Judi Hess had already sold one company to a giant before she walked into Copperleaf.
She was a software engineer at MacDonald Dettwiler in the 1980s, then rose to president of Creo, the Vancouver-area printing technology company. In 2005 Eastman Kodak bought Creo for almost US$1bn. Most people would have stopped there. Instead, in 2009, she joined a smaller Vancouver company called Copperleaf as CEO.
Copperleaf built a way to rank every possible project by value and risk, and to show the board why.
Copperleaf had begun in 2000 as a consultancy. By the late 2000s it was turning into a software maker, and the transition mattered more than anything else. Consultants sell hours. Software sells the same idea again and again. Its product helps utilities, pipelines and infrastructure owners decide which assets to repair or replace first, and when, with a limited budget.
It is easy to underrate how dull and how large that problem is. A power utility owns thousands of transformers and lines. Money for upgrades is never enough. Copperleaf built a way to rank every possible project by value and risk, and to show the board why. The company later said its software helped manage more than US$2.9 trillion in assets around the world.
What almost nobody outside the industry saw was how long the climb took. It spent more than twenty years from the first consultancy to a stock market listing. In October 2021 Copperleaf went public on the Toronto exchange at C$15 a share, raising C$140.1m. Orders reached about C$1.4bn, and the Globe and Mail put its market value at C$1.78bn, making it one of the few female-led Canadian tech firms with a ten-figure valuation.
The next chapters came fast. Hess moved to vice-chair and chief strategist, handing the chief executive role to enterprise sales veteran Paul Sakrzewski. In June 2024 IFS agreed to buy the company, and the deal closed that year at C$12 a share, about C$1bn. That was below the IPO price. IFS said it would keep investing in Vancouver.
The arc is unusual. Someone who had already helped build and sell one company chose to build another. Then she stepped back from the chair when a sales-led leader could take it further. For founders the useful lesson may be the quiet one: knowing which stage of a company you are best at is a skill, and stepping aside at the right moment is part of it.