A story that begins at fifteen
I never waited for permission to start building. The model I still apply today, I worked out in high school.
At fifteen, while most people my age were still looking for a direction, I was already building my first ventures. Not out of precocity, but because nobody had told me I was supposed to wait.
At sixteen I gave my first public talk. I do not remember being afraid. What I remember is noticing something that would shape the next forty years: when you explain well, people act.
Around the same time I became president of the Club Optimiste Octogone du Triolet, a youth service club in Sherbrooke. My first non-profit. I led it through the last two years of high school.
The club received requests for help. We wanted to answer them, and that took money. The usual solution is to run fundraising drive after fundraising drive — exhausting, one-off, and starting from zero every year.
I opened a restaurant instead. The Café du Club served donuts, coffee and pastries during break periods. The profits went directly to the community needs the club was answering.
What that meant in practice
At sixteen, with nobody explaining it to me, I was already doing the work I bill for today.
- Designing and starting the restaurant, from idea to first coffee served
- Building and holding the club’s budgets
- Serving as president for two years
- Answering the requests for help the club received
- Taking part in the cerebral palsy telethon
- Handing over a cheque for more than a thousand dollars — a considerable sum for a student club
Build a business that generates wealth and funds an organisation’s mission. I worked that model out in high school, and I have never stopped applying it.
It is the most durable lesson of that period. An organisation living purely on grants and fundraising drives endures its budget; an organisation backed by economic activity chooses its priorities.
Forty years later the structure is the same at another scale: companies on one side, a mission on the other, and the first giving the second the means to stand on its own. The Café du Club sold donuts; the principle has not moved.
I have not stopped speaking in public since. More than a thousand talks, training sessions, workshops and engagements, in front of audiences that often had nothing in common with one another.
The subjects changed with me. The underlying question never did.
Early on, my talks were about social engagement, leadership, civic responsibility, civil disobedience and community mobilisation. That was the period when I watched groups of citizens accomplish things well-funded institutions could not.
Then came management, business, technology. Then cybersecurity, digital transformation, and more recently artificial intelligence.
People sometimes ask how you get from citizen mobilisation to identity architecture in Microsoft Entra. The answer is that you do not get from one to the other: they are two forms of the same work. In both cases, the job is to make a system understandable to the people who have to live inside it.
Four decades, one method
Understand the problem
Before any diagnosis, listen. Most organisations describe a symptom while believing they are describing a cause.
Simplify the situation
Strip away the clutter. A complex situation almost always hides one simple decision nobody dares to make.
Put a structure in place
What remains after I leave matters more than what I do while I am there.
Hand it over
A successful engagement is measured at the moment the organisation no longer needs me.
Whether a small business, a municipality, a government department, a community organisation or a startup, the role has stayed the same. Only the vocabulary and the technical stakes changed.
Where this story leads
The model glimpsed at the Café du Club found its full form decades later with CARE Montréal — a homelessness shelter organisation grown to four sites, 250 employees and a budget of more than twenty million dollars.
A question on this?
Describe the context in a few lines. I answer with a proposed angle, not a brochure.