Tell Us Your Story. What motivated you to start your business? Why are you passionate about what you do?

Entrepreneurship was ingrained in our CEO, David Herrington, from a young age. “Growing up I watched as my father started and grew a successful accounting firm and my mother built a thriving interior design company. Learning from their experience and dedication, I gained vital knowledge of what entrepreneurship meant and I knew that I wanted to create my own business. Having entrepreneurship ingrained in my DNA, throughout my early career I was drawn to entrepreneurial opportunities where I developed multiple profitable start-ups and helped scale small businesses for growth. While working for other companies, I began developing products on my own, running a few businesses as a solopreneur though always knowing I wanted to grow something bigger and build my own team. After years of experience in the tech industry I saw a gap. There were no BC-based organizations that served local businesses with all their tech needs – from software and app customization to office IT support and web development. Realizing this gap, I expanded my solopreneur business building an augmented reality product and developed Kelowna Software as a full-service IT company with three main pillars of software development, IT support, and web development. I would like to attribute the inspiration to start my own business firstly to my parents who have been tremendous mentors to me throughout my life and secondly to my desire to innovate and create new solutions for challenges faced by local businesses. Business is about community and I started this company to help create solutions and advance businesses and non-profits in our community.” says David.

Describe and demonstrate, including metrics, your community support. How do you support and uplift your community, and how do they show that support in return? Minimum 25 words, maximum 2500 characters.

We believe in being active community members and supporting the community that supports us, whether in business or our personal lives. We are committed to supporting non-profit organizations within our communities in order to help them increase capacity for doing good and achieve their goals. We provide non-profit organizations with significantly reduced rates on all our services ranging from 15%-50% off. Kelowna Software attends community events as an organization and is a member of multiple local non-profits. Our outreach includes yearly participation in the BC Thanksgiving Food Drive which provides needed food to the local Food Bank. Staff are provided with flexible schedules and encouraged to volunteer in their communities and increase time spent with family. Kelowna Software staff coach and volunteer on multiple youth sports teams, actively mentor local youth, fundraise for men’s health and spend time helping causes near and dear to them. We are developing a unique partnership with a local non-profit to help local small and medium businesses get online or upgrade their existing online presence, through providing significantly reduced web development rates (+40% off). The partnership is being developed to help local businesses continue to recover from the pandemic and to weather challenging economic conditions. In return our community, clients and employees have continually provided positive feedback and praise to our organization. Within the past 12 months Kelowna Software has been named the 2022 & 2023 Face of Technology by Kelowna Now, voted the Central Okanagan’s favourite IT company by Capital News readers, voted the Best Software Developer in Kelowna Now’s Best of Kelowna competition, nominated and named as finalists for the Small Business of the Year and Technology Innovator of the Year in the Kelowna Chamber’s 2022 Business Excellency Awards, and our President David Herrington has been named to the Kelowna Chamber’s Top 40 under 40.

Why do you deserve to win the Business Impact award?

Kelowna Software deserves to win the Business Impact award because we are a business that is guided by our company values to throughout our organization and provide impact on many levels. We provide support to help our clients improve their operations and gain efficiencies, we strive to create an inclusive culture that supports our staff to succeed at work and at home, and we are active, compassionate members of our community. As we continue to grow, we hope to be an example to our children, peers, and clients of how to grow business and community through always leading with positive values.

Tell Us About Your Culture. How are you creating a sustainable and healthy workplace where everyone feels welcome? Provide examples of leadership you show in interactions with clients, vendors, contractors, staff and others.

Kelowna Software’s values of transparency, fairness, and inclusion are essential to how they operate internally with their team and externally with customers. Internally, Kelowna Software prides itself on creating a fun inclusive work culture, emphasizing work-life balance, and allowing for flexible hours. Kelowna Software is proud to have near-zero employee turnover, over 50% female leadership, and a group of employees committed to supporting one another. Creating a culture not only of hard work and customer dedication but also one that represents company values requires culture to be considered throughout operations. We maintain culture through having leadership portray company values, HR creates mechanisms to measure culture and employee success, provide opportunities for feedback and for improvement, and breaking up the work week to have fun and come together as individuals. At Kelowna Software some of our practices to help maintain culture also include: -Flexible hours -Remote work -Weekly team gaming sessions -Monthly team lunches -Bi-weekly retrospective meetings for open sharing -Regularly scheduled one on ones with managers and HR -Employee reviews -An open-door policy starting with the CEO Externally, a commitment to high-quality work and exceptional customer service is the backbone to our ability to maintain a 5-star Google Review rating and a myriad of positive customer testimonials. Our values of fairness, transparency, and inclusion also guide our successful customer relations. We are transparent in our abilities and what our work can do for our clients, we are fair in our pricing and timelines, and we are happy to work with all types of businesses and people. These values help us to create strong communication with our customers and to deliver projects on time and on budget.

Why do you think you should win the Premier’s People’s Choice Award?

Kelowna Software deserves to win the Premier’s People’s Choice Award because we are the small business that could. We use values to guide our operations and provide support on as many levels as we can. We strive to create an inclusive culture that supports our staff to succeed at work and at home, we are active, compassionate members of our community, and we provide support to help other businesses improve their operations and gain efficiencies. As we continue to grow, we hope to be an example to our children, peers, and clients of how to grow business and community through positive, value-driven leadership.