Helcim is a Calgary-based payments company on a mission to support scaling business owners with modern, merchant-friendly payment solutions. Whether in person or online, Helcim provides the point-of-sale systems and software that help businesses process transactions seamlessly.
With approximately 140 team members, all based in Calgary, Helcim entered a growth phase after closing its $20 million Series B funding round in early 2024. Around the same time, the company refreshed its Culture Book, emphasizing what it means to work smart and hard, and leaning into the idea of talent density: building a team where great people raise the bar for everyone around them.
Helcim was focused on building a place where great people want to work with other great people - where high performers raise the bar, support each other, and make everyone around them better.
But as the company entered its next growth phase, the People & Culture team saw an opportunity: the leaders were strong, but a shared framework for leading at scale could make them even stronger. Helcim decided to invest in development that would grow alongside the business.
Helcim's leaders were talented, dedicated, and deeply invested in the company's success. Many had grown within the organization, with individual contributors stepping into people leadership roles for the first time. They lived the culture. They worked smart and hard. But there was a pattern we couldn't ignore:
"Our leaders cared a lot - sometimes to a fault," Cheryl Hooper, Head of People & Culture, says, " but sometimes that showed up as being overly cautious - they didn't always ask for what they needed from their team."
This is a common tension in people-first cultures. When trust and psychological safety can quietly slide into conflict avoidance, feedback gets softened, and hard conversations get delayed. Leaders carry problems themselves instead of raising them directly - not because they care, but because they care a lot and don’t want to risk the relationship.
At Helcim, this manifested as leaders taking on too much. Instead of delegating and building ownership across their teams, many leaders absorbed work personally. In some cases, harmony was prioritized at the expense of performance. "We wanted people to feel supported, but we also needed to raise the bar. We needed more tools to do both at the same time.”
This wasn't a question of capability or commitment. It was a question of tools, confidence, and shared standards. Many of these leaders had navigated the shift from peer to leader without any formal training. They were doing their best with what they had, but they didn’t have a shared framework for what high-performing leadership actually looked like and how to deliver clear feedback and set expectations while staying aligned to the culture.
The conversations that needed to happen weren't happening - not because leaders didn’t see the issues, but because they didn’t have a roadmap to handle them well.
As Helcim’s Culture Book raised the bar, motivation wasn’t enough. To scale talent density and performance across the organization, Helcim needed a repeatable way to develop leadership capacity — and the confidence to lead with both care and clarity.
Once the need was clear, Cheryl, the Head of People & Culture, began exploring leadership development options. She eventually came across Unicorn Labs, and the focus on startups and scale-ups stood out right away.
“A lot of it just clicked,” she recalls. "They were talking about the same challenges we were seeing - building high-performing teams while scaling fast. "
A local reference further validated it. Another Calgary company already working with Unicorn Labs spoke highly of the experience - not just the program itself, but the practical takeaways and the fact that they continued investing in it over time. That gave Cheryl the confidence that this wasn't just another generic leadership course.
There was still one important question to answer: would it actually fit at Helcim?
Nic, Helcim's CEO, had a reasonable concern - whether the language and approach would feel too corporate, too polished, or disconnected from the pace and reality of a startup.
"Startups are just different," Cheryl acknowledges. "The problems are real-time, and you don’t have the luxury of slowing down."
A conversation with Fahd helped resolve that quickly. It didn’t feel like a sales pitch; it was an exploration of fit. Fahd asked thoughtful questions about Helcim's culture, goals, and what the team was trying to achieve - and focused on understanding before recommending.
"That’s when we knew it would work," Cheryl says.
With that confidence, Helcim made the call: every leader would go through the program.
Helcim committed to running three cohorts of approximately 36 leaders in total.
Running all three cohorts on the same cadence was intentional. It meant leaders across the company were learning the same frameworks at roughly the same time. That created consistency - and made it easier for the learning to show up in real life, whether in leadership meetings, learning pods, or day-to-day conversations. The reception was overwhelmingly positive.
"Honestly, almost everyone was excited," Cheryl recalls. "There’s always a couple of people who’ve been through leadership training that wasn’t great, so they come in skeptical."
And that skepticism is fair. Leadership training can feel generic - another deck, another model, another program promising transformation. But even the skeptics came around.
"The funny part is those were the people who ended up most impressed," Cheryl says. "They came out of it like, 'Okay -, that exceeded my expectations.'"
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Leadership development is a significant investment in dollars, yes, but also in time. Cheryl is clear-eyed about that reality.
"It can be scary," she admits. "This is time that you're not spending building your product or finding customers."
But the rigour of the program wasn't incidental. It was part of what made it work.
"The rigour made it meaningful," Cheryl says. "It wasn't easy - and that was the point. People appreciated that it pushed them."
The effort required sent a clear signal: leadership at Helcim is real work. It reinforced the standard the company expects across every role.
"The amount of work that you have to do in the program actually reinforces what we expect people to do in all parts of their job," she explains. "You're investing just as much in terms of your leadership development as you are in any other aspect of your role within the organization."
The program wasn’t a finish line. It was a foundation.
"This program gave our leaders a foundation," Cheryl reflects. "They're more confident, more self-aware, and better equipped to have courageous conversations. It's shifted our leadership culture for the long run."
But Cheryl is careful not to frame this as a finished story. Building a high-performing culture isn't a box you check.
"It's not a one-and-done," she says. "Building a high-performing culture is ongoing. We just need to keep reinforcing what we've learned; that's how we maintain it."
The team is already thinking about what comes next: rituals, cadences, refreshers to keep the material alive in day-to-day work.
“We’ve talked about putting rhythms in place to keep the material fresh,” Miranda adds. “So it stays part of how we work.”
For Helcim, the program wasn't an ending. It was a beginning, a shared foundation from which to keep building.
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