About Plujo
Most consultants tell you what to do and leave. We'd rather build it with you - and we've built enough of our own businesses to know the difference between advice and something that works on a Monday morning.
Plujo started around 2000, building websites. Back then, every business knew the web mattered and almost none knew what to do about it. What worked wasn't hype. It was a clear process and a platform that put businesses in control of their own site.
AI is the same shape. Everyone knows it matters. Most people don't know where to start. So we do what worked then: a clear path, and a brain that belongs to your business.
Our job is to organize it, not replace it.
One area of your business, working, before anything bigger.
It belongs to your business, not to a tool or a model.
We run our own ventures on the same method we sell. See The Lab.
The team
Managing Director
Jeremy Laidlaw is Plujo's Managing Director and technical lead, with over 25 years of experience across business and interactive technology. He leads every client engagement, from the first conversation about your Brain Scorecard to the day your first area goes live, and he builds the brain alongside your team. Jeremy also runs Plujo's own ventures in The Lab, so the method he brings you is one he works with every day.
LinkedIn: Jeremy Laidlaw
User Experience
Edgar Alvarado is a designer with over twenty years of experience building intuitive digital products. He combines deep UX/UI craft with a marketer's instinct for what actually converts, and he has shaped the visual and experiential identity of numerous software products and websites. At Plujo, Edgar designs how your team works with its brain, so asking it a question or handing it a task feels obvious from the first day.
LinkedIn: Edgar Alvarado
Communications
Dean Askin is an award-winning communications strategist and brand storyteller with a career rooted in radio journalism. For the past five years he has been Communications Strategist for the Ontario Disability Employment Network (ODEN), leading flagship campaigns, ghostwriting for executive voices and co-hosting You Can't Spell Inclusion Without a D, now in its fifth season. Dean's instinct is to find the emotional truth in a story and make it land. At Plujo, he captures how your business talks, so everything your brain drafts sounds like you.
LinkedIn: Dean Askin
Lead Generation
Michael Bickerton is the Principal of RAVEN5, North America's leading contest and sweepstakes agency. Google, iab Canada and CMA certified, he has spent his career helping some of the world's largest brands design and run promotions that build audiences, generate leads and convert them into customers. At Plujo, Michael brings that playbook to the sales and marketing side of your brain: how you find leads, follow up and turn interest into customers.
LinkedIn: Michael Bickerton
Co-Founder, #local
Rich Bouchard has been building stronger communities for over 20 years. With Plujo, he co-founded #local (Hashtag Local), a platform that connects citizens, businesses and charities in ways that make a real difference, and he is now scaling that model to communities across the country. #local is one of Plujo's Lab ventures: a working business run on the same kind of brain we build for clients, and part of the proof that the method works.
LinkedIn: Rich Bouchard
Co-Founder, Ceremony Builder
Jim Emerson has spent his career at the intersection of ceremony, community and technology. A seasoned wedding officiant with thousands of ceremonies to his name, he co-founded Ceremony Builder with Plujo to help officiants and couples write truly personal ceremonies; his wife Renette is also a co-founder and leads its marketing. Ceremony Builder is one of Plujo's Lab ventures, where an officiant's know-how is put to work by AI, the same idea we bring to client businesses.
LinkedIn: Jim Emerson
Co-Founder, Household Resilience
Michael Koehler is a serial digital entrepreneur. He built CrossDaily.com from a hobby index site into a community of over one million members and eight million page views a month, then sold it to a major US media company. A Plujo partner for more than ten years, he co-founded two of our Lab ventures, Household Resilience and Puddding. He brings deep experience in reading market demand, building communities that scale and the financial models that turn a promising idea into a proven, investable business.
LinkedIn: Michael Koehler
Brand Strategist
Derek Lackey is the Managing Director of LACKEY Advertising and one of Canada's foremost authorities on direct marketing and brand positioning. He has helped organizations across North America move from fuzzy positioning to brands that resonate with the market they want. At Plujo, Derek uses his Wrap, Bag & Tag™ process to sharpen how a business describes itself, so the brain we build speaks with one clear, consistent position.
LinkedIn: Derek Lackey
AI Strategy
Craig Stark is a business strategist and systems thinker with over 30 years of experience bringing complex technologies to market. Through Vectored Value AI Labs and as Managing Director, Canada at Strategy of Things, he helps mid-market companies build the structure that turns AI initiatives into real business outcomes, not just pilots. At Plujo, Craig brings that long view to every brain we build: which area to connect first, and how each one compounds over the years.