About
About SZTek
SZTek is an Ontario AI consultancy based in Vaughan that builds AI tools and automation for small and medium businesses.
Who we are
Who we are
SZTek was founded by Zafer Khan and is based in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada. The company, SZTek Inc., was incorporated in 2020 and helps Ontario small and medium businesses put modern technology to work in plain, practical ways.
Why SZTek exists
Big-company rigour, small-business access
Our founder spent years leading large transformation projects: the careful, measured kind that big companies run with big budgets, where every change is planned, tested, and counted in real dollars saved.
The businesses that could use it most are the ones that could never afford it. SZTek exists to close that gap: the same discipline, sized and priced for a shop, a crew, a clinic, or a small firm, and explained in plain language the whole way through.
Mission and values
Our mission
We believe good technology should feel like a helpful neighbour, not a puzzle. Our mission is to make everyday work smoother, faster, and more profitable for the businesses that keep Ontario running, and to explain every step in plain language.
Honesty
We tell you what will help and what will not, even when it is not what you hoped to hear.
Craftsmanship
We build careful, clean work that holds up, not a quick demo that falls over later.
Plain language
We explain everything the way you would explain it to a friend, with no jargon left hanging.
Respect
We respect your time, your budget, and the good work of others in our field.
Founder
Zafer Khan
Founder, SZTek Inc.
Zafer Khan has spent more than twenty years in technology. He comes from a Karachi family of soldiers and poets shaped by generations of migration, and he added three of his own. He left home for the Gulf, then the United States, and then Canada, and each time he started over from the bottom in a place that did not yet know his work.
In Canada he rebuilt that work one step at a time. Over the past decade and five roles at JELD-WEN, a global door and window manufacturer, he rose from plant-level IT support in Toronto to Manager, IT Business Operations for Canada, the role he still holds today, accountable for IT operations across every JELD-WEN facility in the country. He founded SZTek to bring that same enterprise discipline to smaller companies and build AI tools they can actually use.
A decade of documented performance reviews records, among much else, that he:
- built Canada's first centralized IT asset management system, its first national IT procurement process, and its first annual IT budget, institutions that had never existed there before;
- kept JELD-WEN's national workforce running through COVID-19, sourcing and building laptops in a matter of days during the global shortage;
- had solutions he designed in Canada adopted for rollout across JELD-WEN's United States operations;
- held financial accountability for a Canadian business generating over $350 million a year, which went on to significantly exceed its revenue and profit targets;
- was voted an employee MVP five times, with a zero-safety-incident record across his teams.
He is a very strategic thinker and looks for every opportunity to make the operations more productive and cost effective.
His manager, in a performance review
He knows what it is to start over and to be underestimated, and it shapes how he builds. The best technology, he believes, gets out of the way and makes a hard thing feel simple for the person on the other side. That is the standard he holds SZTek to.
View LinkedIn profile (opens in a new tab)At a glance
- 20+ yearsin technology, from plant-floor support to national IT operations
- Every facilityIT operations across each JELD-WEN site in Canada
- 5 timesvoted an employee MVP, with a zero-safety-incident record
- Co-founderof Saalvio, a Canadian digital mental health platform
How we work
How we work
We start by listening. We look at how you work today, then give you a straight answer on where technology will save you time and money, and where it will not. When we build, the tools are yours to keep. You own your stack, pay vendors at cost, with no SaaS markup and no per-seat lock-in. SaaS markup means the extra fee software companies add on top of the real cost. Per-seat lock-in means paying again for every person who logs in. Support and maintenance are there when you need them, not pushed by default.
Want to work with us?
Tell us what slows your business down. We will reply with a straight answer.