A conversation with Bryan Statham, Co-Founder, CEO, LifeBooster Inc. www.lifebooster.ca
Tell me about yourself and your journey to this point. How did you decide to start the company?
Entrepreneurship and business were ingrained in me throughout childhood: my mother was a strong business person and my father was a successful entrepreneur. I knew from a young age that I would become an entrepreneur myself solving problems to help protect people and ensure they were safe.
With that goal in mind, I studied biomedical sciences and was focused on becoming a medical practitioner. Upon graduating, I felt I was missing something... adventure! So, I travelled, working in clinics, hospitals, orphanages, and various care facilities to support myself. When I returned, I worked in a number of different industries from warehousing operations to hospitality to investment banking. I learned how to drive a forklift, motivate people, manage teams, and negotiate deals. Success was always dependent on the quality of the team and our ability to work well together.
During those years, I missed the passion I had helping others while travelling abroad. I also suffered back strains and tendonitis on-the-job. Many of my close friends and family members had worked in demanding industrial environments and they too were seriously injured on-the-job. The devastating physical, emotional, and financial impacts of these injuries resonated with me deeply as I felt strongly that all of these injuries were preventable. I asked myself: “How can we stop these injuries from happening in the first place?”
This observation and frustration with the current state of worker safety in an industrial setting led to the creation of LifeBooster and its connected worker and risk analytics platform. The experiences I had managing warehouse and hospitality operations gave me deep knowledge and insights about the “what”, “how” and “why” of workplace health and safety. Today, we are a market leader in Digital Safety Technology – helping to ensure that every worker goes home safe every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Our vision is to be the trusted provider of real-time worker risk and safety analytics offering a comprehensive view of multivariate injury risk data to industrial employers.
Who are your Customers / Prospective Customers - What do they do?
LifeBooster is operating at the intersection of industrial IoT, insurtech and data analytics. We are serving all sectors of the industrial economy, especially essential service sectors such as energy, manufacturing, utilities, and logistics.
Our value to our customers flows from the shop floor to the boardroom. Employees gain confidence knowing they are safe and protected on-the-job. Safety Managers gain visibility and presence onsite, allowing them to digitally assess the workplace and scale their capabilities to drive effective programs and injury prevention. Employers benefit from reduced costs for workplace injuries, such as medical and insurance costs, and indirect costs related to lost time / productivity losses and administrative burden.
What Solution / Technology are you using to meet your Customers’ needs?
We have developed Senz, a connected worker and risk analytics platform. It pairs an industrial-grade wearable multi-sensor platform with a cloud-based analytics engine that delivers risk assessments in near real-time.
LifeBooster is also developing a suite of risk modules that address different types of risk in industrial work environments. Today, our risk modules include ErgoSenz (ergonomic assessment) and ThermalSenz (heat stress risk).
We have validated our core business model and the value of our technology through a series of deployments with Fortune 500 employers across a range of target industries. We have also partnered with one of the top workers’ compensation insurers globally. We collaborate and partner with global risk consultancies. Further validation has come through our customers experience: continuing reduction of injury risk exposure in the workplace.
What differentiates your company from the competition?
LifeBooster offers a multi-sensor, multivariate comprehensive injury risk solution - capable of assessing a multitude of risk types simultaneously – whereas competitors typically are single-sensor and/or single injury solutions. We have intelligence on all forms of workplace injuries and embed this knowledge in our data and analytics platform.
Fundamentally, we are a data analytics platform company and not a wearables company: wearable devices offer us the ability to obtain worker safety and risk data, which we analyze with machine learning and provide to our industrial customers for business decisions and risk mitigation. Employees who feel safe on-the-job are going to produce at a higher level and continue working. Employers who respect this important reality gain a more productive workforce and minimize operational disruptions.
Randy Fisher, MA, BJ, is a communications and market research professional with experience in business writing, customer interviewing, media relations and storytelling. His experience in customer discovery and validation and education helps firms accelerate adoption and rapidly penetrate new markets. https://www.linkedin.com/in/customerdiscoverypros/ He teaches business and proposal writing and interview skills at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He began his career in Vancouver and worked as a business journalist with The Globe and Mail, Financial Post and CBC Radio.
