295: $30M to $2M in 18 Months: How to Lead When Everything Falls Apart

0:00Today's episode contains some strong language and conversations around controlled substances and bereavement. Aedan Fida's company turned over$30 million in 2021. By 2024, that was down to$2 million. And somehow, that's not even the most interesting part of his story. Hold on, did I get this right? You said$50 ,000,$1.5 million. Did you go$1.5 million to$30 million in 12 months?

0:27Aedan Fida:Yep. we're going to get into the mistake period or not really the mistake period. That's not fair. We'll call it the deep learning. And so in 2023, we we did 10 million in sales and 2024, that number dropped all the way down to two. So 2021 is 30. 2024 is two. And so we just are struggling here. The pressure from the different sides, trying to balance that pressure while keeping your eyes clear and straight ahead. Aidan is the CEO of Blade Air, Forbes 30 under 30, EY Entrepreneur of the Year, and one of the most honest founders you'll hear talk about what it actually feels like when the company you built starts falling apart.

1:14Today he tells us how he went from sleeping in his car building air purifiers to a 30 million dollar company to watching his revenue drop off a cliff and what leading a team through that actually looks like. But did he give up? Of course not. This is Aidan Fieder we're talking about. He rebuilt and had the humility to learn the lessons and rebuild Blade Air so it's poised to revolutionize the industry yet again. Do not bet against this man. Maybe you're a founder. Maybe you work for one. Maybe you're thinking of becoming one. Either way what Aidan shares today is the stuff most founders only admit in private, if at all.

1:53Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne and I'm a chartered occupational psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner and we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Our guest today, Aidan Fieder, is the CEO of Blade Air, a Canadian clean air technology company. He started it in a basement in 2017 with his brothers and a business school friend building carbon filters for cannabis growers.

2:23By 2021, he had a$20 million school board contract, not for growing cannabis, 25 ,000 square feet of manufacturing space, and a team that had managed to scale building 50 units a week to 1 ,250. And then the pandemic ended. What follows is one of the most candid accounts of founder life we've heard on this show. The acquisitions that nearly broke them, the moment revenue dropped 93%, the employees he held on to for too long, and the lessons he only understood after losing his dad. So after this quick break, we're going to go right back to the beginning. A Toronto basement, a cannabis odour problem, and two students with absolutely no business starting a manufacturing company.

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3:41Aedan Fida:I am the CEO of a company called Blade Air. And if I might be famous for something, it could be the Forbes 30 under 30, could be EY Entrepreneur of the Year, could be Globe and Mail, fifth fastest growing company. However, if you ask me, what I'm most known for is my eyebrows. Makes it really hard to forget my face. best answer we've ever ever had i love it look i want to take you right back to i think it's going to be sort of around about the beginning of 2017 from my research you're working in the tax office at the time and you blade was just a thought um in the back of your head tell me the story how did blade come into come into existence uh 2017 uh second year of university and living downtown Toronto with my older brother Joe.

4:32Aedan Fida:He is going to what is now known as Toronto Metropolitan University, then known as Ryerson for chemical engineering. I'm going to Schulich School of Business for business. And going back to the eyebrow story, in case you couldn't tell, I do have an Italian heritage as well as the British one that we previously discussed. I grew up down the road from my grandparents and Joe being the eldest male child in my family He spent a lot of time there. And so when we were in university, the way that he used to cope with the stress of engineering was to grow plants. Started out normal, you know, some cherry tomatoes, some cucumbers here and there.

5:11Aedan Fida:And as the stress of engineering got harder and more, the plants he started planting got weirder and weirder. We're talking couldn't open up a closet without seeing cherry pits germinating in plastic baggies. And so very quickly realized that in Canada, we don't have enough heat and light to grow tropical fruit plants. Looked into buying a growth locker, which at that time was most commonly used for cannabis. And saw the price tag, said, screw that. I'm an engineer. I'll build my own. And during that design phase, he realized the inefficiency with the carbon filter. And the carbon filter was used for odor control, and he was looking at this like, what an inefficient solution.

5:56Aedan Fida:Called his friends who were growing other tropical plants at the time, who needed the odor control, and said to them, Hey, what is this? Why do I want it? What's going on? And is there something better? They said, you absolutely need it if you don't want your parents and the cops to know. And no, there is nothing better. It's just been this way for the last 20 years. This is the most common solution. And so he looked at that and said, well, screw that. I'm an engineer. I'll build a better one. And that's when he came to me when we were living together, knowing that I had always had a dream of being an entrepreneur.

6:33Aedan Fida:Our dad was an entrepreneur and said, hey, I have this great idea. Is this something you'd be interested in looking at with me? And 2017, cannabis legalization for recreational use is right around the corner from us. and we know that all of these new facilities that are getting licensed are going to have huge regulations that they need to adhere to and so we know that there's high potential already without even really digging into this and at this time I'm in my second year and my best friend from business school Giancarlo who just so happens to be our other business partner he and I had already been looking to start a business together for over a year so I said to Joe short there's one more person I want to bring into this.

7:16Aedan Fida:And really, that's how we got started was the idea of the world's first zero waste carbon filter focused on efficiency, logistics improvement, and as a baseline, better air quality. And the company has always been focused on the idea of impact, sustainability through the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. And that's how it really got started. Not where we are today, nowhere close. However, those are the true origins. cannabis odor control I was going to ask you whether it's legal now to grow cannabis for yourself Yeah, up to four plants at home So we're going to come much more into the future later on, but just to give people a taste how has it changed from 2017 to 2026?

8:03Aedan Fida:We don't really sell carbon filters anymore we still work in odor control, funnily enough however, what started with in-room purification and odor control has now transition to whole building energy efficiency solutions through HVAC filtration. What were the businesses you were looking at before this? You said you were considering opening another couple. We were looking at cleaning services. We were looking at building this type of realtor website for students, trying to find housing and anything and everything. For us, it's always been about building and being about entrepreneurs and what that means to build something meaningful and impactful rather than the specific solution itself.

8:46Basically, you, Joe, Giancarlo, you're all like, right, cool, we're building this thing. You're a year in. Are you still in the basement or have you got premises?

8:54Aedan Fida:Oh, no, no, we're still in the basement. We're students. Come now. 2017 to 2019 is really when we were all still in school doing this during our summers, using all of our, like you said, when I was working for CRA, using all of the money that wasn't going to living expenses, getting pushed into the company. And one piece of advice for any future entrepreneurs out there, if you're a student and have absolutely no money, don't try and start a manufacturing business right away. It needs capital, especially if you want to build a domestic product. And so 2017 to 2019 was our money and any little savings that we had, and$85 ,000 in non-dilutive funding raised through pitch competitions, grants.

9:39Aedan Fida:And fortunately, there were quite a few opportunities at both York University, Schulich and Toronto Metropolitan that we were able to leverage that gave us a little bit more momentum, gave us a little bit of that early capital to build some prototypes, get some IP, attend some trade shows and start building some interest around what we were doing. um so 2019 we all graduate and we raised 350 000 from investors in a friends and family round or an angel round whatever you want to call that and we started working with a local uh contract manufacturer so didn't have to get our own space and waste those investor dollars the basement was great you had good cell phone service there was some natural light that came through the small windows up top.

10:26Aedan Fida:What else could you be looking for in a startup? And we 2019, we brought in our first round of inventory and really started building up this momentum that we had kind of collected from 2017 and 2018, and brought that right to a head in 2020. And that's when we had our really big inflection point because the pandemic hit, cannabis markets completely bottomed out, all of our pipeline basically disappeared overnight. Projects were canceled. They were put on hold. Commitments were pulled back. And so even if our pipeline didn't entirely get erased, we had absolutely zero confidence in delivering anytime soon because people just didn't know what they were going to do.

11:13Aedan Fida:And that's when we were put into this position of really trying to decide, do we double down on this carbon filtration or do we lean into the ethos of what we were trying to build which was focus on efficiency focus on logistics and waste reduction uh improved air quality and and again really going back to that concept of triple bottom line people planet profit and those kind of key value elements as a result of it and we we chose the latter and just lent in that way and brought air purifiers to the market that were locally built, trying to be a part of the solution to the pandemic, trying to create local jobs, service the local community with our technology and create this kind of cyclical effect to help people come back to work.

12:02Aedan Fida:Really, the idea started with we need our clients to go back to the office so we can sell them more carbon filters. It didn't end up like that. However, that was the original intention. What do you mean it didn't end up like that? We did exactly what you're told not to do in marketing class. We're like, well, we want people to buy our cannabis clients to buy our HEPA air purifiers so that they feel safe going back to the office. And they didn't end up buying them because the markets tanked on them. People didn't realize that it was going to be the most successful years for cannabis that we had ever seen to date because they were just sat at home smoking weed all day.

12:42Aedan Fida:That wasn't really the early understandings of the pandemic, though. And so we asked ourselves, well, who can use this technology? Everyone can use this technology. All the businesses are closed. Let's target everyone. Waking up at 4 a.m., walking down Yonge Street, which is one of our main streets here, plastering. And we had these accordion-type folders where if you were a church or a worship center, if you were a dentist's office, if you were a small business with a retail center, you were a quick service restaurant. We just changed the logos and the messaging a little bit and put a different flyer on your door.

13:20Aedan Fida:We started cold calling after that. And we did have a good idea at one point after that terrible idea that didn't work at all. And that was to target private schools. We're like, hey, these people are going to care. Those parents are going to care. What are they doing for air quality? And that's where we really started to see that early success in what we were doing there, started delivering to private schools, and then was able to transition and leverage that into driving success within the public school sector, which is really what kind of lit a fire under what we were doing there and helped us to scale very rapidly.

14:01Aedan Fida:for some context here. In 2019, we did 50 ,000 in revenue and carbon filters. In 2020, we did 1.5 million in air purifiers. And then in 2021, we grew that up to$30 million leading into 2022 where we did$25 million. And we did get our own place in 2021. That's when we officially moved out of the basement. Hold on, did I get this right? you said fifty thousand dollars 1.5 million dollars did you go 1.5 million to 30 million dollars in 12 months yep um honestly it was uh a lot of luck a lot of luck and and luck to me really means um when opportunity meets preparation and what we were doing at that time was building air purifiers, sleeping in our cars at our manufacturing partners to build air purifiers nonstop.

15:03Aedan Fida:And the agreement that we had was I said to Giancarlo, listen, like, we can't all be building air purifiers all day. You're much more of a people person than Joe or I, and you're a great salesman. You go hammer the phones for the first half of the day, and then we'll build units and then you come back and join us. So we keep on track of what we're trying to do and we don't lose momentum and opportunity. And it was truly Giancarlo's persistence that drove this opportunity for us because the first major contract that we got was with one of the local school boards where they came in, looked at what we were doing, wanted to support young entrepreneurs, wanted to support a business that was building in the local community to give back to the local community instead of buying something that was frankly being shipped in from China or somewhere else in Asia.

15:56Aedan Fida:And because our technology was meeting the same standards, if not higher standards, with better airflow and better ventilation rates, while also being incredibly price competitive, they said that they wanted to take the chance on us and gave us that first opportunity. And that was in 2020. And that drove of a significant portion of that$1.5 million. In 2021, then we ended up winning a$20 million contract to install 7 ,000 lights over seven months. And I remember so distinctly being sat at one of my employees' condos. And we had this ongoing joke where we're like, if this works, you know, you got to project manage that, right?

16:41Aedan Fida:And she went, if that works, don't worry, I'll project manage that. And then two months later, it's like, you said that you remember that, right? You now have to project manage this. And it was just this incredible journey of exponential growth. simultaneously while delivering this monstrosity of a contract for doing an induct technology and actually doing the single largest retrofit to a school board in North America, 260 plus locations, 7 ,000 lights over seven months,$20 million contract value, we were still pushing our air purifiers. And we went from building 50 air purifiers a week and pulling an all-nighter once a week to building a team out of people around us that scaled our production capacity from 50 units a week to 1250 units a week.

17:35Aedan Fida:And so we just we outgrew that first space from 2021. That was 2500 square feet to by the end of 2021, moving into a facility that was 25000 square feet. and it was just non-stop go. It was incredibly fun. It was exciting. It was challenging and very stressful. However, just so rewarding to see everyone pushing and the growth that we were able to attain and being able to deliver something to the market that we were truly proud of. And it was the air purifier sales that actually drove the 2022 revenue number up to$25 million again. I want to go back to this first employee. Was this the same employee who said, I will project manage this if you get it?

18:25Aedan Fida:Define first employee. Are we talking free unpaid labor that happens to be your younger brother? Or are you talking paid employee? Because if it's paid employee, it's yes, it's probably her. And she's still with us today. Her name's Kira. And she is phenomenal. Phenomenal. I don't suppose you've got any good podcast recommendations. Do you know what I do? And coincidentally, this podcast is on the HubSpot Podcast Network. Who knew? The audio professional. We're going to come to that. This old marketing is hosted by Joe Polizzi and Robert Rose, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

18:58The audio, Leanne, together. The audio destination for business professionals. Where all podcasts, good podcasts live. Exactly. Joe and Robert are two of the most well-known experts in the content marketing space, and they talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers. Lovely. Yeah, I've actually been listening. Each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines. We like headlines. Love them. Rants from Joe and Robert on what's going on in the industry. We like that too. And this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from.

19:29It's always useful, entertaining and never more than 60 minutes. Yeah, I love the recent episode about alternatively influential. These are the micro-influencers who have real impact, but they don't have massive follower counts. Listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

19:49tell us more about kira she why did you why how did you recruit kira this is where i i reflect

19:55Aedan Fida:back on my life and i truly think that i have been just so fortunate um because the connections that i have made and and and where those connections have taken me and so it was the friend of an investor. It was sorry, it was the niece of the friend of an investor in our business is how we got introduced to Kiera. She had been working as a as a kind of an entrepreneur within a recruitment agency and was headhunting in in hospitality and hospitality took a worse beating than than cannabis did during the pandemic, especially in the early days. So she was looking for a career change. She had exceptional sales skills.

20:39Aedan Fida:She was exceptionally hardworking. And she really helped to start give us a little bit more professionalism, push us a little bit more to be more focused and aligned and was the type of first employee who you absolutely need because she was willing to do anything and everything for the business. You want her to go and build units? She said, I'll go and build units. You want me to sell this? I'll sell that. You want me to sell this? No problem. We need to take on this task. You need me to project manage a 260 school deployment with two different types of vendors on something that I've never done before.

21:16Aedan Fida:Yeah, I'll execute that flawlessly for you. It's just that type of commitment and the growth that we've seen from her as the organization has continued to grow over the last years has been incredibly rewarding because she really does embody that ownership mentality that we ask for. The next hire truly was actually paying my younger brother. He had just graduated from school at this point, and we needed to build out production capacity. And he started doing that for us. And again, like the same echoing the exact same sentiments towards him as I do towards Kira, just an exceptional attitude of ownership and making it happen.

21:55Aedan Fida:And we needed people who were going to help us build without needing us to be there to do it for them. And so his own growth has been truly exceptional. And that's been an incredibly rewarding experience for me as well. Hiring him and then hiring, honestly, more friends and family to the production side because we needed people we could trust. We weren't built out to handle that type of revenue. We didn't have the financial structures in place to truly have the type of management that you would expect for a company at that revenue. And so we needed to have absolute trust in the people who we were working with.

22:37Aedan Fida:And that led to us hiring a lot of people who we had grown up with, people who we could trust, and people who we knew were going to be hard workers and help us push towards that ultimate vision. A lot of them have transitioned out of the company now and are pursuing careers more aligned to their own passions. However, a lot of them were early grads during the pandemic and recent grads during the pandemic and were struggling to find work. And so they saw what we were doing, saw that we had an opportunity where they could help us out and get paid for it. And it just became a mutually beneficial exchange as employment should be.

23:15Was that tough seeing people from the early days leaving the business to go and do something else?

23:20Aedan Fida:Yes and no. As I've focused on growing myself as a leader, my attitude on this has changed quite a bit. In the early days, watching them leave was really hard. Now I look at how Reed Hastings from Netflix kind of talks about employment, and it's like dating. It's dating, not marriage. We're here to have a good time. We're here to help each other grow and achieve great things. And at the end of the day, if it's a long term relationship, great. If not, let's both move on and be better for it. And especially right now with where the business is at, as we come back into a new phase of scaling, I'm really trying to adopt more of a mentality towards what the business needs first.

24:08Aedan Fida:I held on to part of the mistakes that you're talking about is I held on to employees for too long, especially when we had years after those huge success years, we had very, very poor years. And part of that learning process was learning to let people go sooner because I needed to prioritize the business need and the business health for the benefit of the many rather than preserving my own feelings of trying to help out one or two individuals who I knew the organization no longer needed. It was that idea of chasing, trying to create opportunity and when that opportunity wasn't being created not pulling the plug fast enough and ultimately causing more damage to them and more damage to us uh while doing it and that has been one of the biggest learnings and takeaways that i've had over the the last few years you mentioned just a little while ago you said we weren't quite ready for management structure so did that come a little bit later having all the the management the traditional management stuff Oh my goodness.

25:11Aedan Fida:We're going to get into it. So my entire full-time employment is limited to internships as a student and then running this business. I had never built a team. I had never run a team. I had never managed a team. And I'm very much of the attitude of you were hired to do a job, do your fucking job. Like it's, it's that simple. I'm not, if you were hired to do the job, if you're asking me to do the job, we got problems on that front. And that's just to the idea of delegation and not being a micromanager because it's, you were hired to alleviate headaches, not cause them. And I have no interest in doing your job.

25:54Aedan Fida:You were hired because you can do it better than me. You tell me what to do in this situation. And so that was definitely one of the hardships post, post pandemic, like pandemic was, was, was not a problem because the revenue was constantly there. All we needed to do was execute on opportunity. We didn't have to go hunt for it. It was out there. It was readily available. We didn't have to create new. Post-pandemic, as we started transitioning out of that, looked at our technology lineup, weren't happy with where we were, needed to bring in our own induct technology for whole building solution.