BC Business
As a Google partner, Premier Cloud helps businesses use Google tools like Workspace
CEO, Premier Cloud Inc.
Life Story: Daniel Azad started working for his parents’ company when he was 15 years old. Back then, it was essentially a call centre in Victoria. Premier Cloud eventually became a Google partner, helping customers use those products. “I was making minimum wage, maybe even under it, I don’t know,” he says. “I was in technical support for years, then I moved to sales, which I hated. I thought about school; I wasn’t sure I wanted to be at the company.” Eventually, Azad started getting some traction, selling a few contracts here and there.
In 2017, at his behest, the company did a pivot and started focusing on selling Google products. “I sold millions, because I was selling something I believed in,” he says.
Azad is in his third year of running Premier Cloud—the core of which is helping businesses use Google tools such as Google Workspace. The company is now looking to move into the Google Cloud space. “The Google Cloud platform has 100-plus products. Maybe a few [companies] are excellent at more than 50, but nobody is an expert in all of them,” he says. “We’re going into it with the attitude that we’re not experts on everything, but we want to be experts on a few. We’re going to focus on infrastructure migrations, data engineering, data visualization—things like that.”
Bottom Line: Premier Cloud has around 20 employees and is on track to hit $23 million in revenue this year. Azad just came back from Austin, Texas, where he’s planning to expand Premier Cloud to an office space a few blocks from a new Google tower. “[Google] is going hard on Austin… they want to bring people in from all over.” –N.C.