It’s never easy to answer that question. What I say is that my best and my worst habits are the same thing. I am very organized, very “focused”. That’s me, my great quality. My fault is that I am very “focused” too. Try to get me out of what’s on my mind! It is not easy.
The word “no.” I have a lot of difficulty with this. I will always find a solution. That’s my job. So when someone calls me back and says no, I have a hard time. We’ll find a different way. In business I use an expression from Nelson Mandela that I modified: “You know, in business you never lose, you win or you learn. » In our profession, as a pollster, as a business manager, when I have obstacles, I always have to find a solution. I deal with clients. When the customer says no, I want to understand why, what’s behind it. I have to convince the client.
When I entered the business, the first thing people said to me was: “The customer is always right. » This is not true. When he’s not right, you explain to him why, whether he agrees or not. And today, what’s fun is that I turn away clients, people I don’t want to work with because they tell me: “Look, I want to do the questionnaire in this way. »And I know that there are customers who are vampiric. With several, I gave them the phone number of a competitor. The worst customers are those who don’t know anything about it. They want market research, but they don’t know what they want to do.
This is the advice I received from my father. I created the company with my father in 1986. My father was known at the time, it’s thanks to him if I have the company today. But he died in 1993 and we were 50-50 partners. Besides, I was more the father and he the son, he was more delinquent than me, who was thoroughly organized. He gave me some advice: “Always be careful who you meet when you go up in society, because you’re going to meet the same people when you go down. » This is good advice because doing business in Quebec is a small environment. You have to pay attention to those you meet because inevitably, you are going to see them again somewhere. Then there is an element of humility. This advice helped me a lot.
There were plenty of moments, but, inevitably, there was one that was a little more emotional. Before my father died, we signed our biggest contract, 2.5 million with Santé Québec. It was in 1992, it had been six years since we created the company and there we were moving into the major leagues. There, I had a meal with my father, for whom it was usually never enough, for whom we always had to go further. And there, that evening, it was completely the opposite: “We succeeded! “, he told me. When we started the mandate, three days later, he died.
I train every day, it’s my outlet. Sometimes I sit at home with a screen and I work out. For the past year, I’ve been doing a lot of brisk walking outside. I need to get some fresh air.
I take 30 or 45 minutes. Often, when I’m at home, three days a week, I’ll listen to a documentary at the same time. An archaeological documentary, often, I would have liked to be an archaeologist, but it is not a very paying profession.
I made my first acquisition in Toronto in 2000, I made every possible and impossible mistake. Everything you shouldn’t do for an acquisition, I’ve done it. Bad partner, poorly evaluated, paid too much. There were too many gray areas. Since then, I have made 14 acquisitions. Currently, as we speak, I’m talking to 22 companies. If there is an acquisition, everything is put in writing. “Here are the 10 things that will change”, “the name will change”, “here are the goals for the next three years”. Everything is clear.
One of the secrets of the company is that we have established a profit sharing program here. This means that all employees know the company’s financial results every three months. And from the moment we reach the level requested, the rest is redistributed to employees with a certain limit. This creates a considerable impact on the company. We have a turnover rate of 1.8%. The person at the reception downstairs, the profit sharing program, thinks about it, because it’s their bonus at the end of the year.
I have one, I talk to him every week. It’s Pierre Weill, someone quite extraordinary, the founder and president of one of the biggest survey firms in the world, TNS Sofres. I met him in New York at the time, he was trying to buy me. When I arrive, he says, “Sit down. You have a great business. We would like to buy it. » My response: “I’m very happy. I would like to buy yours. » We became friends, he is 86 years old. I was in France three weeks ago and I ate with him every day. He really likes the entrepreneurial spirit of French people in America, he always has a different perspective, he did what I went through, he has made around fifty acquisitions in his life. I once asked him, “If you had to do it again, would you do the same things? » He said to me, “I would do the exact same things, but faster. »
He is someone who surrounds himself with the best in the industry. The acquisitions we have made, we are not buying furniture or buildings, we are buying talent. I understood very quickly what I don’t like to do, and there is a relationship between what I don’t like to do and what I am not good at. So I looked around for people who were better than me.
