Get to Know the NorthBridge Team:
Chief Executive Officer and President, Sol Algranti
Sol Algranti is an accomplished entrepreneur, operator, and investor with more than 40 years of experience in engineering, manufacturing, operations, and business services. He has successfully acquired, grown, and exited numerous manufacturing companies, mainly in the plastics sector.
In 1989, Sol used a leveraged buyout to acquire Shirlon Plastics, an established Cambridge, Ontario plastics manufacturer with a focus on RV components. However, a series of factors, including a precipitous drop in RV sales with the onset of the 1990 recession, caused Shirlon's revenues to decrease significantly in the following years. In working to return the company to profitability, Sol increased the company's focus on research and development, refining existing products and designing new products to reach new customers in new markets. Offsetting these costs through the SR&ED tax credit program was essential in enabling his company to grow.
Having successfully re-established Shirlon as a presence in the plastics industry and realizing that many other business owners — including friends and former colleagues — were unfamiliar with the SR&ED program, Sol decided to put his joint expertise in engineering and business development to work by expanding into SR&ED consulting. He started NorthBridge Consultants in 1995 and grew the company into one of the largest independent government consulting firms in Canada. Twenty years later, Sol and his staff continue to practise the principles established through his background in manufacturing, taking a focused, hands-on approach in order to understand the most complex projects on a technical level.
In addition to his ongoing role at Northbridge, Sol is the CEO of NorthSpring Capital Partners, a private equity fund which provides risk capital to small and medium sized businesses. NorthSpring's recent focus has been in the information and communications technology sector, where Sol's interest in research and development has translated into a passion for helping emerging technologies survive.
