A conversation with Anick Beaulieu; VP of Growth & Partnerships at C2

“The main objective is to drive economic impact for our city, for our province, for our country. So, we need to give a platform to entrepreneurs to have their brand shine, but we also need to architect them meeting people. So, how do we source the audience? How do we create moments of connection throughout the experience? How do we hype people before the event to come and discover these talents? That’s really kind of what’s driving the whole vision. That’s how we’re thinking about designing our stages, our content. That’s how we’re thinking about having a lot of collaboration and all the activities that we’re doing because we want to multiply the number of times people will collaborate and will meet humans.” – Anick Beaulieuuote

In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anick Beaulieu about her experience designing impactful collective moments for C2 in Montreal.  She shares how having the right questions lead to a creative vision.  Later, Anick explains why intention is the key to collective moments and conversation.  We then discuss fostering tan health and connection in times of crises.  Listen in for more inspiration on using flagship events and collaboration to drive economic development in your region.

Show Highlights

[2:20] How Anick transitioned from real estate to event designer.

[7:15] Vow to develop a creative vision.

[16:23] The power of intention.

[27:25] Driving economic impact with Flagship events.

[34:24] How C2 changed during the COVID pandemic.

Anick on Linkedin

Anick on Twitter

About the Guest

Anick intuitively knows that business is a human endeavor, and therein lies one of her great strengths leading commercial strategy and client accounts at C2. Her knack for understanding current and future partners’ business goals allows her to forge meaningful and lasting partnerships. As Vice President – Growth and Partnerships, Anick heads the creation of new revenue opportunities and innovative growth strategies and is adept at linking great ideas to revenue generation. She also brings an infectiously positive and empathetic outlook to her leadership responsibilities. After acquiring marketing and economics degrees at the internationally renowned HEC Montréal business school, Anick spent five years as a co-entrepreneur in international real estate. She joined C2’s sales team in 2015 and quickly added commercial strategy to her repertoire. Through her deals with innovative top-tier enterprises such as IBM, Facebook, Twitch, GitHub, and RBC, to name a few, she has elevated C2’s partnerships to new heights. She has proven herself instrumental to the growth of C2’s broad local and international networks. Anick is also very involved in the Montreal community, playing an active role in the innovation sector and sitting on the board of directors of Zú, the creative entrepreneurs’ incubator initiated by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas: Welcome to the Control Room podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures to the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in, and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my book Magical Meetings you can down the Magical Meetings Quickstart Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy a copy today at magicalmeetings.com.

Today I’m with Anick Beaulieu at C2 where she is Vice President of Growth and Partnerships and heads the creation of innovation growth strategies. Anick is also involved in the Montreal community playing an active role in the innovation sector and sitting on the Board of Directors of Zoo, the creative entrepreneurs incubator initiated by Cirque Du Soleil Founder Guy Laliberté. Welcome to the show, Anick.

Anick: Thank you so much Douglas for having me. It’s great to see you again.

Douglas: Oh, absolutely. It’s been awhile since South By and it was such a pleasure to connect with you there.

Anick: Absolutely. What a great pleasure to discover someone that’s kind of connected in some random way and being brought together by the power of convening. That is great.

Douglas: Yes, so cool. Our conversation there by the lake just really inspired me to want to have this episode with you and dig in a little bit more about the types of events you all do, then what inspires you to do the work you do. So, really looking forward to doing it.

Before we get into all that, I think it’d be really great to hear from you about how you got into this work, what kind of inspired you to start working in this space of events, and just bringing people together?

Anick: Yeah, I think there’s a cool and kind of nontraditional story there. I started my career in the family business doing real estate, but we really were conceptors of projects. We’d work with architects and designers and landscape architects. The whole thing was really creating projects that we can then market. We sold a lot to Europeans and even Asians and this beautiful spot by a like in [inaudible 00:02:55] where I’m from.

C2 was actually a client of ours and at some point my dad had done developing and he just wanted to slow down a bit and I had a connection at C2 and they said, “Do you want to come by and work a little bit during the event?” I was really happy at this time because I didn’t have a job anymore and so I was like, “Oh, that’s a great way for me to find one at least,” and I didn’t have to pay for my ticket so that was perfect.

Then I get there and my boss at the time, once I’ve done my report, was like, “Look, do you want to run our Sales Team? We’re looking for someone.” I guess this was just great timing and I think what really appealed to me at that time was that we went, and I don’t know if you guys know C2, but we were known for this amazing flagship in Montreal that’s called C2 Montreal, which the whole purpose is to create a creative exportationfor creative industries and technology industries that are born out of this city and our country and our province.

I get there. I’m excited, obviously. I think one of the things that really got me excited about the opportunity is that first they were scaling. They were taking the flagship model and they were turning it into a white label surface for brands who wanted to create different B2B experiences. There was the entrepreneurial mindset, but also de notion of commercializing creativity. I’ve been used to working with designers and architects, and I just felt like there was a lot of very interesting design principles and I think this is the link to, basically, my old career in real estate and working at C2. So it wasn’t just the event space, it was mostly how do you take such strong creative and design and turn it into something that’s commercially viable?

I’m pretty social. I love people, so I thought, “Maybe that’s for me.” So, I’ve been here for six year snow.

Douglas: Wow, that’s really. I can imagine a project focused real estate endeavor had some real similarities to putting together events. To your point, C2 was a client, so there’s definitely some overlap and needs and elements of what brings together a really solid event and experience.

Anick: Absolutely, I think the whole … Well, first of all, the fact that it’s a project based, both are project based industries. There’s a start. There’s a finish. So, there’s this notion of hype. You’re working really hard and there’s a clear deliverable, and then you kind of move onto something else. I think with my personality that fits really well. So, that’s a big similarity and a bit more like the business model or the way we operate the business.

Then there’s the whole creative vision. What are you trying to achieve? How do you want people to feel when they enter your real estate project or an experience that you’ve built together? What do you aspire to? What kind of aesthetics? What kind of feeling? How do you drive, if it’s in real estate it’s like how do you drive seamless living? How do you make people connect with one another in the property? And then these are very similar concepts when you’re looking at how do you design experiences? In our domain it’s mostly for businesses, so it’s mostly B2B experiences. How do you get people together? How do you architect environments that will enable humans to meet faster, more meaningfully, so that they can do projects together, find a new job, or just think about some innovation that they want to push forward?

So, lots of similarities. Even if the first time you look at it you might not think so. It’s actually very, very, very similar.

Douglas: Absolutely. I was really curious when you mentioned creative vision and I wonder what do you think are the keys to successfully crafting a creative vision when it comes to these projects or even a C2 projects. What are the elements to making that really just well done?

Anick: I think for us and I’ll stick a bit more to C2 because real estate is a bit far right now. I’m not very old, but still. I think for us it’s really having a key. There’s two things. There’s C2 as a corporation. What’s our philosophy behind convening and how we want people to feel and how we want them to behave? But then when you’re looking at a client project or when we’re looking at the flagship event that we’re doing, let’s say C2 Montreal. The main objective is to drive economic impact for our city, for our province, for our country. So, we need to give a platform to entrepreneurs to have their brand shine, but we also need to architect them meeting people. So, how do we source the audience? How do we create moments of connection throughout the experience? How do we hype people before the event to come and discover these talents? That’s really kind of what’s driving the whole vision. That’s how we’re thinking about designing our stages, our content. That’s how we’re thinking about having a lot of collaboration and all the activities that we’re doing because we want to multiply the number of times people will collaborate and will meet humans.

I think starting with a clear, and it’s a bit cliché I guess, but starting with a clear indicator of what winning means and then making sure that all the touch point, all the creative, all the elements are driving towards that and that the whole team is aligned. I think probably is one of the most important thing is how do we make sure that everybody that’s on the project understands clearly what needs to be accomplished? Then providing, I think, a fun space for people to experiment, take risk, have fun, love what they’re doing, so that you come up with something fresh.

Douglas: Yeah, I think that experimentation’s really very key. I’m kind of curious how you’ve balanced this need to meet deadlines, but also foster the right amount of experimentation.

Anick: We’re a bit lucky in that regard because we have a flagship with our brand on it. That’s really where we go crazy because I was talking about the main objective, but at the end of the day there’s not a brand telling us, “This is our guideline or we need a speaker or the CEO to open the talk and these clients to feel a certain way.” We have a lot of freedom to take risk because that’s really tied to our DNA. I think people come into a C2 Montreal event expecting weird stuff to happen, almost kind of looking for it.

We really love to have this as a project where creatives and strategists and business people work on to kind of get a bit crazier. Then what works there can be applied to clients, but there’s a lot of freedom there.

But I must say that we’re also very lucky because clients come to us to do things differently. I think this is true to who we are as a brand. We’re bold. We’re risk takers. We love to push the envelope. And so, even within the projects that we’re doing, deadlines, budgets, it’s always important when you know that executing with excellence is probably the one thing that we can go about whether it’s for our brand or any client we’re working with. But experimentation is part of the journey even when we’re working with our clients.

Douglas: I’m also starting again to wonder about, as an organization focused on events, how’s that impacted your internal gatherings and internal meetings that you have? You talk about human connection being a bit part of your focus and interest. How does that show up in your everyday interactions?

Anick: I think there’s a pre pandemic, a pandemic answer and I didn’t want to bring this up, but I think it’s had a big impact in where we are now and where we want to go. We have a very collaborative culture. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it makes things a bit more difficult or complex, but I think we like to test things on our employees. The creative team sometimes will say, “Oh, we’re trying a new lab or a new experience for an event and we want to try it internally before.” There’s a bunch of these things happening.

I think we love start meetings with ice breakers. There’s a few funky things that we do when there’s bigger or more official meetings within a company. Other than that, some meetings are just kind of happening in a more traditional way. We’ve tried a lot of stuff during the pandemic to get people engaged, to make people feel that they’re part of a community, that there’s still culture. Now we’re trying to get people back into the office. I think that we’ve all grown a bit comfortable being in our Lulu Lemons and just relaxed clothes and working from home and not having to commute. There’s definitely something positive about that, but the real culture, the real connection, we firmly believe that needs to be fostered through being live with the humans.

Anick: Right now we’re testing a bunch of stuff. We’re humans. We love to eat and drink, so there’s [inaudible 00:13:09] in the office. It’s a cocktail hour if you want. We’ll converge certain days for certain projects or team meets. We’re really trying to try to get people excited to come back to the office. We even have an office dog now, Alex, and my team is training him to be a dog that’s going to assist someone that’s fine and she’s training him for the first year of his service dog career. We didn’t used to have dogs at the office and now he’s here and everybody loves him so we come and we pet him. We’re trying a bunch of stuff.

Douglas: Yeah, there you go. It sounds like you all are making much more of a shift to get back in the office. Is that 100% of the time or are you doing more of a hybrid approach where it’s some time at home, some time in the office? How are you all thinking about that?

Anick: I think right now, and it’s funny because one of our content dealers this year at C2 is about the future of work. I don’t think we have it 100% figured out because something that came out of the pandemic is we started hiring people that are working from Mexico City and from BC and from New York. That’s fantastic. We have someone in Paris. We don’t want to lose that and I think it’s important to be inclusive in the sense that talent can come from anywhere and there’s definitely something very positive about not having the barrier of Joe Graffy dictate who you’re going to work with.

But at the same time, there’s a certain energy in being able to live collective moments. We have a strong culture at our company and this is something that made for really good retention. Also that makes it okay to go through stress together. We’re an industry like if there’s an event and the doors are opening on September 26th, that’s when it’s opening. It comes with a certain amount of pressure, but being together, going through it together, living the hype together kind of makes it cool. We’re just trying to find the balance.

There’s also a lot of contract workers now. There’s a generation of people, there’s people who want to have more flexibility in the way they work and we need to be thinking about that because at the end of the day we want the best talent no matter how they want to live their work life. There’s a lot of things and complexities. I find now with the way we work, but at the same time I think that the brands will nail that and find the right balance between culture, inclusivity, flexibility, will probably win the talent race.

Douglas: I couldn’t agree more. We experienced the same thing with the work force being much more distributed. In fact, the folks that did live here in Austin have moved away. Then we hired one new person from Austin, so there’s still a few of us still in Austin, but we’re all over the US at this point. And like you, we work with contractors as well. I think the trick is still being intentional about when you bring people together and not just assuming, “Hey, we’re remote all the time and that there’s no need to bring people together because hey, we’re just remote.”

Anick: I love that. I love the word intention. I feel that this is so important because going back to that notion of flexibility, I think we can’t become lazy. So, having the intention when we bring people together, why are we doing it? How are we doing it? It’s kind of being like a good host and I use this metaphor a lot in what we’re doing. How do you greet people? How would you make them feel comfortable? How do you create moments for conversations? How do you set the table? I think that notion of intention is so important.

Douglas: Yeah, we’ve been kind of grappling with what’s the right cadence. I think right now we’ve been gathering everyone together, flying everyone to the same place twice a year, but maybe-

Anick: That’s great.

Douglas: Maybe we need to do that more often. It’s something that we’re constantly experimenting with.

Anick: And sometimes even smaller groups, maybe sometimes like you were just saying Douglas that you were in Montreal for a conference. Sometimes it’s maybe just mapping where people are flying for work and Douglas and Anick are meeting in Montreal when you’re traveling here. When I go to Austin I make sure to hit you up so we have this moment where we may grab a bite or we grab a coffee and we share this collective moment. Maybe we take a picture. We share it on Slack.

I think there’s going to be a lot of tries and errors and evolution in that, but I feel that we all need, as leaders and managers, to be thinking about these things.

Douglas: You mentioned the trip to Montreal I recently took. I think it’s a great example because I invited one of our employees to come with me.

Anick: See?

Douglas: I wasn’t totally convinced that it was a good decision from an ROI standpoint of, “Oh, is that going to result in sales or is it going to boost things in a certain way?” Even after the fact when we’re looking at it we’re like, “This was a good use of funds or time.” I still think that bringing together, to your point, it doesn’t have to be everyone. We can create little moments where two, three people can come together, maybe send an extra person on a trip that doesn’t have to be there but might provide some insight or extra glue, extra connection.

Anick: A lot of how we design experiences is based on a concept that we call Smart Hosting. I think one of the most difficult things from a business perspective in the last two years has been the time you have in the board room is never where you closed a deal. It’s never where you actually devvle up the relationship. It’s part of it. It’s part of the journey, but why do people love to have lunch or dinner or too many drinks with a client or with a colleague? It’s because it gives you this moment where you get access to information that’s different. You get more information. You get the different level.

The way we design is all about that. It’s how do you leverage content, environment designs, to get people to connect more meaningfully and more deeply? That’s not done with a one hour Zoom. You’ll do a bit of small talking here and there and then you’ll get into whatever it is you have to talk about. Then you hang up and then that’s it. Where that’s not where relationships are built. So, I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying in terms of just taking these opportunities that at the end of the day will be so meaningful when you look back with maybe a different lens or perspective.

Douglas: Yeah, I was going to key in on you mentioned contacts and environment. I think that’s so critical that people think about those elements, even if it’s in a smaller engagement, even if we’re just getting together for a little team celebration, whether it’s someone’s birthday or any little team health moment. If we really spend some time thinking about those two things it could go a long way to foster more connection.

Anick: Absolutely. I think it goes back to intention. So what you were saying, it goes back to knowing what you’re trying to get out of that celebration. How do you want people to feel? Everybody wants to feel special and cared for. Rarely do you hear an entrepreneur saying, “Oh, I had the best idea sitting in my office. My company was created when I was having a discussion in the board room.” It’s usually when you’re surfing or playing tennis or back from the museum or after a great dinner or a walk in the city.

I think you’re right. Thinking about changing the environments that change the mindsets of people. If it’s a celebration, where do you want to celebrate? What is festive? How do you get people to be in that space and that mindset? We firmly believe that environments have a lot to do with that.

Douglas: Yeah, you were talking about Zoom being difficult for connection. We had our-

Anick: By the way, we’re on Hang Out, Google Hang Outs. I feel we’re all advertising for Zoom all the time.

Douglas: There you go. Yeah, it’s become the new kleenex, right?

Anick: Yeah.

Douglas: For me, I had a big epiphany when we did our holiday party in VR. While I have a healthy-

Anick: That’s awesome.

Douglas: Yeah, it was really cool. I’ll say this because I don’t want to just come across as a huge fan boy. I have a healthy dose of skepticism. There’s some things that need to happen before this is going to be applicable broadly in the workplace, but I will tell you this. It is fabulous for bringing together a remote team to play and to be together and just to celebrate. People were running around setting off VR fireworks and playing basketball. There were side conversations that were just happening. People were congregating in one little place and then they’d start to wander off and congregate in another place. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen normally in virtual meetings.

Anick: No, you’re right. I’m not, me, myself, fully immersed in the Metaverse and VR and this and that, but at the same time I feel that this is one of the things. I remember seeing a Nike advertising many years ago. I was probably nine years old and it was woman in sport and it was just these athletes gunning. Now we’re used to seeing that, but back in the days, all advertising for sport was male. It was finishing with this bold statement of, “Want it or not, it won’t go away.” I was just like, “Wow. So freaking bold.” The message was strong, it’s like, “Get on the program. Start putting your dollars there. Start thinking about raising your girls like that because that’s where it’s going to go.”

I feel that VR and these immersive technologies right now, this is where things are going. It’s awesome that you guys have actually hosted your internal event on those. We’re working on having some of those at C2 Montreal as well this year and lots of clients are interested in testing and kind of dabbling in those technologies. We’ve hired talent that basically lives in the Metaverse. We have people now and it’s just embracing these new things when they come up, I feel is so important because that’s kind of … When you look at being relevant and not being relevant, I feel that these things happen so quick now that whether you like it or not, it won’t go away.

Douglas: 100%. You talk about people living in the Metaverse and there’s certainly people that like to hang out and be there and experience it. There’s professionals that are leaning in pretty heavily to what does it mean to create in those worlds and what does it mean to build an environment or a place to gather. It’s amazing to watch them work. I was spending time at Horizon Worlds, maybe six months ago, it was really just quite cool because I wasn’t in edit mode so I was walking around like normal size and he’s working on the whole world. It was like Jack and the Beanstalk. I’m walking around all tiny, he’s massive working on it. It left an impression. I was like, “Man, this is the future of creation.”

Anick: It absolutely is and it’s just going to have to be really meaningful when you are actually live with people and we actually make the effort to travel. I’m looking at my Oculus Quest 2 right there sitting on my desk and I’m like, “Yeah, totally.” It’s still in the box.

Douglas: You mentioned your flagship event and that is held in Montreal every year. When’s the next one?

Anick: The next one is September 26th to 28th. 2020 was fully digital. 2021 was hybrid, but it was extremely hard for the team because regulation was changing up until a week out of the event. So honestly, it was easier to plan fully digital than last year was planning the hybrid. Now we are so stoked and energized thinking about what we’re actually going to produce in September. We’re coming right at the heart of the city so we have a multi year deal with [inaudible 00:27:24], a real estate company in Montreal and they own most of the downtown amazing real estate. We’re taking over and it’s a strong metaphor for future of cities. How do you create a business environment where people don’t just want to come and work, but they actually want to come and learn, meet, play?

We’re bringing a lot of amazing, creative firms from Montreal to create experiences. We’re going to have some amazing content. For the first time there’s a portion of the event that’s going to be open to the general public and it’s really kind of a statement of us wanting to ignite our city. The team this year is ignite, so couldn’t be more excited and energized with the project.

Douglas: Yeah, and with the focus around economic development and prosperity for Montreal, do you find that you mostly see folks from Montreal and the general region or are you attracting folks internationally as well?

Anick: No, the whole point is there’s no economic impact if people from Montreal do business with people from Montreal. If you look at it some an exploration perspective, so I guess we’re not like a CS where everybody from all over the world meets to discuss technology in Vegas and where there’s very little people from Vegas. For us, there are some sectors that are very strong in terms of the economy in Montreal. So entertainment and creativity, so Moment Factory, some companies that you might know, then lots of PixMob basically doing the flashy bracelets that you see at the Super Bowl shows and whatnot.

Quebecers are producing most of the shows in Vegas, lots of big world tours for artists like Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish and whatnot, so that’s very strong. Then we also have a lot of AI. Many universities in Montreal and the second place in the world where the most doctorate and deep learning graduate from. So it’s given birth to this very strong ecosystem and artificial intelligence. Many of the large corporations have labs here, but also many startups in the domain, and same thing with green technology and batteries, eCommerce technology, so Lightspeed and companies like that.

Anick: Then the people who want to learn about these, who want to buy products from these companies, that’s the people we’re trying to get. If you want to be inspired by amazing creativity, you want to learn more about AI, you’re a retailer and you’re looking at creative ways to do eCommerce and grow your business, these are the international folks that we’re targeting. It’s kind of like an inverted commercial mission, if you want.

Douglas: Speaking of the flagship, what excites you the most about it? When you think about even as a participant, or as a citizen of Montreal, what excites you about the fact that it exists and being there and just being a part of it?

Anick: I think it’s a testament to how we love to do business in our city. We love to eat well. We’re big astronomic destination. We’re kind of smart, but relaxed. It’s not like the corporate city. It’s not your Toronto. It’s that Latin feel, I guess, with the North American vibe that’s kind of mixed up. Then I feel that it’s really an example, or it’s really kind of a benchmark in terms of B2B experience.

I guess what makes me the proudest is that we want to speak to Douglas. We don’t want to speak to your function or your company. We want you as a human to feel that you’re going to learn, experience, connect in meaningful ways with great humans, and it’s not about your function. It’s not about the error key. It’s about the ideas you bring to the table. It’s about the values that you have. It’s about your ambition or you wanting to drive progress and grow. I think that this is fundamentally one of the things that’s very different in the way we build the experience and I think that it’s true to who we are in our culture, I would say. We’re recognized for it. People come and they will tell you, “I came to C2 and it changed my life. I changed careers. I met my business partner. I sold my business. I got the biggest client that I would have never met if I just sent them a LinkedIn or whatever, that we lived this amazing lab where we were suspended up in the air thinking about moon shots and we had one that was similar and then we got out of the lab and we continued jamming and we ended up with a deal.”

So, I guess this is what is exciting me the most, is how do we create those environments for people to connect, do business? But with a mindset of doing good. I think one thing that our participants have in common is that they’re forward thinking. They want to define a world where we do business maybe in a way that’s a bit different. There’s this notion of being bold and taking risks and I’m bringing this a lot because I feel that is true to our brand, but it’s true to who attends a C2 Montreal event. That’s why it creates such an amazing kind of moment of magic, collective magic, I would say is because people come with a mindset that’s like, “How do we do good?”

Douglas: I like that.

Anick: While growing. While making business, but let’s be good humans.

Douglas: Yeah, no doubt. Earlier in the pre show chat you were talking about how opportunities is such an interesting place to be and to look. It sounds like it’s creating opportunity for folks that are coming, for them meet, for them to even explore new opportunities. Specifically you were even referencing just the opportunities that can be in and around crisis. Surely we’re all very familiar with having to navigate the pandemic. You were even talking about being completely virtual and then the challenges of doing a hybrid event when on the heels of Delta and regulations are changing. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about your perspective on all of that.

Anick: I think for us, it just pushed us to go so deep into the very core of who we are to make sure that the people who were on board had a very concentrated focus, if that’s even possible [inaudible 00:34:49] my French Canadian. That’s not saying the right words in English, but it tightened up everything. What was supposed to be a five year vision became a five month vision and it’s kind of like the red tape, the friction, everything that came in the way just didn’t exist anymore. It was almost a survival instinct that made us really go back to the roots of who we are and why we’re doing what we do.

Then just being wildly creative. When you don’t have this notion of, “What can I lose?” There’s not much else to lose. So, how does that change your mindset? How does that allow you to have a different vision or to just go do things that you would have maybe not considered before? I think I’m a better human or a better business person than I was when we started living those challenges. I think there was some pain or scars left in the organization, obviously, but at the same time if I look at the fundamentals of the business, the clients, the relationships we’ve had and hardship, the trust that we have with one another in terms of the team, I feel that we’re in a better place.

But then we’re still in business. It was hard for two years, but I feel that we now have fundamentals that are stronger bringing us into the future.

Douglas: Yeah, you talked about getting back to basics. It was certainly a time of really, I want to say resilience-

Anick: Yes.

Douglas: And really coming back to your values. I will say this, companies that were able to tap into their values, like you say, laser focus in on, “Hey, what really matters right now?” Were the ones that survived it, and with grace.

Anick: And humanity because I just feel we got a different perspective, a different lens to look at our colleagues, our clients, our investors. I just feel that it allows a different level of relationship.

Douglas: Absolutely. Well, we’re coming to our end here and before we close out I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Anick: First of all Douglas, thank you for having me. We always have really good conversations. I guess final thought would be, first, come to C2 Montreal September 26th to 28th. This is my shameless promotional message. It’s going to be awesome. We’re creating a great experience, amazing speakers, vibrant location. It’s us being back bigger and bolder, just really cool.

What I would say is find ways to connect meaningfully. Make the effort. Don’t be lazy. Think about what it means to actually go in with that intention you were talking to, Douglas.

Douglas: And be bold.

Anick: Be bold. Yeah.

Douglas: Awesome. Anick, it’s been such a pleasure chatting today and hopefully I’ll see you in September.

Anick: Yeah. Thank you, Douglas.

Douglas: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want to know more head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about radical inclusion, team health, and working better. Voltagecontrol.com