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The Homecoming
A deeply personal lesson in resilience and hope from the founder of Bulletproof Solutions, Steven Burns
If it’s true what people say—that you can never go home again—Steven Burns may be the most unapologetically optimistic corporate executive in Atlantic Canada. Maybe, shrugs the Fredericton-based 53-year-old president and COO who came out of retirement a year ago to run the IT security company he founded in 2000. “I wanted to help the people who had helped me get to where I was,” he said. “It wasn’t a hard decision for me to come back.”
In the fall of 2022, Bulletproof Solutions was at a kind of crossroads. With annual sales approaching $100 million, its growth had been nothing short of phenomenal—having benefitted both from its 2016 sale to U.S. gaming giant GLI Group and the worldwide boom in the computer security industry. But, in the four years since Burns had stepped back from the CEO job in 2020 to become chairman/adviser, the company had also become, well, unfriendly wasn’t exactly the word. “When I left, we were probably 120-130 people,” he said. “I felt like I knew everybody’s name… their wives… their kids. Now, in 2022, we were over 300. I felt like we had lost some of our culture.”
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