When you are a founder it can be hard to imagine your business running the way you want it to once you grow past a certain team size — you fear the magic will be lost. We continue to be cautious and methodical about growth at FreshBooks for this reason, but a big piece of our next growth step fell into place this January, and for the first time we have confidence we can grow beyond a team of 15 without losing the magic. How you ask? Thanks to Mitch Solway.

Mitch is a marketing veteran. He started working on his marketing chops at Proctor and Gamble — arguably the best outfit in the world to learn management and traditional marketing acumen. But I’d say Mitch is a little restless at heart, and he needed to be somewhere more nimble and faster growing, so he left for Lavalife where he was employee number one in the marketing department. He stayed for nine years. He left as their VP marketing, managing a team of 27 with 6 direct reports, and in the process turned Lavalife into Canada’s household name for online dating — like Match.com or eHarmony in the USA.

What a business needs to grow are pillars to build on, and those pillars are people — more specifically great managers. After doing some consulting last year with us, we knew Mitch would be a great and timely fit for FreshBooks. He’s an ace demand generation marketer, a great people manager, and he’d done it before. Sadly he was committed to other projects, but by the end of the year we were able to convince him that FreshBooks was the place he could make a real impact, and as you can tell, we feel he has and he will continue to for a long time to come.

So… with that, please join me in welcoming Mitch to the team.