Wes Gould, COO and partner at Redspace in Bedford, N.S., heads to the open roads (or the open waves) when he wants to unwind.Paul Darrow for The Globe and Mail
24/7 Executives is a series of stories on high-performing professionals who are as serious at play as they are in the conference room. See the other stories here.
When Wes Gould takes a corner on his racing motorcycle, leaning to one side and pushing his knee toward the tarmac, he has to let muscle memory take over and focus entirely on that manoeuvre.
On the bike, Mr. Gould finds his Zen. There's no space in his mind to think about running Redspace, the Bedford, N.S., company that's the largest independent digital studio in North America.
"You're just there with the machine, and reacting. It's a different kind of problem-solving," he says.
Not that Mr. Gould wants to shut out all thoughts of work. The Redspace chief operating officer is passionate about what he does, and beyond happy with how the company has grown in the past 15 years.
Redspace started out in the basement of Mr. Gould's business partner Mike Johnston, who is chief executive officer and president. "Our first expansion was into Mike's furnace room, before we moved into a real office," Mr. Gould says. "Last year we moved into huge new premises and we've already outgrown the space. We've got 150 people on staff and I could hire another 25 right now. We're growing like gangbusters."
Redspace started out developing digital products for business, and IBM is still a major client, although these days most of the company's work is in the entertainment field, providing everything that a broadcaster or movie company needs. Viacom is a huge client – there are 50 employees alone at Redspace working to develop apps and interactive products for the U.S. entertainment giant's Comedy Central, Nickleodeon, and MTV divisions.
Redspace has received industry praise for its work, and its Nickelodeon app for iOS devices won the 2013 Emmy Award for outstanding creative achievement in interactive media.
Mr. Gould believes that being passionate about extracurricular activities is vitally important for the success of his company. "We hire people that are so passionate about their work that they do this stuff in their spare time, but we also like to hire people that have interesting hobbies," he says.
"One of the questions that I like to ask in an interview is, 'Explain something to me that I don't know how to do.' And we've had people explain taxidermy! Having people who have the kind of brain where they can explain something to you is very important. It shows their passion and creativity and ability to problem-solve in different areas of their life."
Besides pushing his limits on his motorcycle through the streets or on a track, the 38-year-old married father of two is also a keen windsurfer and takes home-brewing seriously. He progressed from using regular stove-top-beer-making kits to building a custom rig that incorporates the use of technology such as Arduino robotics (a tiny robot on wheels) that talks to an Android tablet in order to automatically control boil temperatures, and a hops controller that will drop the hops into the beer at the right time.
"Then on the pouring side I've got some solenoids [a type of electromagnet] and hardware that I've wired together to make sure that the carbon dioxide level in the beer is just perfect. The fun is in the creativity and in doing the stuff that other people don't do."
Technology is a foundation for much of what he does, both at work or play. As well as incorporating robotics and apps into his brewing, he is always interested in bringing tech into his motorcycle riding, too, and has just bought a new helmet with a heads-up display (think Google Glass-style projections on the inside of the visor).
"I try to integrate a little of what we do here into my outside pursuits to help me get a little bit better at them," Mr. Gould says.
Getting better at his pursuits is vital to him. Whether he's riding a motorcycle, windsurfing at Lawrencetown Beach in Halifax and Lake Torment by his cottage, or making beer, he loves the level of precision required and constantly finds that little changes make a big difference to performance. "It takes all your attention and a degree of precision to do it well. And there's no end to how good you can get with those things, there's no ceiling, you can just keep getting better and buying more equipment," he says.
These constant tiny gains in order to make something perfect are key in the type of projects at which Redspace excels, and Mr. Gould says the reason his company is so in demand is that it creates products that work well and do not fail.
"Most companies lead with the shiny, with the visual, and most of their growth starts with sales people that are pitching and designers that are making things look good, but there's not a lot of substance underneath with the things that actually make the products work. We always came at it from the opposite way – make it really solid, then build on top of that and make it look pretty. Because of that we've never even needed a sales department," he says.
Mr. Gould enjoys the parts of his hobbies that don't require deep thought. He admits that the more of his beer he samples in production, the less intense he gets about the science of it all. "When you work with ones and zeros all day long, that's what makes these physical hobbies nice, you're using a different part of your brain," he says. "You have to have your little bits of fun and excitement."