Other highlights (36)
““We don’t make a cent in these offices. The money is made in the stores.””
“Each individual has to learn how to make their role meaningful. And another central tenet: May the best idea win.”
“Where did the neologism “*dépanneur*” originate? It comes from the verb *dépanner,* meaning “to repair.” This word also has a metaphorical sense: “to *dépanner* someone” means “to render a service”—hence *dépanneur.* According to Bouchard, the neologism originated with Paul-Émile Maheu,[[2]](private://read/01j5mtjqkzkqnzrmf5b4rr6pr2/#notes2) owner of a small grocery store in a popular Montreal neighbourhood in the 1970s. With his customer base dwindling due to the booming popularity of supermarkets—a trend that was spreading across the continent—Maheu decided to cut his staff, expand his range of products and extend his business hours, which were severely regulated for grocery stores at the time. This formula, later adopted by Bouchard and others, was such a success that today Quebec has the world’s highest number of convenience stores per capita: one store per 1,200 inhabitants—three times more than the average in California, for example.”
“More than once, Couche-Tard had doubled and even quadrupled in size, overnight. Its acquisitions both in Canada and in the United States had allowed it to develop a unique mode of operation that was simultaneously decentralized and integrated.”
“The business had also thrived because its management team consisted of four men who had built it with their own hands—quite literally—and they had personally experienced what it’s like to run a small store, with the successes and failures that this entailed. Each setback had brought their group closer together. Each challenge had made them stronger, more efficient, more impressive. Some competitors made the mistake of underestimating them due to their imperfect English despite the fact their families had been North Americans for generations. But these four men knew where they were going because they also knew where they were coming from.”
“It is said that the survival of humankind rests on two pillars—a mother’s love and a father’s protection. But it is equally true that it depends on a powerful lever to propel it forward (or, in some cases, to drag it backward): a son’s desire to restore his parents’ honour.”
“The bankruptcy laws in that period, however, were merciless. He was chained to debts that would take him 10 years to repay. The entire family suffered the punishment. “Before, we would drink whole milk, with cream on the top,” says Alain Bouchard. “After, it was powdered milk, and our meat was baloney. They were very hard years.””
“It was all too much; their mother was unable to cope. Not long after her sixth child, Suzanne, was born, Rachel suffered a serious depression and lost touch with reality. The crash had been too brutal; everything they had built was crumbling. In Chicoutimi, she had had her own car, a Cadillac. Now the family drove an old wreck, as ragged as their lives—*her* life—had become. The only solution was to commit her to a psychiatric institution. The closest option, Saint-Michel-Archange de Québec hospital (better known under its previous name, *l’Asile,* meaning “the Asylum”), was a few hundred kilometres from the family home.
How long would it take for her to heal? When would she be returning home? No one could answer these questions, to which the children constantly pleaded for answers. Another question was more pressing: How could the family endure her absence when the father was away working from morning until night, and there were six children in the home, including a newborn baby? The oldest daughter, Christiane, was barely 10 years old. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to sacrifice her own education, quitting school to become the surrogate mother for that lost tribe, stranded in the snow-covered woods.”
“He still has heartbreaking memories of visits to the Saint-Michel-Archange psychiatric hospital in Quebec City, where his mother was held for two years, and where she was given “care” in the form of ice baths. When that treatment failed to cure her depression, the doctors considered giving her a lobotomy; she barely escaped the treatment. Each of Alain’s visits were the same, and ended with her pleading. “She would say, ‘Alain, get me out of here.’” He had to explain that there was nothing he could do, that he would love to bring her home with him but that he didn’t have the authority to discharge her from the hospital. When he returned home, he would beg his father, trying to convince him that the children could take care of her far better than the so-called doctors at Saint-Michel-Archange.
But it was impossible. The father knew full well that he couldn’t bring his wife into their mobile home, pushing their number to eight, only to abandon her for months when he went off to a work site. It would just pull them all back into the nightmare they had lived through before.”
“During his brief stays back home, Jean-Paul Bouchard would take them on an activity that left a deep impression. After they piled into his old car, the family embarked on driving tours of businesses of the region: garages, hardware stores, restaurants, trailer parks. Jean-Paul nurtured a single dream in his heart: to enter the business world once again. His children, brought along on these strange adventures, would see first-hand his yearning to find his way back to that road, that pathway to restoring his dignity.
The unusual team would disembark, arrive unannounced abruptly and begin to examine the premises and question the owner about his or her revenue, traffic levels, the price of rent, inventory, employees and their wages, profit margins and sales prices. Then their father, who had only a third-grade education and had trouble with basic math, would turn to his son Alain. “He would say, ‘Alain, do the totals,’” Alain Bouchard recalls. Though”
“His mother had found an ingenious way to help make ends meet: Every morning she made sandwiches that her son, Alain, would sell to the workers at nearby sites. They also offered sodas, which they bought at wholesale prices so they could maximize profits. Alain’s first two summers in Micoua were therefore divided between this work in the morning, and spending the afternoons fishing with his friends in the well-stocked rivers of the region.”
“I’m going to go to Montreal, I’m going to make a lot of money and I’m going to start my own business.” In short: all he had to do was invent his life.”
“The task didn’t require much in the way of thought, but it had one great advantage for a single young man: The workers in charge of packaging were all female, and most of them were young. Thus it was a matter of some consternation for him when he found out he was being promoted to the shipping department, cutting off his contact with the young ladies. Despite the salary boost the position provided, he decided to quit the factory for another with a predominately female staff: a clothing manufacturer. Once again, his intellectual abilities were not what led to him being hired. During the job interview, the supervisor selected him after comparing the size of his biceps against that of another candidate. They were looking for a man capable of lifting heavy spools with his arms, to feed the noisy mechanical weavers.”
“Gilles, the eldest son of the Bouchard family, decided to go into business, and bought a franchise located near Laval: a grocery store attached to a dairy. The formula had been created 15 years earlier in Ontario with the Becker’s chain. Becker’s was a network of convenience stores specializing in the sale of homemade dairy products. The dairy, owned by a Canadian businessman of Greek origin, Frank Bazos, essentially created its own distribution network. The idea was based on the vertical integration model used by major oil companies, which have their own gas stations.
In Quebec, Robert Bazos, another member of the family, had undertaken to reproduce this concept starting with a dairy located in Laval. In a stroke of marketing genius, he named the chain, Perrette.[[11]](private://read/01j5mtjqkzkqnzrmf5b4rr6pr2/#notes11) At that time, all Quebec Francophones had grown up hearing the 17th-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine *The Milkmaid and her Pail.* Many had had to memorize it in school, an exercise that had little use in itself, but that had the advantage of occupying students for hours. The story begins like this: “Perrette, having a pot of milk on her head…” thus Francophone Quebecers naturally associated the name Perrette with milk products.
Robert Bazos also had the idea to sell milk in reusable plastic containers. Rather than throwing them out after using them and losing the value for the deposit, clients had a reason to return their milk jugs to Perrette—the only distributor of the brand—and buy a new one. With this tactic, Bazos secured the loyalty of his customers, while hoping that they would also buy other products, like cigarettes or newspapers.”
“La Fontaine closes by observing that all humans, rich or poor, tend to build “castles in Spain,” to dream that “All the riches of the world are ours.” But each of us should be aware that an accident could come about, leaving us “Gros-Jean as before.”[[12]](private://read/01j5mtjqkzkqnzrmf5b4rr6pr2/#notes12)”
“In July of 1969, while he was on his annual vacation, Alain Bouchard had taken over the store for his brother so that the storekeeper could take some vacation time for himself. A Perrette supervisor came in just as the young man was reorganizing the shelves. “So you’re the one who makes the store look so good?” the supervisor asked him, and promptly offered him the responsibility of organizing the interior of new stores. It was an attractive offer—but salaries in the construction industry were also attractive. Alain Bouchard was earning $3.30 an hour on the construction sites. Perrette was offering $1.50 an hour, which was less than half that. “However, I asked him, ‘Can I work as many hours as I want?’” says Bouchard. “No problem,” was the supervisor’s response.
Having a 20-year-old’s energy made all the difference, he says. To make the equivalent wages, he would simply have to work twice as many hours per week; but he would be doing something he actually enjoyed. It would finally allow him to fulfill what his father had taught him: The important thing in a man’s life is to make a name for himself through work. Alain Bouchard threw himself into the job with an extraordinary ardour. “I really clocked some hours. It was ridiculous. I was working 80 hours a week,” he says.”
“During the years that followed, Alain Bouchard opened Perrette stores at lightning speed. As soon as a suitable location was found for a franchise, he was given two weeks to design the store, paint it, install coolers, shelves and counters and arrange merchandise. Nothing could get in the way of him attending opening day for each store, which always took place on a weekend. “I loved that moment. You could feel the excitement of everyone waiting outside before the doors opened.” The energy was that much higher when Perrette promised a complimentary milk jug to the first 500 clients and granted specials on other products, to promote the full range of their offerings.
The company grew so quickly that Perrette often opened new stores before it had even found managers to run them. It was Alain who was given the job in the interim, but never for long, since he was the sole specialist when it came to openings. The supermarkets watched the growth of the blue-and-white-signed stores with a mixture of astonishment and amusement. “Everyone was laughing at them,” said Gaétan Frigon, who headed a number of grocery store chains in Quebec over the decades. “It was a company that wanted to sell milk, period.” To his mind, Perrette stores were marginally more menacing than the small corner grocers that had developed anarchically, transforming the living rooms of their apartments into stores.”
“No one could accuse him of not working hard enough, however. He worked 84 hours a week, in seven 12-hour shifts. When he ended up going outside of Montreal he was given a lump sum, on top of his hourly wage, to cover his daily expenses for food and lodging. He had negotiated the amount: $35 for a hotel and meals. But he actually sometimes spent as little as $8 per day. “I was living in a hole, basically, a rat hole. I would buy a can of tuna to make a sandwich, and that would do me.””
““I’m an entrepreneur at heart, in everything I do,” he says. He couldn’t overcome the instinct, which at times seemed to verge on compulsion. The tours of businesses with his father long ago, with the hope of climbing back to a state of dignity and happiness, had left a deep mark. It was like an unquenchable thirst. His mind was constantly working, doing calculations, everywhere he went. “When I go into a restaurant, I count the number of seats and I can say whether it’s profitable or not, based on the traffic. It’s like an innate reflex.””
“In addition to designing new stores and organizing launches, he was entrusted with renovating older stores. He was named territory supervisor, which involved regular visits to each store and mentoring the managers. The demands on him were clearly too great; there wasn’t a moment of downtime.
He realized he wasn’t the only one who was becoming burnt out. His work with dealerships had allowed him to see behind the scenes, and he discovered the extent to which the company’s operating system was interfering with their functioning. “I saw the numbers,” he says. They didn’t show Perrette in a rosy light. For one thing, the dealerships had to pay the head office for any products lost due to shoplifting—and it wasn’t the wholesale price they wanted for the stolen items, but the retail price. Each shoplifting experience was thus triply costly: the dealers lost the value of the product; they lost the profit that was anticipated from the sale; and they had to pay this unrealized profit to the company’s management. It cut into revenues that most dealers already thought were too low. “I lost dealers constantly, and I lost good ones,” says Bouchard, who would inevitably find himself with the burden of finding and training replacements.”
“One day he had the opportunity to speak directly with Robert Bazos, who was passing through to inspect renovation work for the Perrette in his own neighbourhood, the Town of Mount Royal. Bouchard told him that the turnover rate for dealers was much too high and that replacing them was costing the company a lot. “Try to find a formula for them to make more money, and that will make them stay with us longer,” he suggested. Bouchard can still hear Bazos’ response, as clearly as he did that day: “Mind your own business.””
“Provigo, a Francophone-led grocery store chain that was experiencing massive growth in Quebec, also made him an offer: supervisor for a chain of mid-sized grocery stores under the name Provibec, a kind of hybrid of Perrette stores and supermarkets. The position didn’t seem to offer much in the way of challenge, so he declined. Two days later, however, Provigo came back with a new offer. Would he be interested in launching a new store concept within the Provigo family, with the unique feature of being open morning to night, seven days a week? In short, they asked him to help build a banner—Provi-Soir—that would mount an attack against none other than Perrette. “I was the only person in Quebec who had the experience. And they were ready to pay for it. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.””
“Many companies discourage this type of behaviour and promote strict rule-following and a hierarchical structure. Bouchard, however, advocates an entrepreneurial attitude at every level. He encourages risk-taking. This requires a high tolerance for error, but he prefers taking an overall position of trust—even when it sometimes backfires—to an overall position of mistrust that will sometimes prove justified.”
““No one shows up to work every day aiming to rip off the boss,” he says. “In real life, people want to earn their wages, to feel good about themselves, to be able to say they did a good job, to contribute in their own way.” To get there, Bouchard says, each individual has to find the zone in which they can make decisions, room to manoeuvre that fits their abilities and gives them a chance to show what they can do. “That’s a basic need for all humans. We all want that: to reach the level of importance corresponding to our potential. That’s the biggest lesson I learned in my three years doing evening classes at HEC Montréal.””
“A temporary absence of his immediate superior due to health problems gave him the opportunity he wanted. While his boss was in the hospital, Bouchard found independent retailers that Provi-Soir could acquire and quickly transform. Bouchard, in a hurry to capitalize on the growing reputation of the Provi-Soir banner, believed it was necessary to step up the pace in order to win the battle against Perrette. Almost overnight, the brand could strike a major blow and acquire 25 new stores, all in the Montreal area. Even better, these stores were operational, and therefore had a known and quantifiable customer base, which would reduce the risks.”
“There was no longer any margin left for Bouchard to become a more important player at Provi-Soir, so he decided to leave. He did so on good terms, however, offering to buy a second Provi-Soir franchise,[[13]](private://read/01j5mtjqkzkqnzrmf5b4rr6pr2/#notes13) whose construction was almost finished, in Blainville, north of Montreal. At management’s request, he agreed to stay on in his position until they could find a replacement. He expected it would take them a few months. It ended up taking more than a year, and not one but three successors were hired: a development supervisor, a construction supervisor and a maintenance supervisor. He still can’t believe the implication. “Like an idiot, I was doing all that work by myself,” he says—an amount of work that resulted in personal sacrifice and sometimes resulted in a less than perfect work quality.”
““They kicked me out. That was hard,” says Bouchard, who nonetheless understands Provigo’s reaction. Franchises must be loyal members of their clan. Obviously, Bouchard had had other projects in mind. “I knew I was going to go out on my own, but they forced me to do it a little sooner than I expected.” And it certainly didn’t happen in the way he thought he deserved. A bailiff appeared at one of his stores and presented him with an eviction notice—he who had built the Provi-Soir enterprise from its beginning. His wife, red with rage, gave the Provi-Soir delegate a furious warning: “One day, we will buy you out!””
“Next Bouchard had to find trustworthy employees to run the store while he took care of developing the enterprise. He immediately thought of Jacques D’Amours, a brilliant young man he had met seven years before when they both worked at Perrette. Bouchard was a replacement manager at the time, and D’Amours—then barely 14 years old—was a jack of all trades. He had no option but to mature early; his father had left the family and his mother was raising 11 children on her own. All of the D’Amours children had to start working at a very young age.”
““On my first day of work, I had to sit on a case of Coke in a dusty basement.” But despite all that, he was happy. It was the happiness that comes with believing you’re a part of the very beginning of something big. His confidence was inspired by Alain Bouchard, he says, his charisma and his passion for work.”
“The ingredients: strategic positioning of products, an aggressive pricing policy, fast service at the cash registers and cost control. “In each case, our operating methods allowed us to increase sales by 15 to 20 percent in the first year. Every time”
“They were becoming experts at extracting that gold, but it was crucial that they keep searching for new veins, without relenting.”
“Bouchard quickly discovered that Plourde possessed the skills of a watchmaker: he had a genius for connecting gears and parts in such a way that the machine as a whole would function smoothly and efficiently. He knew how to work with employees, to delegate tasks and responsibilities, to break down steps, to motivate teams to achieve goals that were realistic. He was a master of organization, and had an incredible gift for understanding human nature.”
““The company was too small to have so much talent,” Bouchard thought. He set about acquiring other small manufacturing companies, and gave Plourde the responsibility for running them. One company manufactured security modules that were installed at entrances to stores to detect theft. Another produced eyeglasses lenses. “We were making money, but it was a major distraction”
“Facing the several dozen people present, he began to speak. He thanked the employees for their continued efforts. Then he went on to deliver a prediction that left his audience stunned. Their company, he told them, would become the largest convenience store chain in Quebec. “The other partners and I just stared at each other,” says D’Amours. “We definitely had a long way to go to catch up with Provi-Soir, which had 200 stores, or Perrette, which had 125. We only had 12!”
Fortin was also in shock. “Bouchard hadn’t told us about his announcement beforehand. Réal Plourde and I agreed that it was a very nice goal—but could we actually achieve it?””
““New constraints can also bring new opportunities,” in”
“the four men had come to a conclusion: They should stay the course. The main reason, in Fortin’s view as a former banker, was that no bank would dare cut off funding for a company with a cash flow of $3 million. “We should continue operating,” he said. But they should also roll up their sleeves, he added, and strive to improve performance.”
