Mentor Spotlight: Sushant Trivedi
BEEDIE LUMINARIES — As part of our ongoing mentor spotlight series, we continue to highlight the incredible individuals and partnerships that help our students thrive, both throughout their undergraduate journeys and long after graduation.
These stories reflect our deep commitment to student success and the belief that mentorship, when done with care and intention, can change the trajectory of someone’s life.
Meet Sushant Trivedi, mentor to Jack Wang from SHINE Cohort 2024 and Allison Duong from SHINE Cohort 2021.
Now CEO of Fresh Tracks Canada, Sushant’s story begins long before the boardroom. In 2004, Sushant arrived in Canada as a 17 year old international student, landing at 4PM in the dark of his first Canadian winter. He recalls looking out of his window seat, convinced that the pilot had made a mistake. “Surely, it had to have been 4AM”, he recalls himself thinking.
Raised by a single mother and an older sister, Sushant studied at Simon Fraser University, pursuing finance while carrying the constant weight of tuition and the challenging feat of paying for living expenses. He received a small bursary that went a long way, and in this process, he quickly learned that every dollar counts.
After graduation, a brief stint in management consulting led him to Procter & Gamble, where he worked in teams across Ohio, Boston, and Toronto. Moving from Toronto to Boston, he says, felt like going from a river to an ocean. Surrounded by Ivy League MBAs in his late twenties, Sushant learned that meritocracy could let anyone shine, once they showed they could perform.
He returned to Vancouver after COVID and met the founder of Fresh Tracks Canada, a company on the brink of bankruptcy. He saw potential where others saw risk. Just five years later, the company has grown to nearly $100 million in sales and been recognized as one of Canada’s most admirable corporate cultures for midmarket companies. For Sushant, the achievement was never the point. Rather, it was always about how they got there.
Today, he lives in White Rock with his wife, son, and dog. He and his wife, who was born in the UK and raised in Africa, are global citizens in their own way, having travelled to nearly 50 countries together. Their most recent trips took them to Australia and Vietnam. These days, much of that same wonder gets filtered through the eyes of his two year old son who keeps Sushant and his wife very busy.
When asked about his leadership philosophy, Sushant lists the below as his guiding principles:
Ownership: Sushant says that nothing has changed since he started his career. Even today, he still operates every day as if it were his own business.
Transparency. He shares all of his numbers, the good, the bad, and the ugly. At the centre of trust, he says, is transparency. Many leaders spend time massaging figures and deciding how to communicate the bad stuff, but you really cannot make everyone happy. So, honesty is the best policy.
Accountability. Taking responsibility for what he does and the results, or sometimes the lack of results, is key. As a leader, he says, you have to remember it starts and ends with you, and to use that as a push to be the best version of yourself.
Reflecting on his career, Sushant explains that he once believed he had to be the hero, solving problems alone. He has since learned that no one flies a plane solo. He also chased titles and promotions early on, only to realize that pursuing excellence in the work itself, rather than the recognition attached to it, was the thing that actually led to success
Sushant credits much of who he is today to the people who invested in him early. A professor at SFU, met through a case competition, pushed him to think like a business leader rather than only a finance student. In reflection of his early days, Sushant credits this shift in his studies as a catalyst that changed the trajectory of his career.
Later, business coaches taught him that real leadership means knowing your business better than anyone else, so that if someone woke you at 3 a.m. and asked how things were going, you would always have an answer. He still stays close with many of the people who shaped him, including the person who hired him at P&G. Mentors and bosses, he says, have become friends.
That same intentionality now shows up in how he mentors Jack and Allison.
With Allison, who obtained her BComm at the Sauder School of Business, one conversation stuck: disappointment, he told her, is nothing more than the deviation from expectations. The real work is understanding whose expectations you are chasing, hers or someone else’s. Allison now works at Fresh Tracks Canada, where she has spent nearly two years refining her skills in design and analytics.
For Jack, now studying Business Administration at SFU’s Beedie School of Business, proactive and ambitious almost to a fault, the lesson has been slightly different. Sushant’s main piece of advice for Jack? Well, no one wins by trying to go fast without first learning to go slow. Sushant has encouraged Jack to invest in his health and well being, to make space to do nothing, to be bored. It is a lesson he learned the hard way himself. (Read Jack’s Student Success Article).
He is quick to point out that mentorship has changed him just as much as it has changed his mentees. Spending time with people who are values driven, ambitious, and family oriented, he says, forces him to reflect on his own priorities, no matter how busy life gets. Through mentorship, Sushant has learned the value of staying in student mode and always being willing to learn. It is a principle he hopes to pass on to his son, for whom he wrote a letter to be read years from now, encouraging him, too, to never stop learning.
In his closing remarks, Sushant explains that he does not mentor to be remembered. It has never been about that. Instead, he hopes that years from now, Jack and Allison are simply the best versions of themselves: strong professionals, good humans, loyal to the people who matter to them. He includes himself in that same hope, still chasing the same standard he sets for them. If he has passed along even a small piece of wisdom, he hopes his mentees can carry it forward to someone like the 17 year old who once landed in Canada in the dead of winter, someone who needs it.
To Beedie Luminaries, he offers this reflection: he was once the international student who skipped lunch because it cost too much. Today he leads a company worth nearly $100 million that employs hundreds of people across Canada. None of it would have been possible without a program willing to bet on someone who needed the platform:
Thank you, Sushant. We are grateful to have you as part of the Beedie Luminaries community.