About Mark Brian Vanderkam

“Innovation is my life ...”

Mark Brian Vanderkam has a lifetime of innovation under his belt, with his entrepreneurial career beginning in earnest when he started his first marketing communications agency while still a student in the Rhetoric & Professional Writing program at the University of Waterloo.

He led that award-winning agency for four years just outside Toronto before joining one of Canada’s premiere B2B marcom businesses, Quarry Integrated Communications, as a senior account director working on large accounts including UGG, Cyanamid, Proven Seed, and United Way. Mark led the campaign for Prowl which won the national CAMA “Best of Show” award and more importantly infused Prowl with new life and increased market share in an incredibly hard-fought market.

After several years on the agency side of things, Mark moved to the dark side (i.e., the client side) and took on various marketing leadership roles within companies, including Director of Brand Marketing for Inscriber Technology, Director of Marketing for Total Care Technologies, and VP Global Sales & Marketing for Penad Pension Services. At Inscriber, Mark was instrumental in helping the company quadruple revenue and grow from 7,500 to 25,000 customers in just two years, while at Penad, Mark helped grow software revenues by over 500% in eighteen months.

Mark eventually moved back to consulting and over the past dozen or so years has worked with a number of firms across Canada and internationally, helping business leaders set goals, overcome challenges, solve problems, and grow.

Mark is a copywriter, creative director, marketing and sales guru, branding expert, and M&A strategist. He is currently completing a book on pragmatic innovation and is the creator of the “Innovate for Greatness” professional development workshop.

On top of his marketing and business exploits, Mark is also an award-winning wilderness landscape photographer and wilderness guide. Mark grew up camping and canoeing along the north shore of Lake Superior and got deep into photography as a teenager. He began hand-printing Cibachromes of images that he made on his wilderness trips and selling them in art galleries in southern Ontario when he was just 18 years old. In recent years, Mark earned his certification as a licensed guide with the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides, and today Mark leads photographers on back country photographic expeditions in the Canadian Rockies, British Columbia, and the Yukon.

Another creative outlet for Mark is singing and musical theater. Mark is an accomplished performer who enjoys nothing more than singing with friends and working on new songs. Because of the long periods of time that Mark spends alone in grizzly bear country on his photography trips, Mark gets lots of opportunities to sing in the wilderness, which is an incredibly useful technique for alerting the bears to one’s presence and much more fun than hollering (which is what most trekkers do in dense bush). 

Today Mark’s mission is to fully embrace and express his personal creativity and inspire and energize others to do the same. Mark consults with teams and individuals to reach for the stars and find achievable ways to get there.