The Ben Mulroney Show - Small business week spotlight -- YOCALE

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

GUEST: Arash Asli  I  Chief Executive Officer YOCALE If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So the best hapice in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ.

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We're celebrating entrepreneurs. We're hearing from entrepreneurs. We want to get into the heads of entrepreneurs who I believe are, they are the special sauce that makes Canada what it is without risk takers, without people who wake up every day and bet on themselves and bet on an idea that they have. They've looked at the market and they say, you know what? There's something missing. here. I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and I'm going to try my hand at building

out a company that can make life better or solve a problem that I see in the world. And one of those people is joining us now. And for the record, I have a financial relationship with this company. Please welcome to the show, the chief executive officer of YoCal Arash Asley. Welcome, my friend. Hey, Ben. Good morning and thank you so much for having me on the show. So you're based out in Vancouver. Talk to me about what YoCal does.

Yeah. So the whole purpose of YoCal is to make a business simple. You know, we started with a mission that, hey, running a business, especially a service-based business is very tough. You know, generally speaking, what you find is that in a lot of cases, the business life takes over the life of the business owner. And our mission was to make that simple to let the business owners run their business rather than it running them.

Yeah, if you run a nail salon, if you own a nail salon, you probably got into that business because you like doing people's nails. And then you find that as you build a business, you're spending a lot of time on bookkeeping and you're spending a lot of time on appointments and that sort of thing. So you built a platform to address that part of the business. Yeah, exactly. I mean, really, the whole purpose was for us, for those people to concentrate on what they love doing and for us to take care of everything else. And everything else is really the entire management of their business, right? So we automate, we streamline. And not only that, we help them grow their business. So from their scheduling to booking, to invoicing, to taxes, to payments, you know, online reputation management amongst everything else is required, you know, to run a business and, you know, save time doing it. But, also helping them grow their business, which is one of the key components of running a business. Well, that's, see, that's the double-edged sword, isn't it?

If you're a business that has built a suite of products for other businesses, then your success is kind of tied to the health of these other businesses. And if the economy is not humming, and if businesses go under, you'll lose a client, right? And so how, what you would know, how is the economy doing right now, based on your clients, how is the economy doing? You know, it's interesting. We really saw, because we also, part of what we do is payment processing. So unfortunately, we saw that across the board, it didn't matter if you were a dentist or

you were a hair salon or you were a massage therapist, you know, their revenue dropped considerably. In fact, there was a report I just read last week that, you know, they said that 90% of small business owners are making personal sacrifices to just stay afloat. 69% have cut their own salaries and more than half delayed retirement or, you know, buying at home. So yeah, yeah, we're absolutely seeing that. And that's very unfortunate because they're the heart of the economy. Yeah, absolutely. So when you and I first met, you were sort of giving me the history of YoCal. And I don't know a lot about a lot, but I know a little about a lot. And when you were talking to me about building this company, I was struck by how

you really flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which states, find that one thing, make a product, build a business, be laser focused on one thing, and once you become the master of that thing, then you start shifting lanes. Then you start building out other business units. That's not how you built this. Talk to me about how you built this business

because you successfully boiled the ocean. Yeah, you know, I mean, we did have a laugh about. that, didn't we? Yeah, I mean, when we started, we had, we were shooting for the moon. We had this big mission. You know, I came from enterprise software background. And, you know, the passion that I had built was helping and bringing these tools and technologies that is traditionally available to, you know, companies with a lot of money into the hands of the small business owners. Now, this is, you know, around the time that, you know, the Uber's of the world didn't even exist, you know, and the idea was that, hey, I'm going to find a common

denominator between all appointment-based businesses, build a platform that's sort of built for them so they can run their business the way they want to run it. And yeah, I mean, it was a big dream and it was a bit unorthodox. But hey, we did it. And the way we did it is that, you know, we didn't take any institutional capital. We had the time. We worked with one business owner at the time. You know, I remember I literally went and became a receptionist of a hair salon just to figure out, you know, what's working or not, what's not working, you know? And hey, here we are. and I think we've got a great solution today. So how many people are in the company?

About 34, 35 now. Yeah, so it's still technically a small business. And you're going up against some pretty big legacy providers, right? Like, your, YoCal is, what differentiates YoCal from those other companies that do, that are in the same space as you? Yeah, so, I mean, we've got two types of competitors that we compete against. that we were eating competing against feature competitors. Like, for example, we would compete against the Zoom or a Google Meet because they have video conferencing.

We've got built-in video conferencing, you know. I mean, the fact that's the one, when you told me that, that you built your own, as opposed to just building a plug-in for Zoom. No, no, we're going to build our own video conferencing app feature. I was like, okay, sure. You know, the whole idea was like, you know, small business owners are already busy and, you know, for them to have to juggle different systems and, you know, plug things together. We just wanted to have a bumper-to-bumper support, you know, like the entire thing,

one platform, one partner that does everything for them and they don't have to worry about it. Hey, but I got to ask a question, though, because I can't believe I didn't ask this before, but just popped to my head finally. But so you've got the YoCal answer to Zoom. But what if you want to do a call with somebody who doesn't have that on the other side? Yeah, I mean, 100%. And with our application, they just send a link. There's no applications required.

They just click on it and they connect. Oh, that's it. Oh, so it's not, it just, it pops up in a browser window. Yeah, anything, or their mobile phone. Lideaf, low depth, they can chat. Okay, all right. Okay, you answered the question. Okay, sorry, go on.

I took you off topic. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you know, that's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is that, you know, we now have, you know, competitors that have been very well funded and they're providing sort of a, what they call all in one, you know, for a specific vertical. And the difference between them and us is that, hey, look, I mean, we built a platform that's horizontal, meaning that it caters to a lot of different industries.

So we had the benefit of bringing best practices from multiple industries, you know, down to one end-to-end platform. And then on top of that, to be very configurable. So not only our application is configurable for the industry, it's configurable down to the specific business owner, down to the specific service providers, that works within that business, you know, everything from the technology platform to payment processing to everything else. So it's the flexibility customization and the all-in-one part of it. Arash, one more question for you. And it's about you said you decide to forego

institutional capital. If there are business owners who are listening today, a lot of them would probably think that institutional capital is the thing. It's the, you know, that's the goal. If you get that, you've got security, you can move to the next level. talk to talk to our listeners about why that might not be the best case or best choice for every business. Yeah, I mean, look, at the beginning, the thing was that the second that you bring in institutional capital, and I used to sit across the table from people like myself, I would have said, hey, you're crazy, you know? And that may or may not be a good thing, you know, it depends. I was confident on our vision.

And, you know, when you raise institutional capital early, you're often building for growth in a set of the value. And, you know, for us, by raising from friends and family and funding it ourselves, we really stay full, hyper-focused on creating something real, something special, that actually helps business owners. And that was our mission. You know, our mission wasn't to become a multimillion-dollar company. Our mission was to help business owners, you know, what I said earlier. But if you can become a multimillion-dollar company.

Yeah, I mean, no one's going to complain. Okay. Okay. So real quick, if people like what they heard, if there's a small business thinking, I want to check this out for my business. How can they find YoCal? Yeah, I mean, our website, yoCal.com, you know, we provide a lot of information. And, hey, we also have a lot of people within our company that, you know, become your partner.

You know, they become your, we call them customer success managers, you know, to not only help you to implement the software, but any other things that you need, you know, to market yourself, to get best practices amongst other things. Arash Asley, YoCal, thank you very much, my friend. My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Ben. This fall on Top Chef Canada. It's super surreal being here. The search for Canada's Top Chef starts now. Let's go!

Ten chefs are on a culinary quest. It tastes like fear, anxiety, all at the same time, but delicious. Only one will be crowned. It's tough. hardest things I've ever done. Two minutes shot! Top Chef Canada, all new Tuesdays on Flavor Network, stream on Stack TV.