OTTAWA — When COVID-19 struck hard in March 2020, Maple’s virtual health-care business nearly quintupled overnight. The success propelled it to a $75-million investment from Loblaw, technology deals with several provinces’ health systems, and a place in workplace benefits programs across the country.

Before that though, the crisis nearly broke the company.

“What allowed us to survive those first few days was just dropping every single thing in the company that was nonessential. All we did were the very, very critical tasks to stop the ship from sinking,” said Brett Belchetz, Maple’s co-founder and CEO.

Life at most startups is a grind, long hours fuelled by hope and caffeine and just enough early business and investments to keep going. But sometimes lightning strikes, a freak event that jolts a company to wild and unexpected success. While it wrecked many businesses and damaged many more, the pandemic was a boost for some that happened to have products or know-how that were suddenly in demand.

Their business plans, the fortunes of their workers, even the companies’ own long-term survival hung on their ability to adapt fast, and figure out how to keep their momentum.

Some have had a tough time. Montreal-based meal-kit company Goodfood pivoted to rapid deliveries and pivoted away again months later. RenoRun, a rapid-delivery service for construction and renovation jobs, is seeking creditor protection. Lululemon’s bet on an expensive home fitness gadget is not paying off. Even Shopify is cutting thousands of jobs.

At Maple, the stakes were even higher, in a way, because the company was on a happy path before the pandemic—getting used to a bigger new office at Adelaide and Spadina in Toronto and absorbing a $14.5-million financing round.

“You hear a lot of stories about these companies that are pandemic darlings and only really grew because of the pandemic and for us that really wasn’t the case,” Belchetz said. “We had a really healthy trajectory of growth—we were growing 10 per cent month-over-month, every single month, for years straight.”

Belchetz picked over his lessons from the experience at April’s Founders Assemble summit—organized by Daniel Warner, the former CEO of KixCare, whose pandemic-driven business model didn’t work out as expected—and then discussed those lessons bluntly with The Logic in a follow-up interview.

Like many people in early 2020, he said, Belchetz expected the novel coronavirus would be contained abroad, or at least prove a short-lived problem. 

The crucial weekend of March 14, he was in New York City for a conference. “On Day 1, arriving in New York, everything was sort of normal. And by the last day in New York, everything was closed.”

The conference abruptly cancelled, Belchetz spent the weekend on calls thrown together by the Ontario government, which was trying to replace in-person health care with virtual care at light speed.

“We were suddenly getting invited to all these very, very senior-level emergency meetings that I just never, ever would have had access to a week in advance of that,” he said.

He and fellow executives were worried, Belchetz said, that governments couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up virtual-care systems quickly enough when, “come Monday, nobody’s going to have anywhere to get health care.”

So Maple offered its platform free to health providers, without any technical or logistical plan behind the move. Many provinces had no mechanism for doctors to get paid by public insurance for virtual appointments and Maple had no mechanism for billing that way anyway.

Virtuous as the intent might have been, the move also proved shrewd: Maple was out offering a solution to a problem provincial health systems were still trying to define.

Then came the lightning strike: An offer from Shoppers Drug Mart to cover the costs of virtual appointments on Maple’s platform in provinces that didn’t have billing codes for virtual care. Announced March 17, the only catch was that patients had to get there through a Shoppers Drug Mart web page.

“We started this program with, like, 24 hours’ notice,” said Belchetz. “During those first few weeks of the pandemic, in many respects, because of that program, Maple actually became the de facto walk-in clinic for the entire country, overnight.”

Belchetz talked a lot in public during the early pandemic about virtual health care getting its moment, five years after Maple was founded. He’s spoken much less about what that moment meant for the people delivering the service.

Maple’s wait times for appointments blew out from as little as a minute to hours. The wait for technical support requests to be addressed also blew up. The servers hosting Maple’s platform for virtual medical visits, which the company thought had enough spare capacity for a year or two of growth, needed a middle-of-the-night upgrade.

The company had a 600-name reserve list of doctors interested in picking up virtual work, whom it had never brought onto the platform because it hadn’t had enough patients to send them. A rapidly retrained marketing team—the last thing Maple needed right then was to drum up more business—prepared all of them to see patients within days and took up tech-support duties as well. 

“This was our moment to show we’ve got what it takes and we deserve all these big bets—we’re going to rise to the occasion and show what we can do,” said Belchetz. “Or if we fail, I don’t know if anybody will ever make any big bets on us ever again. So this was it. This was our moment to not screw it up.”

For Christy Prada, Maple’s first non-coder hire and by then its vice-president of business development, that meant flipping her model. Her targets had been other companies, selling Maple’s services as an employee benefit through long-term agreements. Suddenly, those would-be customers were pounding at Maple’s gates—but businesses were seeking short-term arrangements, because people thought COVID-19 would blow over after a few weeks of flattening the curve.

“We had to flip our current pricing models and risk models on their heads and come up with new assessments of margin risk and pricing risks that we were willing to accept,” Prada said.

It also meant rushing new patients into Maple’s system. “We were bringing on five to 10, if not more, large businesses every single day in the early days of the pandemic,” she said.

The Shoppers Drug Mart deal, first announced as lasting a week, was extended to two, then three, while the provinces set up billing codes for virtual medical visits.

After the initial crisis, Maple grew like crazy.

“We just needed more bodies,” he said. “At least, we thought at the time that what we needed was more bodies.”

Though he and other executives weren’t experts in hiring, they had tried to be thoughtful about it in Maple’s first years, Belchetz said. For a while, that went out the window. Besides the enormous influx of business, Maple also got that $75-million investment from Loblaw, through Shoppers Drug Mart, at the end of summer 2020; between that and booming business, money was not much of a concern.

“We didn’t have the time or the expertise or the patience in that situation to really be super careful,” Belchetz said. “People that had a decent-looking résumé and looked OK in an interview were pretty much offered the job very quickly.”

Those hires were remote and scattered across the country, and Belchetz said Maple’s onboarding was poor. Some of the results were great anyway, but a lot of people got slapdash welcomes to jobs they were not well suited to.

“It’s just a recipe for tons of turnover and not great outcomes,” he said.

Besides being a doctor, Belchetz used to be a McKinsey management consultant. His physician brain tends to focus on immediate problems right in front of him, he said, while the management consultant thinks about systems. 

“The way that we were attacking problems with more human beings wasn’t actually the right solution at all, a lot of the time,” he said. “When we could take the time to gather our breath, it became very clear that a lot of the problems just required better processes, not more people.”

Former Maple employees The Logic spoke to on condition of anonymity—because of non-disclosure agreements, other employment conditions, and worries about their future prospects—also pointed out changes and false starts in strategy that meant workers were hired for things the company decided not to pursue.

A prospective IPO was bruited in March 2021 and people were hired to manage it and plan for the capital. Then market conditions turned, and just a few months later the IPO was off the table. Provinces withdrew public coverage of appointments with virtual-only health providers, impeding Maple’s plans to serve patients who didn’t have coverage through workplace benefits.

Maple’s headcount has stayed fairly steady at about 150 people since November 2021, according to LinkedIn data. PitchBook data says Maple’s workforce grew from 112 in April 2021 to 162 in April 2023.

Prada, who left Maple to become CEO of an AI-driven fertility company in May 2022, said she thinks that, as rapid as Maple’s hiring was, “I wouldn’t say it was reckless hiring and growth—we were very careful about it.” The fact the company hasn’t laid off big swaths of employees shows it, she said.

Belchetz acknowledged that plenty of people have left. The early-pandemic sense of mission faded and so have fears about job security elsewhere. In other cases, “it was just mutually clear that the job we thought made sense for them just wasn’t the job that actually made sense in real life.” Not many people have been at Maple more than three years.

Besides its core family-physician service, Maple now offers mental-health care and virtual appointments with health providers like sleep therapists and dietitians. In New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, the provincial health systems use Maple for publicly covered virtual care. In British Columbia, Shoppers Drug Mart stores have stations for walk-in virtual visits through Maple. Last year, Maple bought Wello, another virtual-care platform focused on corporate clients.

Since then, as some competitors have struggled (like CloudMD) or fought publicly with regulators (like Telus Health), Maple has focused on consolidating, getting used to its new normal.

“None of the processes we had when we had 35 people made any sense whatsoever when we had 4X the business volume or 100-plus team members,” Belchetz said. Maple has tried to rebuild a corporate culture with more office time and deliberately organized events for people who work remotely to meet their co-workers in person.

Hiring for the long term was the key lesson Belchetz said Maple took from its pandemic spasm. 

“What’s really critical to us is, are you with us over the long haul?’” he said. “It’s not just about today’s emergency, but do you really believe in what this company is trying to achieve and who we are as a company and the company culture.”