Built by people who
have done the work.

Production floors. Aerospace supply chains. Classrooms. Clinics. Our team has lived the problems before we built the platforms that solve them.

mode40-Nonsuch-Screengrab-6-Edit

It started on the floor.

Cameron Bergen spent more than three decades in the agri-food sector. He did not start in a boardroom. He started hands-on in the field.

Over 20+ years at one of Canada’s largest primary food processors, Cameron moved from the floor into senior operational roles. He helped design a $150M processing facility that became Manitoba’s second-largest capital project the year it was built. He and his team generated over $300M in documented annual operational savings before any of it was ever commercialized. In 2018, that business was acquired for over a billion dollars.

Along the way, Cameron hit the same wall every operator eventually hits. Critical data locked inside systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Spreadsheets holding the operation together. Tribal knowledge about to walk out the door with retiring operators. Decisions made on incomplete information, every single shift.

He went looking for a firm that could help fix it. Talked to every major vendor. Every major advisory shop. None of them had lived the problem. Most had never set foot on a working floor.

That is when he decided to build the firm he had been looking for.

He was not the only one
who had seen it.

Inside that same $1B food business, a group of operators, engineers, and technologists had been staring at the same gap for years. They had written the workarounds. Managed the data migrations. Held the operation together on the evenings and weekends when the systems broke. Different roles. Same wall.

One of them was Tracy Gromniski.

Tracy grew up on a 150-cow dairy in La Broquerie, Manitoba. Red River College. She spent her career closer to the data than most operators ever get. Applications Manager at the same food processor where Cameron spent his career. Before that, IT Administrator at a regional health authority. After that, SVP of Business Solutions and Technology at Ellement Consulting Group, and then CEO of Strive Business Solutions, where she led digital transformation across pension, benefit, and group annuity administration. Sixteen-plus years building machine learning and enterprise software systems. She left the food business, built elsewhere, and watched the same pattern repeat everywhere she went. The platforms changed. The gap between operational reality and operational data did not.

Tracy joined mode40 as Chief Product Officer and Partner in 2024. The work she had done outside the floor came back together with the work she had done on the floor. Same problem. New vantage point.

She was not the only one who came back. Many of mode40’s senior practitioners spent formative years inside that same $1B operation. Plant leaders. Quality and compliance leads. Production planners. Engineering and applications teams. Different roles. Same operational scars. Same standard of evidence.

That is the core of mode40. Operators who left the inside, went into software, data, engineering, and advisory work, and eventually decided the firm they had been wishing for did not exist. So they built it.

One basement.
Then a reunion.

mode40 started in Cam's basement in Steinbach, Manitoba in 2020. Just a laptop and a conviction that the gap between operational data and operational outcomes was going to stay open until somebody with real floor experience built a different kind of firm.

The first paying engagement came. Then the one after that. And as the work grew, the reunion began. The people who had lived the same problem inside the same business started to come back together under one roof. Some had spent the intervening years in advisory. Some had gone into software. Some had built their own firms. All of them were drawn back by the same idea. Build the firm we used to wish we could hire.

Six years later, mode40 spans a team of engineers, analysts, product leaders, and practitioners across Canada, the United States, and partner teams abroad. Still headquartered in Steinbach. Still holding the same standard. Still run by people who have stood on the floor.

"We did not start mode40 to build software. We started it because the software we needed did not exist and the firms we needed did not work the way we needed them to work."

Cameron Bergen

Cameron Bergen

Founder & CEO, mode40

What We Believe

Decisions, not dashboards.

It is not about the tech. The tech is a tool. The only question that matters is the one in front of the plant manager, the operator, the quality lead, the superintendent, the chief of staff. What is the real problem we are trying to solve? Once we find the real gap, the rest is work. The right systems. The right data. The right workflows. The right intelligence layered on top. Most firms sell a category. MES. ERP. BI. AI. We are not interested in selling categories. We are interested in whether the line runs cleaner next quarter than it did last quarter. Whether the audit closes without drama. Whether the student finishes the course. Whether the cost of not knowing finally goes down. We lead with the outcome. Not the acronym.

What we believe about the work:

The floor is the source of truth.

The closer you get to the people doing the work, the cleaner the data gets and the better the decision gets. Every project starts with the people closest to the operation, not the people furthest from it.

Hard problems do not get solved alone.

Operations are systems. Systems are webs of people, processes, and technology. No firm solves a real operational problem by itself. Our work sits alongside our customers’ teams, our technology partners’ platforms, and the standards the industry has set. That is a feature of the work, not a workaround.

Challenge the assumption. Especially our own.

The status quo in operational software has produced a generation of tools that underperform. We are not interested in keeping it intact. We expect every recommendation we make, every platform we ship, and every approach we take to be challenged. Starting with internally. The work gets better when the assumptions get tested.

One firm. One bill. One outcome.

Accountability is the commercial model. One team owns the strategy, the platform, and the continuous improvement loop. If the outcome does not show up, there is nobody to point at. That is the point.

Say what you see. Name the number.

The worst thing a firm can do to a customer is hedge. Hedging on whether the data is good. Hedging on whether the platform will deliver. Hedging on whether the ROI math works. We do not hedge. We say what we see, we name the number, and we attach it to the person who owns the outcome.

People, process, and technology. In that order.

Reverse the order and nothing works. Technology first looks like speed, but it creates rework. Process first looks disciplined, but it ignores the human layer. People first looks slow, but it compounds. We optimize for compounding.

Where the Story Goes

The rest of the story is told here.

This is the origin. The depth sits in three places.

The Practitioner Difference

Why a firm built by operators works differently than a firm built by advisors or software vendors. What it means for the work we deliver.

The Team

The people running mode40 today. What they did before this, and why that matters to what they do now.

Partners and Alliances

The technology allies, industry bodies, and customers who help us deliver the work. The recognition we have earned along the way.

Bring us the problem
you think is unsolvable.

If you have operational data that has resisted every previous attempt to reach it, we would 
like to hear about it. A workshop is the shortest path from your reality to a candid answer 
on whether we can help.

Book a Workshop