The Boss’s Corner – A long and winding chemtrail: going Pubco, part 2

I’m not saying it was an easy road.  First of all, going all in with my retirement was the single most difficult decision I made in my life.  Involving my son in building a company almost from scratch was another one: like any father, I do worry about my children’s future.  But thanks to an astute business broker who nudged me in the right direction, I acquired what was then Les industries Pierre Boivert, a company that became under our stewardship Pubco inc. 

So how do we take a small local publishing company and bring it to the world of religious goods packaging: let’s fly some more!  If the airports looked the same as when I was selling chemicals, my final destinations were quite different.  Detroit’s industrial park, which can look like a war zone, does not have any common feature with Lourdes’ Grotto or Fatima’s Cova da Iria, in Portugal, where the Virgin Mary appeared.  To put it another way, my road to Damascus involved more planes, fewer bar get-togethers with the chem boys and more meetings with uniformed, highly cultured ordained ministers.

I welcomed the change.  I am a religious man.  Not to bother anyone with my faith, but I believe in God.  Many decades ago, when I was just out of Teccart (an electronics school in Montreal), I went praying at this city’s foremost pilgrimage site – the Oratoire Saint-Joseph – to ask for Frère André’s benediction for my burgeoning career.  Little that I knew that many years later I would come back to the Oratoire with distribution contracts: the Oratoire would become Pubco’s very first customer.

Since then, we have expended our religious goods business into other business fields (please note that it still accounts for half of our business), but I will always have a sweet spot for these medals, cards and religious memorabilia that started it all and that we now print and package for customers in 40 countries.