Padraic O’Flaherty
Lotek Wireless

“The thing about EF,” says Padraic O’Flaherty, an EF Advisor and Director of Sales and Marketing with Newfoundland’s Lotek Wireless, is that it helps create a positive cycle of entrepreneurial business operations and it builds a culture of corroboration.  

From the business development perspective, Padraic’s conversations with EF helped identify a market position for a new Lotek software product. As an Advisor, he has lent his expertise to other businesses.  

Lotek Wireless has built a thriving international  business with tracking technology that uses light, depth, and other phenomena to track the movements of fish in the sea, wildlife on the land and birds in the sky.  Lotek designs, produces and sells the hardware along with a variety of unique software products that allow researchers to view and analyse the tracks.

Padraic had been with Lotek since the late 1990s.  Leaders of the leading edge, Lotek works to continuously make its tracking devices smaller, lighter and more intelligent.  In those almost 15 years, computer technologies have improved in lock-step making way for software applications that create capacity for end-users to tailor base systems to their own needs.  Lotek, in the meantime, developed a powerful new tracking software system.  The opportunity brought a challenge:  how to bring it to the marketplace in a difficult competitive environment.   He talked to EF.
 
Padraic says, “We knew about selling hardware, but software is a different animal. We decided to make it open source - available to anyone at no charge, and downloadable, and customizable – based on reaping the rewards of associated hardware sales.  The challenge was to get the technology adopted in a marketplace dominated by one competitor that is using accepted yet aging technology.  EF was able to help with that.  We’re about to offer a trial product and very interested in the potential results.”

As an EF Advisor, Padraic brings the benefit of a Masters degree in business and years of experience with Lotek to the table.  He is keen on the benefits of EF to the culture of a business community.  “When companies help each other, even if they could potentially be competitors, it creates a corroborative spirit.  That contributes to a stronger business culture, and that’s good for everyone.”