IVEY HBA DULY NOTED SOFTWARE

Typically, Constellation's acquisitions are small-in the $2-million to $4-million range-but add them all up, slip in a dose of Constellation's financial and oper-ational discipline, and you have a company with $1.2 billion (U.S.) in sales in 2013 and an EBITDA margin of 20%. Constellation's customers need the kind of stuff that's too specialized to merit much attention from the big guns of enterprise software, and all these VMS firms under its umbrella give Constellation a strong competitive position in the North American marketplace-that is, there isn't much competition at all.

IVEY HBA DULY NOTED SOFTWARE

Emphasys makes software for various public housing authorities. For instance, Markham, Ontario-based Jonas Club Management makes the programs that run golf courses' payroll, tee-time reservations and food-and-beverage operations. Over the years, Constellation has made scores of acquisitions and, through its six operating groups, now provides software to over 60 industries, from health care to law to public transit. With an initial $25-million investment from OMERS and his old associates at Ventures West Capital in 1995, he has built Constellation into a world-leading consolidator of vertical market software (VMS) companies-firms that create products to help run businesses in specific industries. Because if anyone is deserving of whatever celebrity the business pages can bestow on a Canadian corporate leader, then Leonard is probably the guy. 'He's one of the smartest tech executives I've met in my entire career.'Īnd there's an irony in that.

And what do those people have to say? 'He is probably the most intensely private individual in IT,' says one long-time associate who, like nearly everybody else contacted for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. At the time of this writing, he had 311 LinkedIn connections-so somebody knows him. Social media? Well, he's on LinkedIn (no photo, of course), which duly notes his job title and that he attended Western's Ivey Business School from 1980 to 1982. Leonard founded CSI in 1995,' and before that worked in 'the venture capital business for eleven years' it also records that he has a BSc from the University of Guelph and 'a MBA' from Western University.

A person close to Constellation says he was born in the United Kingdom another seems to think he comes from South Africa, but 'I really can't remember.' The company's online bio-graphy (no photo) notes that 'Mr. One source from England, where Leonard sits on corporate boards, says that he was born in 1956. Scan the Web, or even the company's website, for basic biographical information and you'll find, well, not much. Search 'Mark Leonard' on Google Images and you get nowhere.

In fact, you could say he's done a strangely effective job of it. And so far, in the nearly 20-year history of Constellation, he's done a pretty good job of staying out of the spotlight. No, the founder, president and chairman of Constellation Software Inc.-a Toronto-based, publicly traded software company with a $5-billion-plus market cap and one of the best-performing stocks on the TSX-would prefer not to be profiled at all. Or television show (you know, if there were a television show devoted to profiling Canadian business leaders). For that matter, he would prefer not to be the subject of a profile in any magazine. So it's no surprise that Leonard would probably prefer not to be the subject of a profile in this magazine. In this age of zero privacy, Mark Leonard has managed to maintain a practically unthinkable level of anonymity for just about any individual-let alone an IT executive who runs one of Canada's most dynamic, fastest-growing and most acquisitive software companies, and who has been compared favourably with Warren Buffett and Prem Watsa.

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