“No One Flies a Plane Solo”: Sushant Trivedi on Mentorship, Meritocracy, and Giving Back
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 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, CEO of Fresh Tracks Canada, and mentor to Jack Wang from SHINE Cohort 2024 and Allison Duong from SHINE Cohort 2021.
In 2004, Sushant arrived in Canada as a 17 year old international student, landing at 4PM in the dark of his first Canadian winter. When the pilot announced the local time, Sushant was puzzled; looking out of his window seat, he was convinced that the pilot had made a mistake. “Surely, it had to have been 4AM”, he recalls himself thinking.
That disorientation felt on the plane would become a familiar feeling in his first years in Canada. Raised by a single mother and an older sister, Sushant studied at Simon Fraser University, pursuing finance while carrying the financial burden of tuition and living expenses in a new country. 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.
After spending time in the United States, Sushant returned to Vancouver post-COVID and met the founder of Fresh Tracks Canada, a company on the brink of bankruptcy (read more on BC Business). 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 South Surrey 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. 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.
But principles like these took time to learn and Sushant is candid that he did not always lead this way. 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 on. 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 broad business owner like thinking as a catalyst that changed the trajectory of his career.
Later, business coaches taught him that real leadership means knowing your business, your numbers and your risks and opportunities better than anyone else, so that if someone woke you up 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. Navigating mentorship with two very different mentees requires agility – there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Allison, who obtained her BComm at the Sauder School of Business, spent her third and fourth years of university interning at Fresh Tracks Canada, where she refined her skills in design and analytics. As she navigates life post-grad, Sushant has been there to remind her that success is not just about projects and deadlines. Instead, he has helped her reframe and see disappointment as nothing but a deviation from expectations. Allison shares with us that in the short time that Sushant has been her mentor, he has an incredible impact on her personal and professional growth. “His mentorship has built not just my skills, but also my confidence”.
On the other hand, for Jack, an incoming third year student pursuing Business Administration at SFU’s Beedie School of Business, the lesson has been slightly different. Sushant’s main piece of advice for Jack? 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. Sushant always tells Jack “in an attempt to do everything, you will end up doing nothing. Learn to say no and be comfortable with the trade-offs associated with it.” (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.
When asked what he hopes his mentorship will leave behind, Sushant is characteristically humble about it. He shares with us that he did not become a mentor to be remembered. Rather, 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 often skipped lunch because he couldn’t afford to pay for it. Today he leads a company worth nearly $100 million that employs hundreds of people across Canada. None of it, he says, would have been possible without the platform post-secondary institutions and organizations like Beedie Luminaries provides.
Thank you, Sushant. We are grateful to have you as part of the Beedie Luminaries community.
Interested in becoming a mentor? Learn more today.
