As Volaris Group celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025, we are publishing a series that looks at the people, businesses, and milestones who have helped build and grow our ecosystem of software businesses into what it is today.
Today, Volaris Group is known for being a vibrant network of more than 240 global software businesses serving vertical markets. It’s an ongoing success story that began when Constellation Software acquired a very successful startup called Trapeze Group in 1995.
While the Volaris network has welcomed many new people into its fold over the past three decades, few people have been here longer than Brad Heide, Bruce Payne, and Harry Preston. They started as some of the first employees of Trapeze Group, and over the past 30 years they have seen the company go through a lot – from finding its niche as a rapidly-growing transportation planning software startup in the early ‘90s and being acquired by Constellation Software in 1995 (which later was split into operating groups including Volaris Group) to Constellation Software going public in 2006 and Trapeze becoming part of a collective of people transportation companies called Modaxo.
Common threads run through each of their experiences that explain how they’ve thrived in an ever-changing organization. Each of them has demonstrated their entrepreneurial spirit, the ability to continually learn, solve problems, and adapt with changing times, and perhaps most importantly, their deep pride in developing specialized knowledge to serve their customers.
The trio spoke to Acquired Knowledge about witnessing the growth of Trapeze Group after the company was acquired by Volaris Group and Constellation Software.
What has it been like to work at Trapeze Group over the past 30 years?
Harry Preston: When I joined Trapeze, the company only had around a dozen people. It has continued to grow and grow. I’ve been in charge of fixed-route scheduling since I’ve been here. As a result, I know just about every transit property in North America, and doing that has enabled me to get to know clients, which I have especially enjoyed.
Bruce Payne: I’d describe the early days at Trapeze Group as exciting, stressful, and fun. We had a “work hard, play hard” culture as a startup. I spent years on the road, so it helped break up the stress a little bit.
When people learn that I’ve been with Trapeze for 30 years, they say, “You’ve been there that long? How do you do that?” But coming from essentially what was a startup in the early days of Trapeze, I’ve pretty much done every role you can imagine – from implementation, to quality assurance, to project management.
I used to negotiate contracts. I did sales. I was a product manager. I led a dev team. I led an installation team. I would install software for customers, train them on the software, support the software, and sell it. That’s essentially how I would describe being here that long. Basically, you did everything!
Now, the roles are more broken up because it would have been hard for the company to continue growing with the model we had back then. As we have grown, business units have become more specialized and divided into smaller groups to replicate the startup feel in a larger business . But back in the day, everybody at the company wore many hats.
Brad Heide: I’ve been through different jobs during my time here, and I’ve certainly worn many hats. In the early days of Trapeze, it would be typical for me to go with the trainer and the installers, and we’d be fixing the code after we installed the software on-site.
Some of the early work included training people how to use a mouse, and although we had the internet, it wasn’t like it is today. We were still taking the software to clients on floppy disks, until at some point we stopped because we could reliably download what we needed from the internet.
The early days of Trapeze Group meant a lot of hard work, but the team always left plenty of room to have fun, including at yearly holiday parties.
(Photo credit: Brad Heide)
What skills or knowledge have you had to develop throughout your career?
Bruce Payne: It’s kind of been the school of hard knocks. The degree I got in university was in transportation and transportation planning. I had to gain a ton of knowledge related to the type of computer systems we were installing and supporting. And not just the systems, but also the infrastructure and database. I’d have to talk to not only the database and IT people at the agency, but the CIOs, CEOs, and the heads of the departments where I was installing the software.
I gained a very rounded skill set. When starting the job, I didn’t know I would end up doing sales, but I learned how to do it through necessity. I didn’t know a lot about contracts, and I ended up negotiating them.
Brad Heide: Self-learning has been very important to my career. Our product was on the leading edge within the product domain, so there wasn’t a course that would teach me to do the work that I was being asked to do. So if I needed to learn a new computer language, I taught it to myself.
I’ve always been a very independent worker, even when I was in my 20s. By the time I had to learn internet security, the World Wide Web was in place. I could search for what I needed on the internet and learn it myself.
Harry Preston: I’ve developed a lot of specialized knowledge in fixed-route scheduling. I currently work on the operations team, and over the years, I’ve been an important resource for our team for training, including training several people who have gone on to become senior leaders at our company.
Being around as long as I have, many of our people in fixed-route scheduling know me well, including customers. I have had a chance to develop deep relationships with our long-time clients.
Customer site visits like this one with RET in 1994 have helped Brad Heide, Bruce Payne, and Harry Preston get a better sense of how their software operates in a real-life situation.
(Photo credit: Brad Heide)
What has it been like to witness the growth of Trapeze over time, especially after it was acquired by Volaris and Constellation, and became part of a network of companies?
Brad Heide: I have seen a growth in professionalism. Trapeze went from a startup feel to investing in more procedures and processes. For example, as we became more established, we took additional steps to ensure software was thoroughly tested before it went out the door. Supporting the software got better in that I didn’t have to fly out in order to fix issues, because they had become more stable.
Over time, we got more money to invest in the business. The quality of our hardware purchases improved, and if staff needed computer upgrades, they were easier to get.
Certainly, I’ve witnessed the share price of Constellation Software go up since the company went public in 2006. We had to introduce and formalize more processes to make sure we were meeting the requirements of a publicly-traded company. The transition didn’t happen overnight; it was continuous and gradual. The changes were definitely for the better.
Bruce Payne: It’s funny – when you’re in the midst of the growth, you just go with the flow and don’t look back. We were so successful early on that we didn’t even think about the possibility that we weren’t going to be successful.
As Trapeze has grown, we have attracted people with new ideas – people from Volaris and Constellation who have asked, “Have you thought about doing this?” Constellation Software and Mark Leonard realized that we are good at serving a niche industry with our vertical market software. For them to look at what Trapeze has created from the outside and grasp what we have been working on, I think it’s very interesting.
For example, the particular piece of software that I’m dealing with now in the mobility on demand world has been around for many, many years. There must be a million lines of code behind it, and being an extremely complex piece of software has contributed to its success. This is a piece of mission-critical software that is hard to replace.
What are you most proud of accomplishing during your time here?
Brad Heide: I’m proud to have been named on two patents that have been awarded for working on algorithms. I’m named as a co-inventor , with Trapeze Group co-founder Ian Keaveny as the other co-inventor. It’s only two patents, but hey, how many people get to have their name on an official patent?
Bruce Payne: The biggest achievement I can highlight is that David Gavin, Andrew McKechnie and I built the public-facing business at Trapeze to a very large scale between us. We are still reaping the benefits of that, and the work we invested there continues to bring in millions of dollars of maintenance revenue to the business.
Harry Preston: I have taken immense pride in satisfying clients. I don’t think there’s any client that I haven’t gone out of my way to try and help. Customer care was rewarding because I had the technical knowledge to fix any problems that existed in the software, and I enjoyed applying my skills in that way. Visiting our many customers is something I took pride in doing as well. I’ve collected close to 50 bus stop signs from different cities I’ve visited. I have signs from the Nashville Trolley, Burlington Transit, Albuquerque, and even the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and have inspired a colleague to start a similar collection.
A sample of Harry Preston’s bus stop sign collection from the cities he’s visited.
(Photo credit: Harry Preston)
What are you getting the most satisfaction out of these days?
Bruce Payne: In my current role, I enjoy the flexibility to drive sales and come at it from an industry perspective. I think it’s a pretty good model – within the sales team, we try to have a mix of industry experts or technical people who know and understand the product, customer, and competitors, and who help the account executives do their jobs.
Now that I am further along in my career, I look back at all the friends I’ve acquired along the way while working here. A lot of them are still with Volaris, and I keep in touch with and get together with others who have retired or moved on. Over the years, I’ve had stressful times and good times with colleagues and as a result have become very close to them. These relationships are how I will view my tenure at Trapeze.
Brad Heide: I enjoy being able to explore and work on new ideas within the product. I still like coding a lot. For a while, I was a development manager, where I was managing more than 20 people. Eventually, by mutual agreement, that changed so that I was able to refocus on engineering. Before that, I was trying to do both by managing people and still doing coding on the algorithm side. It got to be too much, so we changed that. It was a lesson to find out what I was good at, and what I enjoyed – and I learned that I enjoy the engineering.
When I get to work on new functionality – not just bug-fixing, but actually building an idea that we’ve had for a new feature and implementing it – it’s really rewarding to see it in use at a customer site. Walking into a dispatch centre and watching clients use the software is very satisfying, because so much of the work is theoretical until that point.
Harry Preston: Work has been a stable presence in my life. People keep asking me when I plan to retire and enjoy my life — but I enjoy my life and career at Trapeze, so I have not been in a rush to retire.
Outside of work, I like to do artwork, and I like to think I’m not too bad at it. Woodworking is something I got into while I was a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University. I rebuilt a kitchen back then, at the same time in my life when I was publishing studies in scientific journals about molecular structures.
Harry Preston celebrating his 15th anniversary at Trapeze with his co-workers.
(Photo credit: Harry Preston)
What advice would you give to someone early in their career?
Bruce Payne: When you are in a sales role, listen to the customer. Don’t tell them what you want them to do. Take in everything they are telling you. Don’t just nod and smile. Then maybe provide advice at the appropriate time.
Another piece of career advice would be: Don’t expect to be spoon-fed. Whatever you want or need at work, you have to go after it yourself. The successful people I have seen here take initiative, and success doesn’t get delivered to you on a silver platter.
Brad Heide: The grass is not always greener on the other side. When a lot of people are starting out in their careers, they want to job hop – and in some cases, that can make sense. But you can also succeed by staying with a company through thick and thin. In my case, I left Trapeze for three months, but came back on the agreement that I would just do engineering. Once I committed to a career at Trapeze, I participated in the company’s growth, and by sticking with the company, I was rewarded in the long run for my patience. My advice would be: Don’t be too impatient to rise up the ladder.
My other piece of advice is to take responsibility for advancing your own knowledge. Don’t rely solely on coursework or certificates either. Maybe those are important when you are applying for a job, but don’t hesitate to teach yourself something new.
I’m not completely self-taught – I went to university and got a degree in software development. But the self-taught stuff, including what I did while I was still in school, has been a huge benefit. I taught myself the C language when I was still in university, before we needed to use it for class. So I was ahead of the class. It helped me in those courses, and it really helped me get a job. Once I was in the workplace, that habit of self-learning helped me become the person that other people come to. If you can be the expert and take the initiative to learn as much as possible, it will advance your career.
Harry Preston: Everyone will prosper if they work hard. The knowledge I earned was gained through more than 30 years of experience with different versions of our software, running and debugging them all. Spending time to understand these things requires effort and focus, and my advice to people who are early in their careers is that you will need to cultivate patience as you develop your expertise.
Working for Trapeze Group over 30 years has given Brad Heide (far left) the chance to work with many talented collaborators.
(Photo credit: Brad Heide)
