Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
When Marie-Pier St-Hilaire was 10, she wanted to earn money on her own, so she got herself a paper route delivering Quebec City’s Le Soleil. Three months later, she had three of them – and had hired her brothers to work for her.
As the founder and president of training and business consulting company AFI – the acronym stands for Académie de formation informatique in French – she still likes the creative part of being an entrepreneur best. “I’m the person who has all the ideas for a project, and then I find [someone] to take care of them,” she laughs.
Ms. St-Hilaire was just 21 and still completing her MBA at Laval University when she set up her own business in 1997. Yet even then her goal was “to change the face of learning in Quebec,” she says. Most business training courses, she notes, were something people signed up for to impress the boss or burnish a resume. “I wanted to make the training budget more efficient and strategic,” she says. “So instead of training being tactics, or another social advantage, we use the training to help the organization grow and keep their focus on their mission.”
She also wanted her company, which offers 900 courses, coaching in change and knowledge management, and communications strategies for business leaders, to be woman-centric. For her, AFI’s employees are its most valuable resource and she encourages clients to think about their workers the same way. “So when we talk about family and business and how to keep good talent and still be a mom, we have a lot of programs for that kind of woman here,” she points out.
Growing up in a business family, she got good coaching in her early years as company president from her father, who runs an IT business. With 85 employees and another 32 exclusive partners, AFI is now three times larger than his, “so my dad did a really great job,” she jokes.
In 2008, Ms. St-Hilaire won the Quebec City Chamber of Commerce’s Vision Award. She also devotes time to organizing charity fundraisers, with a focus on golf, her favourite sport and one where she enjoys a 7 handicap. Now, aside from adding to her credentials with an Owner/President Management Program MBA from Harvard, she and her husband Jacques Robillard are about to see their family of four expand to five.
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