We started in a Steinbach basement, after years running plants.

One of us, Cameron, spent more than 20 years inside one of Canada’s largest primary food processors. He started in the field and worked his way up to running operations, including the plant that was Manitoba’s second-largest capital project the year it was built. His team documented more than $300M a year in savings. In 2018 the business sold for over a billion dollars.

Here is what that job looked like from the inside. The data that ran the plant sat in systems that never talked to each other, in spreadsheets, and in the heads of people getting close to retirement. A lot of the work was finding out where the number lived.

The other, Tracy, grew up on a dairy farm in La Broquerie, Manitoba, and built her first production tracking system as a teenager, because paper kept losing the answers. She kept building operational tools in every job after that, including running Manitoba’s largest broiler breeder operation.

We were working the same gap from two directions, operations and applications. So we tried to build the fix ourselves, inside the multi-plant operation we were running. It never worked on the side of the real job. We left to do it full time.

mode40 started in Cam’s basement in 2020 with a laptop and one idea: build the firm we always wished we could hire. The people who had fought the same problems came back together one at a time. We still run it from Steinbach, and we still build it for people who have stood where we stood.