In March 2023, Vertus Group acquired PVX Plus Technologies Ltd. (“PVX”), a business focused on providing developers with the tools to keep up with the ever-changing technological landscape. The following May, Ryan Watt joined PVX as General Manager with a wealth of experience running small businesses across multiple industries including Manufacturing and FinTech.

As part of Watt’s vision for PVX, the goal is to preserve and build on the many successful elements of the business – its dedicated employees, innovative technology, and loyal customers – while introducing modern updates. A key part of this modernization is the launch of PVX’s brand new website, featuring a Knowledge Center, Client Hub, and much more.

We sat down with Ryan to learn more about his passion for small business and what his experience has been running PVX within the larger Vertus Group ecosystem.

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Tell us about your background.

So, I started off my career with a large Canadian corporation, but after about seven or eight years I realized I had a real passion for small business. I left the corporate world and went and worked for a start-up manufacturing company and ran that business for a number of years. Then I was looking for a new challenge, love technology, and so moved over and ran a FinTech company, which we grew and ultimately sold. After my transition there, I was looking for my next opportunity, and the opportunity at Jonas Software [Vertus Group’s parent organization] came up.

Where does your interest in small business come from?

You get to wear multiple hats, you get to do a lot of different interesting work, and for me, the work that you do has an immediate impact. I found that when I was working in a large corporation, if I came and gave 120% every single day, or whether I was a less valuable employee, it had very minimal effect on the bottom line.

I spoke about this with a mentor of mine, and he said, “Listen, there's just two ways to look at it. Either you want to be a cog in a much larger wheel, and you want to be part of this massive growth engine of a huge corporation, or you want to be more direct, like see the work that you do have immediate value in the business.”

There's no right or wrong answer to that. It's just for me, small business was the right solution.

Why did you choose to join PVX Plus and the Vertus Group?

I have followed the Constellation Software [Vertus Group and Jonas Software’s parent company] story for my entire life. I've always been fascinated by how it's grown and how it's this group of smaller companies that all come together to be able to form this much larger organization.

After selling my last company, I was looking for kind of that next opportunity and met with the Vertus Group. The PVX business had recently been acquired, and so there was an opportunity there. I love technology and wanted to get more on the software development side of things, and it ended up just being a perfect fit.

Give us a brief overview of PVX Plus Technologies’ mission.

PVX Plus is a development language and toolset. We have our own development environment where businesses can come in and build a business application using our toolset and our language.

Our customers are in a number of different verticals. We have customers in Club, Construction, Hotels, Warehouse Logistics, 3PL, and so on and so on. They are able to use our language and our toolset to be able to build out their application to solve problems for their customers.

What do you find rewarding about your role?

The thing I find the most rewarding is working with people. When Vertus acquired PVX Plus, there was an incredible team of very loyal employees. Getting to know them, learning from their experience and their knowledge has been absolutely amazing.

And then going out and meeting the customers. What is amazing about PVX Plus is it's very, very far-reaching. We have customers from all corners of the world, and so getting to know our distributor network, our reseller network, and getting down to the actual customers has just been an incredible experience of just learning how far-reaching this business is.

How has Vertus Group helped PVX overcome challenges?

I love working in small business, but one of the challenges I've always found in small business is that it is a small business. There are only so many resources available to you.

Where Vertus has been able to significantly help support PVX Plus and the other businesses that are within the portfolio is you now have these additional resources that when you do have a challenge, you have an incredible network of people to talk to about those challenges and come up with really good solutions.

The knowledge within Vertus is incredible, and I'm always a fan of learning from experiences, whether they're my experiences or someone else's experiences. So far what I've found is whenever I come to the group with a challenge, they have already experienced this challenge and have a way to work through it and what the results were based on the decisions they made.

What are the benefits of being acquired by Vertus Group?

Definitely sharing best practices and support. I stress on that support side again because I've been in the small business world where you don't have that additional support, and it can slow you down in some ways because you are not able to access information quick enough.

Vertus has an incredible team that is there to support all of their businesses, and so whether that be from an HR standpoint, a finance standpoint, a strategic standpoint, or a marketing standpoint, we're no longer having to deal with all of these challenges within PVX Plus.

We're able to leverage the resources that we have within the Vertus group to be able to move our projects forward.

What excites you about the future?

I think PVX Plus has an incredible future in front of it and it has an incredible legacy behind it. It was started nearly 40 years ago, and a gentleman named Mike King has been the technical visionary for this business for 40 years and has left the business in very good hands with Vertus.

We have an incredible customer base that we're going to continue to be able to support, we're going to be able to bring in some new technologies, some new ideas, and modernize a lot of pieces in the business to be able to support our customers and solve their pain points.

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