same, she's quite busy with work, and we just get up in the morning, do what we need to do, and then think “now we're good for a bit”. But it's not taxing at all for me cause it's my baby. I think the day it starts to become taxing, I'm probably not the right person to be running it.
I do tell the rest of the team when they're on vacation, I don't expect you to do anything, shut it off. But if you feel like shutting off is going to bother you, check your e-mail. But I'm not going to be expecting any results from you.
I also really started focusing on health, particularly longevity. I want to be like 85 years old on the ski hill or running around a lake. If I'm having a frustrating day, I'll just go to the gym and come back fresh.
We also started doing meditation before meetings actually. I used to joke and make fun of it, but now I'm like the exact opposite. There's this really good 3 minute meditation on YouTube, she doesn't talk about anything other than your physical feeling. It's so genius, while you're focusing on this physical feeling you completely clear your mind.
To be quite honest, even in corporations, I never felt like I was shutting it off. I was constantly thinking about work. But I think if you do that, the company recognizes that, and they realize that you're probably one of the leaders here.
What are you proud of?
My physical health and focusing on that. My girlfriend, she exited her startup in 2021, and now is an executive at the company that acquired it and has also joined the board of a public company.
And I'm really proud of this team. They say you gotta be good to be lucky and you gotta be lucky to be good, we probably fell into that category. There’s not a single person on the team that is just average. Everybody's doing really well, they really dedicated themselves to it so I'm really proud of that. We've got a bunch of people that are here driving the company forward and bought in.
What have you been reading lately?
I’m an education hacker, so for the purists out there I’m probably committing blasphemy, but Blinkist has increased my reading. My friends used to recommend a book, but I'm spending 16 hours a day working on the company, I'm too tired to read at the end of the day. It would be scrolling social media for a bit then go to bed. Now, instead of doing that I'm reading some nonfiction - usually business related – books on Blinkist. My Co-Founder and I have a shared space on there, we’ll send each other stuff we recommend. Our most recent focus has been sales, so tons of sales books.
I've been reading this one called Reworked by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. These are the guys behind Ruby on Rails and 37Signals. It really applies to Start-ups in our stage. I really recommend it.
What advice would you give to someone who’s in the same shoes you were when you made the jump to Quickly?
I’m generalizing from this book called Rocket Fuel Kyle had me read before we agreed to work together. At the founder level, there’s like two personalities that can happen. You have visionaries, who are thinking further ahead and can surround themselves with people to do a mission. And then you have integrators. Integrators are the people that take that vision and bring it to reality. So, figure out which one of those two you are, and then go find your other half.
You know what's funny, I heard this in one of the sessions that Tate did for ZayZoon, the guest said if you have an idea, just do it on the side. Some people tell you to just fully commit right now, but that's not realistic in my mind. You probably have a family, rent, car payments or whatever. I would say take a step back and think “can this thing actually generate revenue?”, and then go paper, landing page, MVP. As much as people might think that doesn't work, it does. You just put it out there to see how many people would click. The cheapest way to find out the answer is by not quitting your job, and in your evenings set up your business, set up an Amazon or Shopify store. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. Just do the cheapest thing possible. Don't get a pitch deck, don't raise money, just go try it out in the most basic form possible. Only exception is if you’ve got like an Elon Musk idea.
What my Co-founder Kyle was doing, he’s the president of another business that he scaled from zero to very successful, and started with Quickly on the side. And it worked. It became a landing page, and then it became a web form, sometime later and here we are.
Thank you Ammar for this one.
Writer and Photographer | Sam Doty