Bringing Global Experience to Digital & AI Consulting 

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Please tell us about yourself —where you're from, your career, family, interests, and aspirations.

Hi, my name is Mahesh Swami. I'm from Toronto in Canada, but originally from India. I moved to Canada about 28 years ago, and since then I’ve lived in different parts of the country, as well as in the U.S. for about five years.

Prior to coming to Canada, my wife and I lived in Hong Kong, and before that, the Middle East. I was born and brought up in India.

As far as my career is concerned, after having worked in Asia for about eight years, I joined 3M Company after we moved to Canada. Since then, I’ve been with them. I took early retirement about six months ago after 28 years with the company, and I thought long and hard about what my next step would be. Then I got this opportunity to get closer to understanding WSI as well.

I’ve got two children, 27 years old and 21 years old. My interests are in the area of sports. I play a lot of sports — golf, tennis, pickleball, and a little bit of skiing. I also watch a lot of sports: football, cricket, Formula One, and anything really competitive.

My aspirations are, after having a long corporate career, I’m now greatly looking forward to setting up something of my own and making it successful for myself, my family, and the community in general.

What motivated you to explore franchising as the next step in your career?

As I was thinking about what’s next in my career, one of the ideas that came to me was franchising, for a couple of important reasons.

One is, I’ve been working in a corporate world with a lot of systems, processes, people, and structure. Most importantly, I got used to it.

I was thinking about starting something of my own or building up my consultancy, and several other thoughts and ideas came to my mind. But starting anything from scratch is going to take a long time to build up.

So the next best option would be franchising, because there is already a system, a process in place, and a network of people that I could sound out ideas and thoughts with, and get advice from.

The more I thought about it, the more intriguing that idea became. I visited a couple of franchise shows, talked to a number of franchisors, and took a couple of those opportunities to the next step. It looked promising, and I thought this would be a really good fit for me.

The bonus is that we could involve my family as well. Although I didn’t start off thinking that way, it worked out exceedingly great for me.

Why did you choose to join WSI, and what makes it the perfect fit for you?

I chose to join WSI for a number of different reasons.

Firstly, Daniel was awesome. I engaged with him several times over the past six months or so, and he was fantastic. I liked the culture of what he was sharing in terms of their philosophies, the values, what they stand for, their core beliefs, etc. That’s first and foremost. The fit was great.

Secondly, I felt that I have to use all my 30-plus years of experience in whatever I do on my own, and this WSI platform is giving me that perfect opportunity to do just that.

My experience has been in sales, marketing, industries, change management, not just in Canada and the U.S., but globally as well. Hence, this was a perfect opportunity for me in terms of having the structure and the process, yet there is flexibility in terms of who we want to target and how to go about it.

The third reason I would say is that it’s a Canadian company. Given all the stuff that’s going on in the world, my heart is still with Canada and Canadian companies. So this gave me that opportunity.

Last but not least, we could engage in this WSI franchise opportunity along with my son, who’s 27, who’s done a digital marketing program and is a very creative guy. My wife also decided to join us from a support perspective.

So I could use all my skills, my experience, the culture fit, it’s local, and my family could join me in doing this and taking this business to hopefully good levels. Those are the three or four main reasons I chose to join WSI.

What are your primary business goals, and what excites you most about achieving them with WSI’s support?

My primary business goal is to be the top gun. One of the top guns as soon as possible.

All kidding aside, of course, all of us have financial goals that we all want to meet. The milestones, year one, year two, year three, etc. I have those. You want to maximize the time that you have with WSI.

Also, I have other goals that I want to meet, such as I want to give back. I know people say this a lot, but I’ve learned a lot from medium and small businesses throughout my entire career at 3M. Now, it gives me a chance to go back to them and really help them grow their business. That’s one of the big reasons I took this up.

Then I would say it helps me to also leave a legacy, perhaps with my children or anybody else who wants to join.

Lastly, my business goal is also the fact that I want to be able to operate globally. During my career, I’ve traveled extensively on business and built a big network of people around the world. I want to give those people who have worked with me closely an opportunity to become my associates and start doing this as well. So that’s also part of my goals.

What excites me is we are at the cutting edge of marketing and AI, and most businesses, we all know, need that and will continue to need that into the future. Every single business, in fact. And we are in a position to help them along the way.

That’s fabulously exciting for me because staying at the leading edge of technology and business processes, instead of pulling my son, for example, into my old world, old economy world, I want to take a step forward and meet them in their world, and then be able to contribute by bringing all my experience and knowledge that I picked up along the way.