Isabelle Marcoux's earliest apprenticeship in her family's business was long, sugary and occasionally monotonous.
In her childhood, at occasions like Christmas and Easter, she and her two siblings would pile into the family car to visit her grandparents in Quebec's Beauce region, a three-hour drive from her Montreal home. Along the way, her father Rémi – founder and patriarch of Transcontinental Inc., the printing giant she now steers as an adult – would turn off at the company's plants in Saint-Hyacinthe, Drummondville and Beauceville.
"So it would actually take us nine hours to get to my grandparents because my dad would stop. And we'd go in and we'd play between the paper rolls, and we'd buy chocolate from the vending machines," she says, adding with a laugh: "After the eighth hour, it got a bit tedious."
Ms. Marcoux, 46, now chairs the board of Transcontinental, having worked her way through the ranks of the business her father built and still watches over at age 75 as a board member. The printing company – easily Canada's largest – is also deeply invested in media, and has just reached its 40th birthday at a moment of upheaval for printed media. Ms. Marcoux and Transcontinental are determined to navigate a precipitous decline in print's popularity while crafting plans to adapt and outlive the turmoil. Throughout lunch at the newly revamped Café Boulud in Toronto's Four Seasons hotel, one of the phrases she returns to most often is "profound transformation."
Wearing a long-sleeved, button-down apple green shirt, her coppery-brown hair tucked neatly behind her ears, Ms. Marcoux smiles and laughs easily and can seem disarming, almost shy. She doesn't do a lot of interviews. But she describes herself as an "A-plus-type" personality who doesn't sleep much – "I think it's about driving the bus instead of being on the bus" – and she is hard-headed when it comes to trying to make the business durable for the long haul.
She bears the added pressure of steering the company through its second generation, and planning for its third – Ms. Marcoux and her siblings have eight children between them. And she has never known a time when business and family weren't tightly intertwined. Her elder sister Nathalie used to work at Transcontinental and now manages the family holdings, her younger brother Pierre runs the company's business information and textbook publishing divisions, and her husband, François Olivier, is the company's CEO. Her daughter Jeanne, aged 18, worked at the textbook publishing operation last summer and "she loves business … so we'll see."
"In family business, it's not lonely at the top," she says, laughing. "I think a great characteristic of successful families in business is they do manage the family."
This is Ms. Marcoux's first lunch at Café Boulud – she stays at the hotel often on her frequent business trips to Toronto, but usually lunches "in boardrooms or a sandwich on my way to the airport." She notes approvingly that menu items are listed in French and orders carrot and ginger soup with cilantro cream, followed by the omelette printanière – asparagus, herbs, wild leeks and cream cheese – plus sparking water, no ice, one lemon.
Ms. Marcoux plotted her course to the top of Transcontinental early on. Her father – "a tough guy" and "a real driver" – had put conditions on his children's entry into the family business: Earn two university degrees, speak three languages (French, English and Spanish in her case), and work three years elsewhere.
Raised and schooled in Montreal, Ms. Marcoux moved south as a teenager to board for one year at a New Hampshire prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy, circumventing Quebec's pre-university CEGEP system. She returned to McGill University to study economics and politics, and landed a summer job at public pension manager Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. That steered her off a career as an economist. "It was a bit too analytical for me," she says.
Instead, she studied law and joined the mergers and acquisitions team at McCarthy Tétrault LLP, which proved a helpful stepping stone to Transcontinental in the late 1990s. The printing company had no acquisitions team, and Ms. Marcoux set about carving out her specialty, creating and then leading a new corporate development arm.
Not that it's been easy. "I think when you're the son-of, or the daughter-of, people scrutinize your moves," she says. "They test your leadership, they test your decision-making abilities, they test your judgment. So I think you have to work really hard."
She has also been tested as a female executive in an industry where most of the deal makers are men. She says she inherited some of her father's toughness, learning to show confidence and be decisive. But she also says Transcontinental now works more on consensus-building than it did under her father, and she champions women inside the company – nearly 40 per cent of board members and 42 per cent of managers in its senior ranks are women.
"I think men and women manage differently," she says, pulling the book she's currently reading from her bag – How Women Decide: What's True, What's Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices, by Therese Huston. "It just came out, so I've been taking notes."
Ms. Marcoux thrives in particular on negotiations to convince sellers that Transcontinental will "be good parents" for the companies they've built.
"And I think that we have been good owners for many acquisitions – I mean, there's a few odd ones that we weren't successful at. But I think our average is better than worse," she says.
Transcontinental is back on the acquisition track, after a period of major streamlining and paying down debt. From 2007 to 2009, the company retooled its printing plants to be more efficient and require fewer hands to operate. It also moved away from labour-intensive investments in direct mail marketing, sold its consumer magazines to TVA Group and doubled down on newspapers. The company's staff count dipped from a peak of 12,500 in 2009 to 8,000 now.
The key is managing "for the long term," she says. "And sometimes it means shutting down a plant, and sometimes it means buying a new company. So it's not about keeping everyone, but it's about keeping an ultimate number of people working in our business."
Transcontinental owns more than 100 community newspapers as well as specialty titles like Les Affaires, a subscription-based French business weekly, giving Ms. Marcoux a front-row seat for the financial woes afflicting media.
"I believe journalism is so important, it's worrisome what's happening in our industry right now," she says, noting how hard she finds it watching journalists lose jobs – Transcontinental closed its last two English-language papers in Quebec, the West Island Chronicle and Westmount Examiner, last year. But minutes later, she's back to business: "We need to operate with a profit – we're not going to lose money on newspapers. I still see turbulent times ahead."
Transcontinental has managed to stabilize revenue on the printing side – 22 large plants still generate 65 per cent of the company's $2-billion in annual revenue – by capturing new business, including contracts to print the Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette and, soon, the Toronto Star (it also prints The Globe and Mail). Flyer printing has also remained stubbornly stable, with no major contracts lost: 84 per cent of people say they use them and only 10 per cent are reading them only in digital form, according to Transcontinental's research.
"However, we know that in the long term, we need to replace the revenues from print with something else," Ms. Marcoux says.
That has meant buying up companies in the flexible packaging industry. Everything from shredded cheese and yogurt to dog food and coffee sometimes comes wrapped in flexible packages printed on presses not unlike those that make newspapers or flyers. Over the past two years, Transcontinental has bought three U.S.-based companies – Capri Packaging, Ultra Flex Packaging Corp. and, just this week, paid $40-million (U.S.) for Robbie Manufacturing – and even before that latest purchase the division had been chipping in 10 per cent of total revenue.
While investors have been fleeing Canadian companies with business models based on paper and ink – newspaper publisher Torstar Corp.'s stock price has plunged from $12.40 (Canadian) five years ago to $1.62 this week, while Postmedia Network Canada Corp.'s shares trade at 2 cents – Transcontinental still attracts some believers, and its stock price has risen over the past year.
"Our view is that investors continue to dismiss [Transcontinental] given its ties to what is perceived to be a terminally ill print industry," Robert Bek, managing director at CIBC World Markets Inc., wrote in a research note published in mid-June. "In our opinion, this is not only an overly pessimistic view, but also an exceedingly simplistic view."
Over a cappuccino with skim milk, Ms. Marcoux says the business, combined with her board and charitable work, can be all-consuming. For the past dozen years, "that was it – it was work and family." She used to run home most evenings to have dinner with her two kids, then go back to the office. On family trips – to cycle in Vietnam or scuba dive Australia's Great Barrier Reef – she checks company e-mails on her iPhone in the morning and at night.
Now, her daughter is a freshman at Harvard University, and her 16-year-old son, who was born with physical challenges, is finding his way in school. "There's a bit more time for hobbies and sports, but it's still a lot about the business," she says.
Her main diversion – "my thing" – is mountain climbing. In winter, she has a holiday home near Mont Tremblant, which she scales on snowshoes at least twice per weekend (her record is four times in a weekend). In the summer, she hikes up Mont-Orford near a family retreat in the Eastern Townships.
"It's a very intense but short sport, so it's perfect for me. Instead of spending a day on the golf course or a day skiing, it's a great two hours. It fits my schedule," she says.
It also gives her ample time to contemplate the steep climb ahead for the printing industry and its struggling clients. So, amid all the speculation about print's demise, how long does she believe print media has left?
"I'm not making those predictions," she says, laughing again. "I think we have five to 10 good years, but my guess is as good as yours."