Amit Arora, Chapeau: Turning Away Work AI Can Already Do

My name is Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA and your host at Growth Tales. Today my guest is Amit Arora, president of Chapeau, a Toronto-based digital product studio where Amit has been building for almost a decade. Chapeau doesn't just build apps, they help organizations get more value out of what they already have. They take companies from idea to shipped product, everything from UX design to full-stack development, and even more recently, AI-driven systems that give you more out of your current tech stack. Chapeau has worked with many big names, including McMaster University, Fidelity, Molson Coors, and more. Amit spent almost a decade helping some of Canada's biggest brands figure out how to turn their existing data and systems into products that people actually want to use. I'm excited to dig into how they built the business. What's changed in the last few years with AI and where Chapeau is headed?

Thank you so much for joining me today on Growth Tales. Thanks, Mike, for having me. Beyond excited. Amazing. And Amit, I wanted to first just kick things off with what inspired you to get involved with Chapeau? Were you always entrepreneurial in terms of what you wanted to do in your career? How did this all get started? I've been a computer geek since I was a little child, tinkering with x86 computers in my parents' basement. I was lucky my dad was in technology, and he'd bring all these old computers home and say, "Amit, take this apart. Build it." Remember when you know all these computers had video cards and audio cards and network cards? So I was lucky enough to get exposed really early in my childhood in that. And I thank my grade six teacher for introducing us in grade six during lunch breaks to what a business means. He allowed our grade six class instead of going out for recess at lunch to make our own popsicle selling business. He printed business cards for every kid in the class. We each had a job and a responsibility. And between that exposure and my dad, you know, introducing me to technology. It's been my passion. And I started my first business when I was at Queen's University. I learned how to build networks and, you know, wireless networking was just coming out. Back in the day, I'm aging myself a bit here and the students didn't know how to set up routers in their houses. And so you have the student ghetto of Queen's kids who want to get connected, not through all of these wires running through their old house, but wireless networks. So we launched Tech Pro. I still own that name. Wow. And Me and my brother actually would go around and set up wireless networks at the Queen's ghetto. That was my first business. Wow. So you this going all the way back to university? So how did you have time to do that when you were still studying and, like, how did you how did you find the time to do that? I was in the computer program there and my younger brother was in the commerce program. So he was my marketing guy. He would give me the clients, and he's like, Amit, these guys need your help. Can you go set up their network? And it was really a compressed setup during, you know, Frosh Week when they're all moving into their new houses and having computer trouble after that. So between frosh parties and buying books, I paid for it all through setting up wireless networks.

That is an early start to entrepreneurship. So you did that at Queen's. Where did you go from there? Like where did you start out your career post-Queen's? My first summer job was after my first year. I had to make the decision of do I do hardware because that's what I was exposed to, you know, networking, wireless networks, building computers, or do I do software? That's the program I was in. I was learning to code, and I was looking for a summer job, and I stumbled across this awesome entrepreneur named Robert Madej. He gave me the first shot, and he hired me to build an importer for a CRM. Little did he know, and I think I've shared it now that I had no idea what I was doing. So I took that summer job and tinkered with coding, and that was my first introduction into coding, and I didn't progress naturally into my own business. I was actually under the wing of a great mentor and advisor, Rob, for several years. So much so that I went back for my second year and third year summer terms to work with him. The company was called Link Stuff and I graduated and he was kind enough to give me a full-time job coming out of school. So I got super lucky and he took me under the wing for the better part of a decade. And so for the first ten years of my career, I was in a wealth tech company. Rob launched PureFacts Financial Solutions, and he let me kind of pick up all these loose ends, all the different roles. I wanted to learn about being a BA, to learn about being a project manager, wanted to learn about sales. And when the company is only seven people, He gave me that opportunity. So that was the first decade of my career before actually getting into the Chapeau world. So that obviously gave you a groundwork of just seeing how a company runs. You obviously had software, a coding background, curiosity with computers and networks obviously going all the way back to being a kid. How did you get involved with Chapeau? How did that all get started?

So in 2017, I was actually part of the PureFacts family. I was running delivery there, and we made our first acquisition of a consulting firm and part of the integration of that firm. What we did was we rolled the better part of that business into PureFacts. But the company we acquired actually had some great customers that were not in the financial services space. And this is, again, where having a great mentor and advisor mattered. Rob gave me the opportunity to spin out all of those clients and take two people, and we spun out Chapeau, and it became a spin-out back in 2018. Amazing. And what problem were you trying to solve at that point? Because you had a few clients, you had a development background. You had a small team. What was the initial thesis of what you guys were trying to solve with that small team? We went back to the roots of software developers trying to solve problems with technology. The two clients we had back then had hired us to design and develop custom products for them. And what we had to figure out was, all right, this is a spin-up, but what do we want Chapeau to be? Where do we want to take it? Where do we see the opportunity? And that's where we focused on, I would say actually we didn't focus. We had so many different ideas. We're like, let's go Salesforce. That's a big problem. Everyone wants help implementing Salesforce. Oh look, someone wants help with managed IT. My background on the hardware side, we're like okay, let's try that. Another person would be like, hey, you guys know creative side, can you help me with marketing? And we're like, sure. And so we would just take on what we can because we had experience in so many different fields and the first couple of years for us were really about finding where we excelled and where we didn't. And so we quickly crossed off. Okay, Salesforce is its own business. Marketing is its own business. Managed IT is its own business. Let's stick to our core: designing and developing custom products for mid-sized companies that can't find something off the shelf. We will integrate with their ecosystem because they've already made some investments in some technology, but they have gaps that they can't find a plug-and-play solution off the shelf.

That's where we found our sweet spot. And how did you come to that decision, given how wide and large a market that is? Because as you as you know, there's businesses that are not tech companies that try to build tech and it goes to the graveyard because it's just a kid and terrible. There's big enterprises that just don't have the resources because they're kind of enterprise level, and they just don't have the wherewithal to build specialized tools. And then you've got even technology companies that just don't have maybe the capital to build a big enough team to tackle all their projects and problems. How did you narrow down that specific, like element of where you guys were going to focus that? Because there's just so many companies that need product development. Like, like at least from my standpoint of thinking of all the different avenues you could go. It took us time to work with various industries to realize where we could play. We were a small company based out of Toronto. There are two things I would say, two parts to it. One thing that differentiated us was we realized engineers are like the right side of the brain, the problem solvers. But engineers can solve really complex problems. They're not thinking about how people may use the technology. They just want to solve the problem. And they know technology can solve it. So we brought the left side of the brain to the table. The user experience, the creative folks. So I brought on a whole team that couldn't code. They just knew users. They knew people who were going to interact with the technology. And so we went to market looking for who needs a solution that's outward facing, not something that's an internal CRM or an internal SharePoint, any of that stuff internal. We said, okay, there's businesses that focus on that. Let's focus on client experience. And so that further narrowed our scope. And then the second part was we've had exposure to so many different industries. Where do we want to focus? And having spent the better part of a decade of my career in the wealth technology space, we realized that this regulated environment where security, privacy. Compliance needs, that was somewhere where people brought in experts. They realized that internally, they couldn't build a solution that may fit all of the compliance needs. Let's focus on regulated environments. So bringing client experience into regulated environments can sometimes almost feel like a clash. And so we could help think about the customer in a heavily regulated environment.

Yeah. And building for once you figure that out and now you have that ICP. I'm also curious about how you developed as as an entrepreneur, like you're now president of a company. You spent a lot. You've had an entrepreneurial journey up to this point. You've had Rob as a mentor, but now you're like building your own team, which comes with HR issues, hiring, firing, capacity planning, which projects to take on. How has the shift been, being able to manage people and build a team and a culture? What has that been like? Because it sounded like from your Queen's University days, you're kind of on your own or working with your brother, but now you're like building a company. What has that been like, and what were those early stages like? Yeah, absolutely. It's fun to wear all those different hats, not only all the things you mentioned. And then you think about the financial side and the legal side and all of that. The one thing that I learned in the early days was try not to do it all myself and be the best at everything. Gathering a group of great people around me and having whether it's advisors or people I can lean on to learn from. And so I learned what I was good at early and what I wasn't good at early, and so quickly found partners in the spaces that I wasn't good at. So fractional people were one of the strategies. So, you know, legal stuff. I'm not going to even try that. Let's find some great lawyers that can come in. That's where I met you. It was amazing. I was like, I'm finance is not my thing, but bookkeeping and accounting. I quickly reached out to ConnectCPA in the early days of our ventures took a big burden off of me not having to figure out all that complexity and having that tax advice. And same with sales. I would say sales was the biggest hat I had to wear. Being a technology guy, sales wasn't my forte. But to this date, that's probably the biggest hat I still wear and had to learn. And I learned by talking to a lot of people. Reading a couple of books and and learning from those around me. Finding some inspirational leaders. You brought up books. I'm curious about that. What books have you read, if you can think of any on the spot, that had an impact? There's a couple of books, I would say one, a from a people perspective. You mentioned HR early days as you have a team of three people and you have to grow. We sat down and figured out what, you know, what are the key traits that we're looking for and the team you want to have. And so the book that comes out is The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni. And he introduced the concept of humble, hungry and smart. And those three attributes in a team. So if you have two out of those three, if a team player is two out of the three, they're going to clash with the others. And so having a balance and making sure each person in the early days hit, you know, all three of those attributes was very important. Hungry someone who wants to learn and wear more than one hat humble that they're not trying to take all the credit. And being a team player and you know, winning. But winning as a team and smart. Not IQ necessarily, but the EQ side, it was super important, especially in the technology space. You can find a lot of people with really high IQ, but if they don't have that EQ and playing nicely with clients and teammates again would lead to a clash. So that's probably the first book that I read in the early days from an HR perspective, because that was a new thing I had to learn. Yeah, I think that's a great book. I love Patrick Lencioni, like he's got a whole series of books and all of them are quite amazing. They're also short reads, which makes them really great. And it's funny because like, humble is one of our core values as well. And I think if you were to narrow it down, you're describing like, hey, are these people that want to go get a drink with or like go have a beer with and like hang out with and especially on a small team. I think it's like having those things is really important. Yeah, I want to fast forward to now though. So how big is the team right now? And I'm going to ask you in a second about what you guys are working on. But how big is the team right now?

We're small. We're still 15 people. And I would say the last two years, because of the advancement of technology, I haven't had to hire. It's funny. How big is your team? I feel like a couple of years ago it was like headcount, headcount, headcount because you needed people for output. But the advancements of AI like that team can output multiples of what they used to be able to two years ago. Oh, believe me, I think at least, at least for, like, there's been a shift. And I'm going to ask you this too. Is the focus in your business on growth or profit? What would what would you say is more of a North Star for you guys as a business? Profitable growth. We're bootstrapped, which is also different. And so being now eight years into this, many people, after a year or two, after finding their fit, at least I hear is like, oh, okay, let's go get some funding or investors or stuff like that to help accelerate. We decided to stay the steady pace and keep it bootstrapped. So Cash is king. Profitability is key for us, and that ensures that we're selective in the companies we work with. We don't look for the one-and-done kind of projects. We look for long-term partners that we can be their technology partner and grow with them. So that's key for us. I love what you said about it. Used to be it was almost like a brag to be like headcount at all costs because it was normally a signal for growth. Now, with AI and the changes in the market, people are coming, going. I've got a one person team doing like and now it's the opposite of what it was beforehand.

And so I guess it kind of pivots into the question of how is AI affecting your offering, given that you are in software and development? How has AI impacted Chapeau? Over the last six months, we've had to make a pivot. You know, we have a lot of great clients in the mid-market and enterprise side. But through that, we met a lot of great founders who came to us over the last five years or so. asking, hey, can you be the technology partner to start a new company? We have a tech idea. We have a SaaS platform idea. We know the industry, but can you build it for us? And we would build version one of that, that app, and there would be smaller projects. But our approach was we would get in at the ground level and we would grow with them. Over the last six months, I've had a couple of people who had the same great ideas and came to us and said, hey, can you help us build version one? And my suggestion to them was, check out AI and sign up for the $200 package. You might be able to get version one for 200 bucks a month. Now it's phenomenal how fast AI has advanced and that's you know, it's been around for several years, but it's only gotten to, you know, the quality that Chapeau expects since I would say December this past year. Wow. And now that is available, where are you spending your time in terms of your product offering to your customers? Because if they are, let's say, kind of hacking it or vibe coding or doing some element of trying to put together a version one, even if it's not polished, where does Chapeau come into the picture? Our potential entrepreneur-founder partners that we worked with there and that segment of our business have now built version one, and they've now market tested it really quickly. And now they come to us and say, all right, I'm we're ready. We've got a couple of potential prospects, but we know what Claude or Lovable or ChatGPT have created isn't bulletproof. Can you help us get this to enterprise-ready because of the markets they're going for. So that's where our team would come in and look under the hood and do that audit and review the computer-generated user experience and say hey it's pretty good. But here's a couple of good tweaks. So we are still working with those founders in the early stage, but we're helping them get from, let's say, the beta test to the first production-ready app. The other thing that we've done is we've gone upmarket. We're actually probably focused more on the mid-market clients that we work with. They're the ones that are looking for external help. How do we embrace AI and what in our organization can we automate? They're seeing the headlines but don't know where to start. And so we've kind of come in and been their AI consultants for workflow automation or leveraging the data that they have that may be sitting dispersed throughout their ecosystem, building those dashboards or analytics or, you know, models on top of their data. Yeah, I think that's really powerful because I think it's like very similar to our business, where if someone came to me and said, hey, I want to do a personal tax return, I'd tell them, yeah, you probably can do a personal tax return with off-the-shelf software. Where complexity comes in is in the nuance of the entire finance function and how it all works interrelated. But for vibe coding, I've tried to vibe code things myself, but the minute it gets into like databases and security and user permissions and any level of complexity that goes beyond being able to prompt for like 50 hours in a row, I'm going to kind of fall on my face. And I think a lot of businesses have a need to save time, money, energy and get professionalism to get to the finish line on their processes and their workflows and how to use AI effectively.

Who are you finding the most success with in terms of of these like AI-type implementations you guys are doing in the financial services and insurance space? They have a lot of workflows that are running behind the scenes that are manual. It goes into a person's inbox. It requires an administrator to make a phone call or accept a phone call and enter data into two different systems or three different systems. If you think about a cancellation workflow in an insurance space, it touches so many people and so many systems, but it's very well defined. There's a standard operating procedure for what to do. And so it's a perfect opportunity for us to drop an autonomous agent in to accomplish 80% of those tasks automatically. But the 20% that needs judgment gets raised to a human. Still, AI isn't going to take over that job completely. It's going to save them the cumbersome tasks and have them focus on the 20% that requires the thinking. And that's now where we're helping is getting the people at those organizations spending their time on the thinking part, the value that they bring to the organization and help them avoid drowning in the administrative tasks they were doing before.

I want to ask you about AI in general. How do you feel about the future of AI as a leader and as a company? And you've been at it almost a decade, so you've seen a lot like in terms of the economy, technology and technology development. Is it a net positive or net negative? You mentioned teams are going to be downsizing, probably because they can do more with less. What do you think is the overall effect on AI? Is it a good thing, a bad thing? What's your view on it? I think it's just the times that we live in and the amount of news that can be built around a theme like, “Oh no, AI is coming,” but it's no different than when the first PC was introduced or when Excel was introduced. If you think about accountants that were using paper-based ledgers to track all of their debits and credits and they're like, oh, no, Excel's here. We're all out of a job. Excel is going to take it over. Not really. They were just helping the accountants, you know, save on the erasers and ink. And then the accounting platforms came in, Xero and QuickBooks, and, oh, accountants are going to be out of jobs again. So it's just a natural evolution and advancement. It allows accountants to add value instead of worrying about balancing the books and the numbers being incorrect. I think technology and AI is the same. It is taking those mundane tasks off the list, stuff we had to do before so that we can spend more time on the problem-solving aspect. There's a common headline out there. Oh, should kids even be going into computer science anymore? Like, is AI just going to wipe it out? I would say double down on kids going into computer science, because you're going to need the brains behind all this AI. The computer science graduates, the engineers, and the PhDs that are going to be building these AI models and implementing them and putting the guardrails around them. That's a really smart point. I think people forget that understanding first principles is still incredibly important. If you have a tool that's like incredible, like it's all-encompassing intelligence. But you look at Elon Musk with his engineering background and all of the companies like it is knowing, understanding the groundwork of what you're doing gives you an edge because something will go wrong. And that's the problem when you're not technical. I agree with everything you just said. I feel like people are short sighted to just think that you can just open up Wispr Flow, talk into an AI, or just open Claude or ChatGPT and then everything just kind of gets solved for you. What happens when the code is wrong? And it goes back to how Chapeau helps businesses. You have to be technical to get something actually working. It's way harder than people think.

Yeah, absolutely. I recently got asked the question—I have a four-and-a-half-year-old—and they asked, are you going to encourage your son to go through the computer science programs and all that, like what he learns in university, if he chooses to go down that path—the topic doesn't matter, but the problem-solving skills, and learning how to learn. And I think that's a foundation that our kids still need. So yeah, absolutely. It's all about learning and problem-solving and developing those skills. Has having a young, four-and-a-half-year-old ever helped you deal with like disgruntled clients or negotiations? Has that helped you in any way? He's the hardest person to negotiate with. So I've definitely grown my patience with him, that's for sure. But I love it. It's the best thing that could have ever happened to us. Yeah, I have an almost five-year-old as well. That's why I asked the question, because they are the hardest people to negotiate with, I'll tell you that much.

So Amit, one last question for you now. It's been almost a decade of running a business, and you've seen a lot over, over this last decade. You've probably had a lot of challenges as well. Are there any business lessons you could share with other people that you've learned along the way of building Chapeau? The best lesson I've learned is surrounding yourself with great advisors, mentors, and not trying to do it all by yourself. If anything, I feel like I was too slow to join a peer group. For example, I only recently this year joined a professional peer group. I wish I had done that five years ago, but I was lucky enough to have some great advisors in place of that peer group, and mentors. And yeah, that would be the biggest piece is don't try to solve it all yourself. Lean on others, learn from others, and then share what you've learned with others. It's a game of bringing each other up. And if you bring many people up together, you can accomplish a lot more than if you try to do it yourself. Yeah, that's amazing advice. And I want to give you a quick congrats on it for like, you've been building a business like you know what the stats are on businesses surviving ten years. If you saw them before you got involved with Chapeau, you probably would have never started. But now that you guys are, it's almost ten years of you running a business. A big congratulations to you guys for doing that. And you continue to pivot and adapt to the times and technologies. So I appreciate you joining me today, but congrats on what you've built to this point. Oh, thank you, Mike, for having me today. It's been great. And thank you for being one of those advisors for the listeners out there. One of the things I'm happy about is that Mike and I started, every quarter or so, just grabbing a meal together to share ideas about growing businesses. So thank you for being one of those advisors, Mike. Appreciate it. Yeah. Likewise to you as well. And we should continue doing that and grabbing those, grabbing those lunches and sharing stories. But thanks for joining me today, Amit. Thanks, Mike. Really appreciate it. Have a great day. You too.