Trent Johnsen comes by his passion for business honestly. He grew up in Calgary listening to his father, Dan Johnsen, spin entertaining Jimmy Pattison yarns at the dinner table.

Yet, Johnsen's path to success has been far different from that of his father, who was one of the senior managers for the Jimmy Pattison Group headed by the Vancouver tycoon.

Johnsen's career has been marked by a flair for entrepreneurship, a reputation for risk taking and an unyielding passion for high tech. Since his business baptism as an entrepreneur in the flower market, the 47-year-old Johnsen has built and sold two technology companies, Bryjon Communications and one-time Calgary dot-com star Offsite Data.

Now he's revving up his career again as chief executive officer of Shift Networks Inc., an emerging player in the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) space. Shift is gearing up with networks serving small businesses in Calgary and Edmonton, but Johnsen is primed for bigger and better things in rolling out the network.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Shift Networks president and CEO Trent Johnsen has come a long way from his early, eclectic jobs, including a stint as a Caribbean boathand.

Which, of course, is the Jimmy Pattison way.

1. To what career did you aspire as a youngster?

"When I finished high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I spent a couple of years in the Caribbean (Bahamas) working on boats. I lived in Lake Louise and skied for a year. I was a guitar player and singer in bars and lounges in Lake Louise and Banff. I cowboy'd on ranches for a couple of years. So I kind of had an eclectic start to things. When I went to the Caribbean to work on the boats, it really brought me to a realization that you could go out and do something that seemed to be outside the realm of your own possibility. I remember coming home and saying, 'Wow, that was terrific.' It really helped me realize that if you really decide to do something, you've moved a significant percentage of the way towards doing it."

2. What's your favourite Jimmy Pattison anecdote?

"My dad spent about two years disposing of all of the manufactured housing and recreational vehicle assets of the Pattison Group. Then, dad got a call from Jimmy. He told my dad, 'Open Road (a recreational vehicle manufacturer) is for sale in California and I'd like you to go down and buy them.' My dad said, 'Jimmy, I just spent two years disposing of those assets, so what are we doing?' Jimmy said, 'It's listed with the Banc of America and, if we buy that company, I'm going to get an hour meeting with the Banc of America.' So you kind of got to see Jimmy's strategy and the value of his network. He also chaired Expo '88 for $1 but, as a result of that, Jimmy spent Expo '88 entertaining world leaders at his home and on his boat in Vancouver."

3. What did your father teach you about business?

"He is a tremendous manager and administrator. And I think he enjoys a high degree of control and is somewhat risk averse, whereas I'm the opposite. I'm entrepreneurial and keep increasing the risk for growth opportunities. But, by virtue of having him as my father, I learned the value of good controls and accurate and current financial reporting. He is very, very disciplined with regard to accurate monthly financials by the 10th of the month. I really came to appreciate the value of that. But I never wanted to work for Jimmy Pattison. I consider myself almost unemployable. I just don't want to work for anybody. I paid my way through university as a bartender, but I think the bartender runs the bar so it doesn't feel like you're working for anybody."

4. What do you remember about your first business venture?

"It was in wholesale cut flowers. I did a business project in my fourth year of university (at the University of Calgary) on a business (Flower Market) where a guy (Chris Hannam) was importing fresh-cut flowers. When I finished that project, I gave him a copy of it. He called me and asked me to give him a hand with the business. I lent the business some money, took a 50-per-cent interest and we grew that business from about $30,000 annually to about a half million dollars annually in the first eight to 12 months. We pioneered the retail flower programs for Co-op and Safeway in Calgary. It's now called Minnaar Canada. Chris Hannam was a fabulous entrepreneur. We cut our teeth on that business. I eventually sold my interest to take over a company called Bryjon Communications (in 1986)."

5. What was the experience of running Bryjon like?

"That was fabulous. That was really my foundational business experience. Bryjon became one of the largest wireless text-messaging companies on the continent at one point. I have a real passion and enthusiasm for emerging technologies. There were good paging companies in Calgary when I got into that, but they were all focused on voice pagers. So we bet on this new generation of text-messaging pagers. We had phenomenal growth in the late '80s."

6. You started Offsite Data in 1996 while running Bryjon. What motivated you?

"At Bryjon, we were having trouble with data storage. As I thought about the challenges we were having protecting our mission-critical data, I thought, 'I wish there was some way I could offload my computer data to a secure location via a data connection.' I thought that was a concept that had some legs. So, I partnered with a friend of mine who was a business development guy and we found a third guy who was a technical developer and we started developing technology to compress and migrate files over dial-up connections.

Then, we came across a Calgary group that had developed, successfully installed and sold the best enterprise storage-management software in the world to about 50 of the Fortune 100 corporations globally. That company was called Harbor. We did a licensing deal to use their storage management software. Then we were able to go out to small businesses and allow them to use the Internet to automatically back up and store their data. It was a great business model."

7. How do you reflect on the $62-million takeover of Bryjon by Nasdaq-listed tech security company Jawz Technology?

"Jawz approached us because they wanted to get secure information storage and backup. They offered us $1.20 US in November of '99 (Offsite Data went public earlier that year at 25 cents). We did a share exchange ratio so that we would enjoy any lift in their stock over the 90 days it would take to close the deal. When the deal closed at the end of January 2000, Jawz stock was at $12 US. So my 25-cent investors from April of '99 (when Offsite went public) were selling stock north of $4 from November through the spring of 2000. The gross valuation of Offsite in the sale was a little north of $62 million Cdn."

8. How many shares did you own?

"I had 1.2 million shares, so my equity in that deal was worth a little north of $8 million. To give you an idea of what those days were like: In December of '99 I was a guest of Jawz at the Waldorf Astoria (hotel) in Manhattan. They had a Lincoln Town car waiting for me when I arrived. I did three meetings for them talking about the storage industry with midtown Manhattan brokerages and I raised $10 million Cdn in one business day in Manhattan. Unreal!" 9. How did the sale of Offsite look a couple of years later after the dot-com crash?

"(Laughing) Great, but I'm still a workin' man. I had a really good balance sheet in 2000 but I still wanted to go out and do corporate finance and work with emerging technology companies. I got some of the money out of the deal, but I didn't realize the entire $8 million. I sold all the shares I could, but could only sell 10 to 15 per cent of what I held. The company (Jawz) didn't survive. After working with Jawz for a year (as executive vice-president), I starting working in consulting with emerging technology companies and the second or third company that I ended up working with was Shift Networks in the summer of 2001."

10. What kind of a company was Shift then?

"They had defined what was then called a business local exchange carrier model. They were going to use a new generation of equipment to deliver a combined business telephone line and Internet access to small business. And I was totally smitten. When I walked into Shift, the founder, a nice young guy named Keith Young, said, 'Trent, look at this, you can use broadband Internet connections to deliver telephone lines to business with the Internet.' And I thought, 'Holy smokes!' Small and medium-sized businesses are a fabulous part of the marketplace. Telecommunications services are their third-largest expenditure. The telephone companies are the kind of companies that I like to compete against. At first, I thought I'd freelance and work with a variety of companies. But then I met Shift and realized I liked operating and growing companies. And Shift is just so cool. The last telephone company that was built in Canada was Group Telecom (which was acquired by Bell Canada in 2004). They had a great business model, but they needed to spend $3 billion to try and be in that business and have telephone switches and so on. I'm in the same business that Group Telecom was in, but I can grow the business nationally and have coast-to-coast, top-quality business line services in all of the major markets in Canada for under $20 million. It's just phenomenal what this new generation of technology can do. It's a profound paradigm shift. It's just amazing."

11. With energy companies dominating the markets, tech companies and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) aren't getting a lot of attention, are they?

"Yeah, the tech sector just blew up so badly and people are prudent and cautious. And I don't blame them. It's their money. But you'll see it again and my question is why we weren't buying oil at $12.

And why we weren't buying Internet stocks when we saw what (emerging Internet company) Netscape did in '96.

And there's an IP (Internet protocol) revolution about to take place. Am I ever glad that I'm a shareholder in an IP-based company. I do think the technology sector will re-establish its credibility and I think it's made some great progress. In this part of the world, people are doing so well with investments in energy and I don't blame them for being there. I'm there, too. I'm an investor in energy and it's been wonderful."

12. What's your strategy in building Shift?

"We're close to being able to open in Vancouver (its third market after Calgary and Edmonton). We anticipate opening in Toronto in Q1 (first quarter) of 2006. What we're really looking to do is build a new national communications business and focus very specifically on small businesses with locations that have five to 100 employees. We actually have looked at some opportunities in the U.S. because the business model works as well in the U.S. But I'm very much leaning towards just building a national carrier here right now."

13. Where do you want to see this company positioned five years from now?

"I draw a lot of comparisons between what Clive Beddoe has been able to do with WestJet (as founder and CEO) and our opportunity. Clive was able to enter the market because of deregulation in the airline industry. He had two lumbering incumbents, Air Canada and Canadian (Airlines), who were extremely inefficient. Clive's in a breakfast club with me. People were always asking him, 'How are you going to compete with Air Canada, the monopoly?' Clive would say, 'I'm not competing with Air Canada, I'm competing with the price of gas and bus tickets.' He went downmarket to serve an underserved market. And Shift is serving a similar market. Shift's average customer has 11 employees. That's a huge percentage of businesses and they are not well served by the telephone companies. If Shift grows to a few hundred million dollars in revenue over the next five years, it's a massive growth success story. In the East, Telus has launched a service called IP-One and it's somewhat similar to our technology. I think it's probably more applicable to companies with 50 employees and up, whereas probably 80 per cent of what we do will be 50 employees and down."

14. What sets your product apart from others in the VoIP space?

"What we drive for is to make the same enterprise functionality that you would get if you were at the Bank of Nova Scotia or Boeing and you bought Cisco IP technology.

"We've been able to make the economics of providing those features and functionality of VoIP work for companies with five to 10 people. It's very feature-rich, it's very easy to use and it moves a tremendous amount of control to the user. So if you had a business with five to 10 people and you were a Shift customer today, you could open up the browser, log in and install a new telephone line for yourself in the next three minutes. Telus can't do that today. When I showed that to a past president of Bell and Bell Mobility in Ontario, he stood up from his chair and said, 'holy crap!' One of my customers has more control over their business communications than Darren Entwistle (Telus CEO) has over his with his 28,000 employees. It's just a phenomenal new generation of technology."

15. How many subscribers do you have?

"We're over 1,000 subscribers, which represents in the range of 100 companies today. We're enjoying some phenomenal growth quarter over quarter. I got an e-mail last night from our technology partners in Ottawa who do some traffic monitoring. We exceeded our first million calls in late June and now they're telling us we're close to two million calls. So it took us about a year to put a million calls through the system and it has taken us 90 days to move to two million calls. So I really think we'll see some phenomenal growth over the course of the next 15 months. We're so tiny with only a thousand subs (subscribers) through the last quarter, but if you look around the industry, Shift is one of the largest, fastest-growing hosted service providers for business on the continent right now. We're an early leading player in this space."

16. What's your outlook for VoIP?

"People who are doing a lot more research than me and who speak with a lot more authority are suggesting that pretty much all of our phone calls will be made over some form of Internet protocol technology within 60 months. There's a $35-billion telecom market in Canada and $6 or $7 billion of that is small and medium business. One hundred per cent of that market will convert over to IP services within the next five to six years. So the unknown is who will get it."

17. How difficult is it to raise capital in this tech market?

(Laughing) It's been the most character-building experience I've ever had.

It's just been awful. I think people think I'm absolutely crazy for having been in telecom for the past four years and there were moments when I thought they were right. But now I'm going, 'This is it, this is one of those huge paradigm shifts.' And is it ever fun to be here. We recently finished a private placement, as we seem to do on a quarterly basis now, to support our working capital. But I cannot believe how the level of interest and the tone of the investment banking community has changed for me now. I'm now getting solicited, particularly by Toronto investment bankers who are offering to raise money for the company, and I have some significant works in progress to fund our expansion needs into Eastern Canada through 2006."

18. How would you describe your leadership style?

"The two core things that I think are critically important are integrity and perseverance. I think what has helped me is that I've been lucky enough to work with things that I get very excited and enthusiastic about. Probably one of my fundamental skills is sales, but (that) has tended to manifest itself in the ability to bring really smart, energetic people to come and work for me.

If I think you can help our organization in some way, very often I can get you excited about the business and get you convinced to throw in with us and help us. At Offsite, I had just an incredible team of people to work with and the same thing's beginning to happen at Shift."

19. Have you managed some sort of balance between business and personal life?

"I have a very, very balanced life. I'm a huge family-first guy. My wife (Lorie) and I have been together 27 years. We got married in 1987, but we were together long before that. We have two children.

For the past five years, I've spent the entire month of August at our home on the Shuswap (Lake). And I'm almost always at the dinner table at six o'clock with the kids."

20. Ten years from today, where will you be and what will you be doing?

"Ten years from today, I would like to be involved with some sort of social activism, working on general quality of life issues. This (running a company) is so much fun and hopefully this is not my last deal, but I'd like to find an effective means of getting involved in some social activism. I don't want to be a politician, but I would love to be working for the greater good and applying what I've learned in my business network in Canada. I think that the creative arts is the highest form of human endeavour. To ink a good line or paint or write good music, that's good stuff to me."

Trent Johnsen

* Title: President/CEO, Shift Networks Inc.

* Born/raised/age: Calgary/47.

* Education: University of Calgary, bachelor of arts (economics).

* Family: Wife Lorie, two children.

* Career: Johnsen began his entrepreneurial career as a partner with Flower Market in 1983. He sold his interest in Flower Market in 1986 and became a partner with Bryjon Communications, which he ran until 1999. He was also president and CEO of Offsite Data until it was acquired by Jawz Technology in 2000. Johnsen has been CEO of Shift since 2001.

* Moonlighting: Johnsen is a director of Rare Method Capital Corp. and a director of Junior Achievement of Canada.

* Pastimes: Reading, playing the guitar.

* Boyhood idol: Jimmy Buffett.

* Favourite author: John Irving.

Shift Networks Inc.

* Brass: Trent Johnsen, president/CEO; Rick Unrau, chief operating officer/chief financial officer.

* Profile: Shift provides digital business-class voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) to small businesses. VoIP is designed to run business telephone systems through computer networks, using Internet connections. Shift's service, which includes features such as caller ID, call forwarding, three-way calls and e-mail, was launched in Calgary and Edmonton in June of 2004 and is scheduled to be online in Vancouver in the near future.

* Stock Price (TSXV: SHF): $0.15 (52-week range, .

$0.06-$0.20).

* Web Watch: www.shiftnetworks.com

* Head Office/Phone: #301, 630 8 Ave. S.W., Calgary, T2P 1G6/ 403-770-7443.

* Edmonton Office: Suite 1020, 10250 101 St., T5J 3P4/780-702-5850.

(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)