Brad Leitch

Imagine this: You’ve founded a fast-growing EdTech company, built a ridiculously awesome team, launched a series of incredible products — and suddenly realized the real job is just beginning. As Principal Strategist at Imagine Everything, I focus on the future, not the inbox. I work behind the scenes (and sometimes in the cockpit) to keep our company aligned with the long-term vision of our school district stakeholders while letting our executive team run the day-to-day like (the Jedi Council they are). I’m the Yoda-on-a-Hayabusa of Imagine Everything, steering us through scale, strategy, and constant Star Wars references, with clarity, courage, and the occasional (terrible) soundboard joke. My role in a nutshell: - Strategic Braintrust: I advise the CEO and exec team on big bets, product direction, and how not to accidentally become a bloated enterprise software company. - Product & Architecture: I help shape the user experience and tech stack so our systems stay elegant, scalable, and worthy of the engineers who build them. - Talent Magnet: I recruit and mentor world-class product, design, and engineering talent, and protect the culture that makes them want to stay. - Culture Steward: I make sure we don’t lose our soul as we scale. That means everything from values alignment to our sacred team traditions: motorcycles, Star Wars, and shipping great work. - Relationship Builder: I support strategic partnerships, key district relationships, and the kind of meetings where you need someone who can speak both education and API.

As Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Imagine Everything I am responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the company and executing on the strategic vision created by the board of directors and our closest school board partners. My responsibilities include building a positive, high energy, innovative work culture, providing inspired leadership to the rest of the executive team, and establishing a great working relationship with our amazing board of directors!

- Designing and building an ultra modern, AI-powered ERP/HR system - Leading a start-up through complex build challenges including a proprietary tax engine that supports worldwide jurisdictional calculations, a core financial system, payroll system, event system, dispatch system, procurement system, and more - Recruiting top talent onto the project and managing business partners - Developing community relationships with enterprise-sized school districts

- Led product managers, research team, engineering team and language development team - Introduced relative weighting and Agile/Kanban to solve significant productivity and prioritisation issues - Worked with product managers to create strategic, profitable product plans and sales and support collateral - Helped repair a damaged work culture by promoting autonomy, accountability, innovation and excellence - Balanced innovation with financial risk; estimated projects most likely to result in financial or competitive gain - Developed a strong relationship with high profile technology, law enforcement and academic organisations - Introduced a company-wide performance evaluation and talent indexing system (based on A+++ performance) - Top-graded and added key A-player leadership talent to the engineering and DevOps teams - Provided extensive leadership coaching, product development training and Agile training to teams - Worked with executive peers on contracting, mergers and acquisitions and due diligence preparation

- Led development of an artificial intelligence product capable of detecting online child exploitation - Led an international Child Protection Hackathon with Microsoft and the RCMP; world-wide attention - Built relationships with leading industry experts on AI; recruited talent from academia and industry - Worked with AI concepts such as aggregation, differential privacy, reinforcement learning, transfer learning - Helped procure over $3.5M in MITACS, CRD, BCIP and IRAP funding; over $380K in SR&ED - Handled all international and national television and radio interviews; guest speaking at conferences - Assisted engineering in solving culture and productivity challenges

- Led an intrepreneurial start-up within the StarDyne equity group called PathFive - Responsible for driving new, innovative products sold agnostically within StarDyne’s portfolio - Recruited a team of A-players including UI/UX designers, full stack developers and DevOps - Built a new, web-based municipal recreation system; new product out to market within 9 months - Helped build PathFive’s revenue to reach close to $1M in ARR in 18 months - Coordinated PathFive’s product strategy, development, marketing, sales and support operations - StarDyne appointed lead on technical due diligence for portfolio acquisition prospects - Public speaking at municipal and government conferences

- Founded Dreamstalk in 2005; consistent year-over-year growth of 30-50% - Acquired by StarDyne Technologies in 2014; seen as their new “innovation centre” - Won multiple personal and company awards for innovation and customer service excellence - Served over a million students, parents and education staff every day through cloud-based services - Strong, competitive product focus on UI/UX and mobile design - Led the companies product, development, marketing, sales and support teams - Built a strong customer community of over 540 schools; 99.8% customer retention over 9 years - Delivered over 2,000 public-facing government websites as part of our service offering - Created a company I always dreamed about working at -- passionate, personally connected people

- Led all promotional efforts and worked with the development team to realise customer benefits - Used the Adobe Suite relentlessly to create beautiful, effective sales and marketing collateral - Wrote copy for news releases, website redevelopment, product booklets and technical guides - Taught graphic design to students as part of a partnership with the Edmonton Digital Arts School

- Led a team that redeveloped a single instance real estate application into a multitenant web application - Reconciled multiple unique, municipal MLS database systems into a single database system - Distributed private MLS to thousands of customers through over 400 custom-branded realtor portals - Wrote copy for news releases, website redevelopment, product booklets and technical guides - Assisted in business development and front-end design and development activities for realtor customers

- Developed an enterprise content management system for the head of the University - Powered over 2,000 pages of content by 64 different departments - Remained in use at the University until 2006

Studied business and technology