Leadership Team

Razor Suleman

Founder and Chairman

5 Things You Need to Know About Razor

  • He is a serial entrepreneur who started his first business at 15
  • He loves to learn; graduated from WLU’s School of Business and MIT’s Entrepreneurial Masters Program.
  • He is completely unemployable. Fortunately he’s a great entrepreneur and has won BDC’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
  • He is passionate about leaving the world a little better than he found it through the Achievers mission and charity work.
  • He has led Achievers to be recognized as a top employer and fastest growing company in North America.

Fun Fact: He’s often seen wearing Levis jeans, drinking Cosmos in public and is madly in love with his wife Kari.

Aris Zakinthinos, Ph.D.

Chief Technology Officer

5 Things You Need to Know About Aris

  • He is committed to lifelong learning. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and completed post-doctoral work at Cambridge University.
  • He has a passion for technology and was a teacher before entering the corporate world.
  • He doesn’t like problems but loves to solve them.
  • He specializes in building high performing, scalable development organizations.
  • Loves the business side of technology.

Fun Fact: He is an avid woodworker and his favorite expression is, “There’s no monopoly on good ideas”, and he judges dance competitions at Achievers retreats.

David Brennan, C.A.

Chief Financial Officer/Chief Operating Officer

5 Things You Need to Know About David

  • He is the proud father of two daughters, Sarah & Julie, and has been married to his wife, Alison, for over 21 years.
  • He graduated from the University of Prince Edward Island in 1986 and earned his Chartered Accounting designation in 1988, which means he’s been in the workforce longer than a number of the employees at Achievers have been alive.
  • He has been an executive at large organizations such as Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He has also has been part of a number of high growth companies, such as, PixStream Incorporated (acquired by Cisco Systems).
  • He loves working with passionate & crazy entrepreneurs (insert Razor’s name here.) Despite being a Baby Boomer, he believes that a paycheck is not a thank you and timely recognition is free and has an infinite ROI.

Fun Fact: He won the 2010 MIF No Limit Texas Hold’em Tournament in Las Vegas after placing in the money in two of the last six years.

Greg Brown

Chief Revenue Officer

5 Things You Need to About Greg

  • Greg was one of the first 50 employees at WebEx and held various management positions as the company grew to over 400M in revenue.
  • He loves the disruption of the "cloud" and has held senior leadership positions at four SaaS companies.
  • He has a passion for building highly competitive and execution orientated teams.
  • He believes strongly in the 80/20 Principle – Identify and focus on the 20% of actions that generate 80% of the results.
  • When he’s not working, he enjoys spending time with his beautiful wife Tara and chasing around his two boys, Brayden and Gavin.

Fun Fact: Greg lived in Amsterdam for three years and his first child was born there.

Amelia Generalis

Senior Vice President, Employee Success

5 Things You Need to Know About Amelia

  • Amelia is a mother of two, wife and career professional. All these roles matter equally and she's proud to do it all.
  • She decided to move into HR after getting her MBA from Vanderbilt University and realizing that the Power of People is the business driver.
  • Amelia believes that everyone is a leader - leadership starts with you. She has set an example of leadership in her 20+ years in HR by turning around a company and delivering 100 million in cost savings, building the first Employee Development process for SuccessFactors from scratch, and building and being a part of some amazing global teams.
  • She strongly believes "never say never" and has now done all of the things she said she would NEVER do, like be a Company Union Negotiator, work on the night shift and live overseas.
  • A self-starter and a risk taker, she moves fast while always keeping our talent and customers front and center in all we do!

Fun Fact: She gave birth to her son at the same London hospital as Posh and David Beckham. These days she is often dancing to pop music in her kitchen with her children. These things may or may not be related.

Dwayne Walker, C.A.

Vice President, Finance

5 Things You Need to Know About Dwayne

  • He is a proud alumni of Wilfrid Laurier University, graduating with his Hons BBA in 2000. Obtained his Chartered Accountant designation in 2001 while with KPMG.
  • Loves every second he gets to spend with his baby daughter and his wife.
  • Loves the thrill, energy, and hard work it takes to take a dynamic, growth company to the next level.
  • Still thinks he is 25 years old and can keep up with the A-Players at Achievers.
  • A professed Sports-Aholic. He would rather talk about the NFL, MLB, College Sports, NBA or NHL before diving into any finance/accounting discussions.

Fun Fact: Extremely proud 3rd generation Belgian horse exhibitor. Considers himself a country boy at heart, minus the cowboy hat.

Holly Tiessen

Vice President, Client Success

5 Things You Need to Know About Holly

  • Holly loves finding ways to add value in new ways -- for clients and for colleagues.
  • To “continuously be challenged”, Holly has never stayed in the same role at a company for more than 18 months.
  • Sales Awards have taken me to South Africa, Palm Springs U.S. and Madrid Spain.
  • Holly worked for IBM for 14 years before making the leap to the entrepreneurial world at Achievers.
  • The only time Holly really slows down is while at her cottage 2 hours north of Toronto.

Fun Fact: She's attended Moscow State University. She's co-authored an IBM Red Book. She knows what SOA stands for.

Jennifer Franklin

Vice President, Business Development, West

5 Things You Need to Know About Jennifer

  • She started off her career programming Human Resource software after completing a Business degree in HR Management and Marketing, as well as a grad program in Computer programming
  • She has been in the human capital space for over 10 years, working with organizations who are leading their industry with innovative technology
  • She is passionate about how social technology can drive human behavior and loves working with her clients to help them drive employee engagement
  • She is a mentor to everyone in the company and has an open door policy
  • She started a trend at Achievers for recognizing great work with a meaningful message along with a photo of her beloved dog, Finnigan

Fun Fact: On weekends, Jennifer can be found playing tennis with her husband and holding a glass of red wine… mutually exclusive activities though.

Jeff Laliberte

Vice President of Sales, East

5 Things You Need to Know About Jeff

  • He is the proud father of daughter Samantha (age 4) and son Benjamin (age 3), and devoted husband to his wife, Elizabeth.
  • He completed a highly competitive internship through the International Foundation of Employee Benefits and The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania.
  • He has been a Compensation and Performance Management Consultant for William M. Mercer, Coopers & Lybrand (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers), and KPMG.
  • He developed the initial product prototype for Salary.com’s flagship solution and accompanied a small executive team to “ring the bell” at the NASDAQ in February, 2007.
  • He loves joining high-growth, dynamic SaaS companies early and experiencing all phases of the company's lifecycle.

Fun Fact: He played one season of professional soccer in 1994 with The Rockford Raptors, a USISL Pro League team located in Rockford, IL.

Peter Daly

Vice President, Software Engineering

5 Things You Need to Know About Peter

  • Peter is the proud father of Katie, Matt and Becca and is inspired by his lovely wife, Lorraine.
  • He firmly believes he has found his dream job at Achievers – building world class solutions with a dynamite development team.
  • He is passionate about creating high performance, high quality, high reliability enterprise scale applications.
  • In previous lives, Peter applied his skills (and learned valuable lessons) as an executive in health, financial services and telecommunications companies.
  • Peter believes that great technology is made possible by great people.

Fun Fact: Peter loves spending time with his family at their cottage – where he has developed a reputation for disappearing on his windsurfer for hours whenever it's windy

Rhonda Bosch

Vice President, Operations

5 Thing You Need to Know About Rhonda

  • She ran her own consulting practise focused on creating centres of service excellence (311 Centre) within municipal government.
  • She loves working with young smart people who have a sparkle in their eye and are eager to make a difference.
  • She firmly believes that continuous improvement is an invaluable process for increasing consistency and efficiency within an organization.
  • She is an inspirational leader who believes that the true strength of an organization comes from empowered and motivated employees.
  • She has an “open office” policy where everyone is greeted with a warm and welcoming smile.

Fun Fact: She has a passion for a healthy active lifestyle and loves to take part in activities that push her limits.

Rob Catalano

Vice President, Brand & Demand

5 Things You Need to Know About Rob

  • Rob started his Achievers journey when the company was still a Toronto start-up. He now lives and works in the US headquarters in San Francisco.
  • He is an avid believer that recognition and technology in the HR space support employee engagement and performance – and he has spoken in over 20 North American cities on this very topic.
  • Rob went to Ryerson University in Toronto where he studied Business with focus on Marketing and Information Technology and feels fortunate to be leading Marketing in a software company today.
  • He is passionate about helping build great companies in fast-growth mode and can’t see himself working for a large, slow-moving company… or the government.
  • He has a no-longer-secret desire to be a professor in marketing and business when he grows up.

Fun Fact: Rob owns eight guitars, used to play in a rock band, and enjoys to play and listen to everything from old school rock to metal. One of Rob’s written songs has turned into published poetry.