What does it take to become a Best Managed Company? No. 1 on the list is clear-eyed leadership, an ability to face seemingly insurmountable challenges, come up with a plan to overcome them and then execute it flawlessly.
The 30 leaders whose businesses are joining the Best Managed program this year know all about that, so we asked them to share their advice on how to build a thriving operation that can withstand just about anything.
Welcome to the club: What it takes to become a Best Managed Company by the people who know best
Still the best: Welcome Best Managed Companies 2026
Ownership drives outcomes
John Ross & Sons Ltd. (Halifax, 500 employees)
Buys, processes and ships recycled materials (primarily metal) across global markets, with sites across Atlantic Canada.
During the pandemic, John Ross & Sons was working to bring a new wire-chopping system online—a capital-intensive machine designed to separate copper and aluminum from insulated wire. The process was anything but smooth. The machine wasn’t performing as planned, delays mounted, throughput lagged and frustration built across the team.
In a different organization, the default move for the manager on site might have been to bring the problem up the chain and wait patiently for direction. But by that point, the company had already outgrown that model. “The biggest growth shift for us has been empowering our managers to make decisions, whether they’re right or wrong, and bring back solutions,” says vice-president Jonathan Ross.
In the case of the malfunctioning wire-chopper, a regional manager stepped in and asked for space to solve the problem independently. Leadership took the cue and stepped back. The manager reassessed the setup, worked through the constraints and ultimately brought the system online at full optimization, turning around a project that had been stuck.
Accountability is distributed across the team, with clear ownership at every level. And when a decision doesn’t land perfectly, it becomes part of the learning cycle—something to refine, adjust and move forward from.
Systems do the scaling
Rohit Group (Edmonton, 237 employees)
A real estate developer that builds residential, rental, commercial and infrastructure projects across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
Real estate development tends to lag when it comes to adopting new technology, and president Rohit Gupta sees the gap widening. Customer expectations have adapted to new tech—buyers now expect the same flexibility and control they get in other parts of their lives—while much of the industry still operates through fragmented systems and manual processes.
Over the past two decades, Gupta has recruited engineers, physicists and data-oriented operators into Rohit Group. That work led to BuildBase, an enterprise resource planning platform designed specifically for homebuilding, with AI embedded into its architecture years before it entered the mainstream. The platform connects key parts of the homebuilding process into a single system.
All that back-end work has cut costs by roughly $25,000 per home. At the same time, output has grown from 450 homes annually to about 1,400—without a proportional increase in headcount—and the business has expanded into rentals, commercial projects and infrastructure partnerships.
Next, Rohit Group is rolling out an e-commerce platform that allows customers to purchase homes directly from their phones. “We’re undergoing such a massive technological shift,” Gupta says—one he believes leaders have a responsibility to absorb and navigate.
Put customers first
Artika For Living Inc. (Saint-Laurent, Que., 240 employees)
Designs and sells lighting, ceiling fans and wall panels to consumers and retailers in 38 countries.
In 2018, e-commerce accounted for roughly 5% of Artika’s business. It designed products for store shelves, packaging for short-distance shipping and largely offloaded marketing to its retail partners.
As more customers moved online around 2020, the company began losing market share in Canada and the U.S. Over the next several years, Artika rebuilt its business around e-commerce. Things broke—including products on their way to customers before the company nailed its shipping strategy for a direct-to-consumer market. That meant re-engineering products to be smaller, more durable and easier to install without professional help.
At the same time, Artika built out a new marketing function almost from scratch and began investing heavily in digital channels. A dedicated team of 18 now handles tasks including content, design and online merchandising.
CEO Marc Couture sees his business as operating in a permanently unsettled environment, where stability is the exception rather than the norm. The past few years—spanning e-commerce disruption, tariff wars and geopolitical shocks—have reinforced his view that turbulence is the new normal. “Many companies hope conditions will improve, but I don’t think they will,” Couture says. “You have to take bold action to solve these problems in the long term.”
Protect the product
Algo Communication Products (Burnaby, B.C., 155 employees)
Algo designs and manufactures IP-based devices like speakers, strobe lights and intercoms for paging, emergency alerting and secure access systems.
Algo was founded in 1968 but was effectively reborn around 2010 as a modern, internet-connected product company. It spent the next decade building on that identity, and by the time Ryan Zoehner joined Algo six years ago, the opportunity was to accelerate its momentum. But Zoehner knew that in professionalizing the business, he risked diluting the engineering-led culture that made it work in the first place. “As you embark to scale a company, you have to change how it operates,” he says. “But if you’re not absolutely clear on what must never change, you can break what made you successful.”
Instead of overhauling everything at once, Algo sequenced its transformation—starting with systems, then processes, then people, leaving product for last. During the pandemic, under the pressure of supply chain disruptions, the company could have pushed ahead with new development or protected the reliability its customers depended on. It chose the latter, redirecting more than half of its engineering resources toward redesigning current products to maintain supply.
Over the past five years, the company has tripled its revenue, headcount and operational footprint. Scaling was less about reinvention than drawing a hard line around what wouldn’t change and building around that.
Let the market speak through your team
WPIC Marketing + Technologies
(Vancouver, 350 employees)
An e-commerce operator that helps brands launch, scale and manage their digital retail presence across markets, including China, Japan and South Korea.
Historically, WPIC operated with a traditional, top-down approach—strategy was developed at the executive level, then pushed out across the organization. That model came under pressure in early 2020, when new client work slowed as brands paused expansion plans, and existing clients pulled back while they waited to see how the pandemic situation would unfold.
From the executive level, there was no clear answer about what to do next. Then, leadership stopped trying to solve the problem alone.
In the Vancouver office, the company brought everyone into the conversation—roughly 40 people, across roles and levels—and asked: What are you seeing on the ground? Teams speaking directly with clients began to identify a pattern—inventory was sitting idle in North America and Europe, but parts of Asia remained open. Brands needed a different path to market.
The team shifted its messaging to position Asia as an active destination to replace Western markets and began helping clients move inventory that would otherwise have stalled. “I would not have been able to figure that out sitting alone at my desk,” says WPIC’s president, Joseph Cooke.
The business entered a period of accelerated growth, doubling in size during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has continued on that trajectory. Now, Cooke sees its grassroots listening habit as a core strength.
Leadership is a group exercise
Hundseth Power Line Construction (Saskatoon, 282 employees)
A utility contractor that builds and maintains electrical infrastructure for utilities, mining and industrial clients across Western Canada.
Hundseth started with three people—current president Todd Hundseth, his father and one employee. The company grew steadily from there, taking on work across Saskatchewan and adding crews as demand increased. By 2010, it had reached roughly 80 employees. The following year, Hundseth nearly doubled the size of the business when it bought one of its long-time competitors.
At the time, most decisions still sat with the same small group, and expanding that pool represented a major cultural shift for the formerly scrappy builder—not to mention increased overhead just as the business was coming out of COVID-19. But over the past five years, the company has added three new vice-president roles at the executive level: operations, business development and health, safety and HR.
Working with the CFO and accounting team, the new leadership group built out a Power BI system that pulls together data from across the business. Over the past five years, revenue has increased by roughly 90%, while costs have risen by about 40%, improving margins without a comparable increase in headcount. He wouldn’t have known to make those changes without more people in the room, says Hundseth. “I’ve gone into a lot of meetings thinking I had a great idea. It wasn’t until everybody voiced their input that it actually became one.”
Fix yourself first
Lopes Ltd. (Coniston, Ont., 300 employees)
A multitrade industrial contractor that provides fabrication and field services across sectors including mining, energy and agriculture.
Felix Lopes grew up in the contracting world, first sweeping floors with his mother, then working alongside his father, a tradesman who built the company from a garage in 1976. The company culture, based on his father’s mentality, was old-school: Work Monday to Sunday, and expect nothing less than perfection from everyone around you. By his mid-30s, Lopes was running operations accordingly as he oversaw a work force that had grown to about 55.
By his own account, he was getting it wrong. “I was a terrible leader,” Lopes says. “I wasn’t good to my people, and I didn’t see it, because I didn’t know any better.” One day, a long-time employee—part of the company’s steadily retiring first generation—closed the door to Lopes’s office and spoke plainly: The way he was treating people wasn’t working.
The next day, Lopes personally went to each of his employees and asked for help—specifically, to call out bad behaviour when it showed up as he worked to change his ways. Over time, that reset became the foundation of the company’s culture.
“Today’s world is such a difficult place, and I don’t want work to be another part of people’s stress. That’s not who we are as a company anymore,” he says. Today, Lopes employs about 300 people, many of them long-tenured staff members who’ve grown alongside the company. It’s a stable, sustainable operation—a fact that Lopes chalks up directly to its supportive culture.
Stay close to the client
F12.net (Edmonton, 500 employees)
Provides managed IT services—covering security, infrastructure and AI—to mid-sized organizations across Canada.
Pretty much anyone who’s ever called tech support has run into the issue of having to explain the same thing over and over again to different people. F12.net wasn’t immune to that dynamic. Like many IT providers, it operated with a centralized support model, where client requests could be handled by any one of hundreds of technicians across the country—capable, but not always familiar with the specifics of that business.
The model started showing cracks as technology got more complex. Over the past few years, AI has introduced a new kind of demand. Clients are wrestling with how new tools will change how they operate—what risks AI introduces, and where it actually creates value—conversations that need context.
Instead of doubling down on centralization or outsourcing, like many of its competitors, F12 moved in the opposite direction. The company broke its national help desk into regional teams, each responsible for a defined group of clients. Clients now work with the same team—people who understand their systems, their constraints and how their business actually runs.
That shift has allowed F12 to act less like a service provider and more like a trusted guide. Over the past two years, the company has doubled in size, with stronger retention and deeper client relationships.
Put the alligators on the table
Mancal Group (Calgary, 81 employees)
A private investment company with holdings across real estate, energy and private equity.
Mancal CEO Steve Letwin lives by a simple rule he picked up running a trucking business in Louisiana: Put the alligators on the table.
If something looks off—an emerging risk, a missed assumption, a shift in the market—he expects people to surface it early and without hesitation. “Bad news early, good news late,” Letwin says. The goal is to make sure the company sees problems while they’re still solvable. Of course, that mindset only works if people feel empowered to act on it, which is why employee empowerment is Mancal’s cultural through line.
Around the start of the pandemic, one employee put those gators squarely on the table. At the time, the company held roughly two million square feet of industrial real estate, a segment that had surged while most other asset classes struggled. The portfolio had gained significant value, and the prevailing view held that industrial would continue to perform.
That team member saw it differently. He came forward with a proposal: Sell half the portfolio, take the gains and build liquidity ahead of a post-pandemic shift. He bolstered it with research and pushed it up the chain, even though it ran against the momentum of the market.
Leadership listened. The company sold roughly half its holdings, locked in a substantial gain and redeployed the capital—moving into multifamily housing, and expanding into markets like Arizona and Texas. The results were, to use Letwin’s word, transformational. The reallocation reshaped the portfolio and generated outsized returns. Mancal has grown at roughly 10% annually for nearly three decades—built, in part, on a culture where problems come to light before they become serious liabilities.
Put people first and results will follow
Capital Automotive Group (Regina, 1,257 employees)
A group of automotive dealerships and collision centres across Western Canada and California.
Short-term results carry a lot of weight in an industry typically driven by monthly performance cycles, and Capital Auto knew that rhythm well. By 2020, the company had evolved from a collection of owner-operated dealerships into a centralized group, building out shared services across HR, IT, accounting and marketing to support further expansion into the United States.
A few years later, the leadership team began to rethink what performance should look like inside that structure.
While completing an executive MBA, CEO Sean Harms tested the service profit chain—a theory that links employee satisfaction to customer outcomes—on Capital Auto’s operations. The results held with the theory, including close alignment between how employees rated customer service and how customers experienced it.
In 2024, the company embraced the theory wholesale, introducing a structured employee satisfaction survey, along with a series of quality-of-life improvements for staff. This included education assistance programs tied to career progression, cost-of-living adjustments, maternity top-ups and formal recognition programs—along with a revamped onboarding process designed to signal investment from day one. Even day-to-day benefits, like discounted service and parts for employees, were reworked to reinforce the same principle: When your people are happy, customers feel it, and profit will look after itself.
Clarity scales
Wyse Meter Solutions (Concord, Ont., 170 employees)
Supplies and installs submetering systems in multiresidential buildings, and delivers billing and energy optimization services nationwide.
In 2013, Wyse had about 2,000 suites under contract. New owners Peter Mills and his partner set a target of 150,000 suites within five years. To execute that, Mills focused on making sure every department understood what it needed to contribute, and each year’s operating plan mapped directly onto that longer-term goal.
The company hit the target three months early, and from that point forward, Wyse built its growth around a series of five-year plans, each broken down into annual, quarterly and monthly targets that rolled up to one single outcome.
Early on, strategy came from the top, but over time, that approach widened. The company began pulling in input from across functions—including legal, regulatory and sales—then expanded further, involving managers and frontline leaders in multiday planning sessions, with work prepared in advance and debated in detail.
As more people saw their input reflected in the plan, managers took more ownership of the targets. Wyse reinforced that alignment with weekly all-staff meetings, quarterly scorecards tied to five key metrics, and a modest bonus structure that tracks progress against those targets. The company grew from 2,000 suites to more than 350,000 under contract, with no down years along the way.
Know when to walk away
Dig Insights (Toronto, 263 employees)
A market research and consumer insights firm that uses analytics and proprietary tech to help brands develop and optimize products.
Half a million dollars into an investment, Dig Insights had a problem. The company, which was worth about $10 million at the time, had set out to build a sleek, consumer-facing app—something intuitive, always-on and scalable—that would fundamentally change how people tested new product ideas. On paper, it made sense. “But it turned out that we were trying to make something too perfect,” says Dig’s CEO, Paul Gaudette.
The more the team refined the product, the further it drifted from its original purpose—and from what the company’s clients actually needed. At the same time, the economics didn’t hold. Maintaining a standalone app, continuously feeding it ideas and incentivizing participation would have turned a promising innovation into a costly distraction.
For what was a smaller, fast-growing company, the instinct could have been to push through to justify the investment. Instead, Dig stepped back, abandoned the app model, and rebuilt the product in-house as a web-based platform designed to integrate directly into client work flows and delivered on a per-project basis. That shift created a flexible system that combined proprietary tech with the company’s existing consulting model.
That hybrid approach is now the crux of Dig’s positioning. “If you want a culture of innovation,” says Gaudette, ”you have to accept that failure is going to happen.”
When you can’t predict, guide
Axxess International Inc. (Montreal, 260 employees)
A customs broker and freight forwarder that helps businesses move goods across borders.
Tariffs drove up costs for many businesses, but for a company built on cross-border trade, the disruption ran deeper and triggered widespread confusion. Axxess’s clients wanted to understand their level of exposure—what was affected, what it meant financially and, most importantly, what to do next. Internally, teams felt the same pressure, with operational strain and financial uncertainty compounding by the day. “In volatile times, leadership is not about accurately predicting every next move,” says Axxess CEO Pierre-Marc Gervais. “It’s about creating enough clarity for your people and your clients to keep moving.”
Well before there was a clear path forward, leadership focused on communication—crafting a message for employees that acknowledged both the best- and worst-case scenarios. From there, the company aligned its executive team around multiple possible paths, paused non-essential initiatives and concentrated resources on the issue at hand. Then, teams worked closely with clients, walking them through exposure and next steps in practical terms.
In all the turmoil, Axxess’s U.S. business has become its fastest-growing segment, with more than 15% growth in revenue and a roughly 50% increase in operational headcount to meet demand. When it was impossible to eliminate volatility, Axxess focused instead on making it navigable—and reinforced trust in the process.
Hold the line
Mondetta (Winnipeg, 140 employees)
An apparel company that designs, manufactures and distributes clothing globally through a vertically integrated supply chain.
At 16, Mondetta CEO Ash Modha was selling T-shirts at Grand Beach in Winnipeg. By the late 1980s, the company had broken through with its now-iconic flag sweatshirts, scaling into a global apparel business with manufacturing across Asia and distribution worldwide.
What’s changed over four decades is nearly everything—customers, channels, trends—a reality that’s tested the company repeatedly. In the mid-2010s, as direct-to-consumer brands surged, Mondetta attempted to accelerate growth by partnering with private equity. That introduced a different set of priorities—faster growth, heavier spending, less control—and pulled the company away from the disciplined, values-driven approach on which it had historically operated.
And that’s how Modha learned the most valuable thing he knows about business: “When we move away from who we are, we always fail,” he says.
After roughly four years, Mondetta bought the company back. Modha returned the business to steady, organic growth, tighter financial discipline and long-term brand building—including commitments the previous ownership had deprioritized, like pursuing B Corp certification, embedding community volunteerism into the culture and expanding employee ownership to interested staff across the company.
Since then, the business has grown fivefold. Modha knows that trends will shift and markets will turn, but knowing what not to change is what makes you a legacy brand.
Move through the fog
Groupe DCM Inc. (Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Que., 526 employees)
A manufacturer specializing in aerospace welding, machining and ground support equipment.
At the onset of the pandemic, Groupe DCM was operating six facilities with overlapping capabilities. When demand dropped sharply and visibility disappeared, that footprint became a liability—the business was too complex for the conditions. But waiting for stability wasn’t a viable option (and in retrospect, it wouldn’t have been an especially good call, given what’s happening these days).
Leadership moved fast. The company restructured around three centres of excellence, consolidating four plants into a single site dedicated to aerostructure machining and assembly, while maintaining specialized hubs in Blainville and Saint-Bruno. The move meant shutting down facilities and reorganizing teams at a moment when the path forward was anything but clear.
What held everything together was how DCM handled it. Instead of managing the change behind closed doors, the company’s leaders brought teams into the process—they communicated openly, shared the rationale and made their people part of the transition as it unfolded.
As a result, DCM’s operations became more focused, capabilities strengthened and execution improved. In the years that followed, the company also exited an unprofitable customer that accounted for more than a quarter of revenue in one division. Between 2020 and 2025, revenue tripled. Crisis meant that the structure changed, but so did the standard for decision-making.
Better, not cheaper
Construction Dinamo Inc. (L’Ancienne-Lorette, Que., 200 employees)
A construction firm that works with private clients on projects across residential, commercial and industrial sectors.
For years, a client had been trying to make a residential project work, but the numbers never quite added up. When Dinamo got involved, the team looked for ways to rework the concept instead of reducing the budget. It came back with a more expensive plan—but with 17 added units, the economics improved enough to bring the project to life.
That approach—adding value rather than trimming it—is fundamental to how the company works. Dinamo gets involved early, often before construction begins, and works alongside architects and engineers to shape the plan.
President Jean-Yves Morissette says this value-add approach wouldn’t be possible without a culture where leadership isn’t confined to the executive team. The company hires leaders internally, invests heavily in mentorship and training—in both technical and interpersonal skills—and expects people across the business to take ownership of the outcome. Teams are encouraged to challenge assumptions, rethink plans and contribute ideas that improve the end result.
When a decision isn’t clear, Dinamo’s people are trained to ask, ”Is this the right choice for the project and for the client, and will you be able to proudly stand behind it five years from now?“ Over the past seven years, despite not always being the cheapest option, Dinamo’s revenue has grown roughly thirtyfold.
Move while others wait
TRC (Burlington, Ont., 65 employees)
A distributor that connects global ingredient suppliers with manufacturers across North American industries, from personal care to animal nutrition.
When global trade conditions began to shift, many of TRC’s competitors chose to scale back out of an understandable sense of caution. Not so at TRC. It had already established a long-term direction for the business—one that included expanding geographically, diversifying its customer base and strengthening its position in core markets—and saw no reason to deviate from that plan. “Staying steady and consistent in the face of change and uncertainty, and focusing on the long-term direction, is crucial,” says TRC’s managing partner, Ryan Wiggins. “We believe in the core value that we bring to the market.”
The first step was completing an acquisition the company had been considering for several years: a U.S.-based personal care distributor that allowed TRC to deepen its presence in the American market. Around the same time, the company expanded beyond North America for the first time, entering southeast Europe through its animal nutrition business and leveraging existing supplier relationships to support that move.
It also increased its investment at home. While others reduced hiring, TRC added new talent across the organization.
Over the following year, the company reported approximately 15% growth in top-line revenue, challenging conditions notwithstanding. More importantly, the business that emerged from that period was broader in scope, more diversified in its revenue streams and better equipped to navigate whatever comes next.
Build for the company you want
QScale (Lévis, Que., 45 employees)
Builds large-scale AI data centres to support high-performance computing in Quebec and expanding to Ontario.
From its founding day seven years ago, QScale’s goal—as its name implies—was to build a company capable of handling rapid growth. “We wanted to build something that would grow really fast and really big,” says CEO Martin Bouchard. “That was in our DNA right from the beginning.”
As soon as the company raised its first major round of financing, it brought in senior leaders with experience scaling businesses—people who’d taken companies from dozens of employees to hundreds or more. One early hire, a VP of finance with experience at a public company, came in well before the organization had the complexity to fully justify the role.
The same logic applied to systems. Even when the company was small, it built processes as if it were already operating at scale—putting in place databases, tracking systems and other infrastructure that could look excessive to the untrained eye, but would become essential as its operations expanded.
That forward-looking approach extends to the company’s use of tech. It continuously tests new tools, including AI systems, across functions, accepting that some experiments will fail in the short term in exchange for staying ahead of what comes next.
That foundation supported a rapid climb from early-stage startup to a multibillion-dollar infrastructure platform, complete with a fully leased Quebec flagship campus and Ontario expansion in the works.
Scale without burning your base
The Crump Group Inc. (Mississauga, Ont., 650 employees)
A manufacturer of pet treats and food products, with operations across North America and distribution in major retail channels.
In its early years, The Crump Group built its business one retailer at a time. Its first brand, Crump’s Naturals, grew through relationships with independent pet specialty stores—partners that were willing to take a chance on a new product and help build it from the ground up. Over several years, those connections became the foundation of the business.
Then a new opportunity came about. Around 2010, larger grocery and mass retailers began to show interest. The volume potential was significant, but expanding into those channels came with a risk: Taking the same brand into mass retail could alienate the independent stores that had helped establish it.
Instead of stretching one brand across two very different channels, Crump built a second one. Caledon Farms was created specifically for grocery stores, allowing the company to pursue growth without undermining its existing relationships—even as it added cost, complexity and risk. It went on to surpass the original brand in revenue and opened the door to broader distribution across North America, all without sabotaging the relationships that made the business what it is.
Protect your standards
Bellai (Ottawa, 770 employees)
A concrete and masonry contractor that does formwork, finishes surfaces and restores aging concrete structures.
Around 2020, Bellai’s 72-year history hit an inflection point: Its business volume nearly doubled in a short period, driven by a surge in Ottawa’s construction market. More contracts meant more crews, more job sites and far greater operational complexity. Systems that worked at a smaller scale began to strain.
Bellai could have stuck to business as usual. Instead, it leaned into structure, doubling down on training and quality assurance to protect the standard it had built its reputation on. The company introduced clearer expectations around planning, co-ordination and equipment readiness, then reinforced them through a formal quality assurance program designed to keep execution consistent across sites.
As the number of active projects grew, visibility became harder to maintain. Supervisors started submitting detailed daily logs that tracked progress and outlined key activities—complete with site photos—creating a steady, real-time view into operations. That allowed leadership to stay close to the work and respond quickly when problems emerged.
At the same time, the company invested heavily in its people. It developed a training program, built around 52 four-hour modules, to deepen technical expertise and strengthen leadership across supervisors and crew leads. All these changes ushered in an identity built as much on leadership, structure and consistency as on hands-on execution.
Alignment happens off-site
Doyon Després (Quebec City, 250 employees)
Distributes foodservice equipment and kitchen supplies to restaurants, institutions and consumers in Quebec and Ontario.
Doyon Després merged with a competitor in 2017, aiming to combine two companies— each with four showrooms—into a scaled market leader. What initially followed fell short of that ambition.
It turned out that yesterday’s competitors don’t become collaborators overnight, because even after the merger, teams operated as though they were still competing. Sales clashed with operations, departments guarded their ways of working, and alignment just wasn’t there.
CEO Michel-Luc St. Pierre had a hunch that the issue wouldn’t respond to the usual organizational levers, because the challenge was more human than structural. He came up with an outside-the-boardroom solution. Shortly after the merger, every three months, the executive team would step outside the business and spend time together. Fishing trips, escape rooms and other team-building activities made the difference no internal memo could. Over time, that approach extended across the organization, with departments holding their own off-sites and shared activities.
Slowly but surely, the friction between teams eroded. A unified executive group was able to align around a three-year plan—and hit its targets a full year ahead of schedule. In a company built through acquisition, integration is often treated as a systems problem. Doyon Després proved it’s just as much a question of relationships.
Grow without flooding the market
Rebel Vac Systems (Red Deer, Alta., 130 employees)
A manufacturer of hydro excavation (hydrovac) and industrial vacuum trucks, serving utilities and infrastructure customers across North America.
Curtis Colbary stepped into the CEO role at Rebel Vac in November 2023 without a background in manufacturing—or in hydrovac equipment—and into a business that had grown around a single owner-operator. He wanted to scale the company but started by figuring out what actually drove demand.
Rebel Vac’s buyers paid a premium and accepted being relegated to a wait list because they trusted the product. Colbary and his team decided not to change that. In some manufacturing businesses, the goal would be to eliminate the wait—add capacity, shorten lead times and push more units into the market—but Colbary saw that dynamic differently. If customers could get a truck immediately, it would erode pricing power and brand position.
Still, the company had outgrown its 24,000-square-foot facility, so Colbary approved a move into a new 62,000-square-foot space. Shutting down production wasn’t an option—orders were already committed—so the team moved in stages, shifting sections of the operation one at a time and restarting each before moving the next.
At the same time, Rebel Vac expanded into new markets and introduced the Renegade, a truck for dense urban utility work built to the same performance standards as the company’s existing lineup.
Output increased from roughly 78 trucks to more than 200, and revenue more than doubled in under three years, but the wait list remained. As Colbary says, “We don’t want to be a mass producer.”
Three priorities at a time
Omni Quality Living (Peterborough, Ont., 4,000 employees)
An operator of long-term care and retirement homes, with 29 residences across Ontario and New Brunswick.
For much of its recent history, Omni Quality Living’s footprint changed very little. But a recent provincial mandate to redevelop aging long-term care homes pulled the organization into a new phase of growth, combining new construction with acquisitions and internal expansion.
Over the past four years, the company has expanded through acquisitions and new development, doubling in size while also building out new departments, upgrading systems and rethinking whole swaths of how the organization operated. But the pace of change initially caused a strain in implementation. Too many initiatives were moving at once across too many parts of the business—and leaders were hearing it from their teams.
At an off-site strategy session, the leadership team paused—not exactly to slow growth, but to bring structure to it. Each department was asked to identify its highest-impact priorities, with a maximum of three, which forced trade-offs. Some initiatives moved forward immediately—like automating compliance and financial systems—while others were sequenced into later phases or re-scoped.
With clearer priorities and a properly phased plan, teams had a much stronger sense of what mattered now versus later, which made the changes feel more manageable. “It felt like a sigh of relief,” says CEO Raheem Hirji. “We all felt like we had more clarity, and the company was much more aligned.”
Stand firm under pressure
Taste of Nature Foods Inc. (Markham, Ont., 130 employees)
A manufacturer of better-for-you snack foods that makes private-label, contract and branded products for retailers and brands mainly across North America.
Taste of Nature had historically focused on building its own brands. In late 2019, new leadership shifted that approach, putting more emphasis on private-label and contract manufacturing—areas they believed offered more room to scale. The shift required different capabilities, different customer relationships and a new way of operating.
A few months later, the ground shifted. Since healthy snack products are consumed almost entirely on-the-go, COVID-19 significantly reduced demand.
The instinct in that moment could have been to pull back or revisit the plan. Instead, the team chose to stay with it and make that commitment visible. That meant continuing to invest in the new model while reinforcing it internally. Leaders also made a point of staying close to the operation. Instead of stepping away from the floor, CEO J. Francis Cooke stayed on-site, working alongside the team, and maintaining direct contact with customers and partners.
At the same time, the company pushed into new markets, particularly the U.S., and expanded production capacity to support growth. Since 2020, revenue has increased by roughly 500%, with exports now accounting for the majority of the business. “In challenging times, it’s important to declare openly that failure is not an option,” says Cooke. “It sharpens focus and keeps the conversation centered on the path to success.”
Keep decisions close to the ground
Beyond Energy Services and Technology (Calgary, 310 employees)
An energy services company that delivers operational, engineering and technical solutions to oil and gas clients.
Before helping found Beyond Energy, CEO Eric Legge worked in an organization that ran the way many do: Information moved up through layers of management, decisions were made at the top and direction flowed back down to the teams responsible for execution. It was structured, controlled and, in theory, efficient.
In practice, as frontline insights—client needs, operational realities and emerging risks—travelled upward, they lost detail and context. By the time decisions came back down, they often no longer reflected what was happening on the ground. “The issue was that people closest to the problem weren’t the ones shaping the solution,” Legge says.
That experience informed how he approached building Beyond Energy. From the outset, the goal was to keep decision-making anchored as close as possible to where information lived. The company organized itself around small, cross-functional teams, bringing together people from operations, engineering, finance and other areas to work through specific client challenges with end-to-end ownership. They have the context, capability and accountability to act; leadership focuses on setting direction and maintaining alignment across the business.
Added scale has brought added layers, and with them a natural pull toward centralization. But no matter the company’s size, Legge asks himself: Where is the information—and is that where the decision is being made?
Make transparency the strategy
Nutra Holdings (St. John’s, 80 employees)
A portfolio of sports nutrition and wellness brands, including Transparent Labs and Jacked Factory, selling primarily in the U.S.
When Nutra Holdings acquired Transparent Labs, the business became more complex almost overnight, with more customers, channels and scrutiny narrowing the margin for error. What had worked with a small, fast-moving team no longer held at scale. The company could follow a familiar path in the category—optimizing for how products were positioned and marketed—or it could commit to something more demanding: full transparency. It chose the latter.
That meant fully disclosing ingredients, formulating to clinical doses and publishing third-party testing results. It came with higher costs, more operational complexity and less flexibility in how products were presented. But it aligned with how Nutra believed the category should operate, and that consistency showed up in how customers responded. Retention improved, and word of mouth eventually became a more efficient driver of growth than paid acquisition.
The business had already scaled quickly—to nearly US$25 million by 2019—but the Transparent Labs acquisition marked a turning point. The brand went on to become the company’s primary growth engine and is now among the larger players in the U.S. sports nutrition market, supported by a direct-to-consumer model with more than 100,000 subscribers and distribution across major retail channels.
Show your work
Team Group Inc. (Aurora, Ont., 1,700 employees)
A facility services and management company that provides technical cleaning, maintenance and multitrade solutions.
About 20 years ago, a customer pulled Team Group aside with an observation: ”You’re doing a great job,“ they said, ”but almost no one knows about it.“ At the time, the team assumed that if the work met expectations on the ground, it would speak for itself. But the people making contract-renewal decisions aren’t always the ones seeing that work from day to day—and without a clear way to communicate performance, a lot of that work went unnoticed.
The company began building a system to make its performance visible. Today, every engagement starts with a tightly defined scope of work and a set of measurable KPIs aligned directly with the customer’s priorities. Those metrics feed into structured reports, where the company sits down with clients and walks through the data, showing exactly how it performed against what was agreed.
“We don’t wait to get feedback,” says CEO Clint Griffin. “We grade ourselves and give clients the scorecard.” Clients see the results clearly, understand where expectations were met or exceeded, and engage in a more informed conversation about what comes next.
Over time, that level of transparency became a major differentiator. Today, Team Group operates across more than 50 locations and is on track to reach about $250 million in revenue.
Invest even when it’s inconvenient
Skygrid Construction Inc. (Mississauga, 171 employees)
A construction and project management firm for mid-market projects across Ontario and Western Canada.
In its first year, when Skygrid was still a team of fewer than 20 people, leadership made an unusual call. Rather than define the company’s values at the executive level, they brought the entire team into a room with an external facilitator and worked through it together. The result was a set of grassroots values—synergy, accountability, loyalty, proficiency, passion—that reflected the people expected to live by them day to day.
In recent years, as construction activity slowed and many firms pulled back discretionary investments, Skygrid maintained those that are true to its values. The company continued hiring co-op students, ran monthly training sessions across teams, and sustained a full slate of internal and external initiatives, including Women in Construction programming tied to industry events and partnerships.
Those choices come with trade-offs, since co-op programs require upfront training with no immediate return, and development initiatives draw on time and resources. But they also create cultural continuity, which helps teams stay intact—and, in turn, mean clients work with the same people from start to finish.
While turnover in the construction industry typically ranges from 20% to 30%, Skygrid’s sits closer to 10%. Women now make up roughly 32% of the work force—more than double the national average.
Shared expertise, better execution
Groupe AGF Inc. (Longueuil, Que., 2,400 employees)
A rebar manufacturer and installer that works across 11 countries with 29 business units.
As AGF expanded through acquisitions, it built a network of local teams across Canada, each responsible for delivering projects in its own market. Those teams brought deep local knowledge, but as projects grew in scale and complexity, the company saw an opportunity to connect that expertise across the business.
Rather than build capabilities in isolation, AGF began working as a more integrated system, where teams could draw on knowledge, experience and capacity from across the organization. A project might be led locally but supported by people who had solved similar challenges elsewhere—whether that means bringing in a project manager with specific experience, sharing best practices from another region or co-ordinating across teams to improve execution.
On a hospital project in Ontario, for example, a local team drew on methods and expertise developed in Quebec, where AGF had completed similar large-scale builds. In Alberta, when the business moved into wind energy, it brought in specialists from other regions to help the local team navigate a new category.
Leadership programs, peer groups and company-wide forums reinforce those connections, creating informal channels for knowledge-sharing and making it easier for teams to support one another across regions.
Continuity is a competitive advantage
Rochon Building Corp. (Toronto, 82 employees)
A general contractor for industrial, commercial and design-build projects for major real estate clients across the country.
Most of Rochon’s business comes from repeat customers, many of whom end up working with the same project managers, co-ordinators and site teams over multiple builds. That continuity carries knowledge forward—how a client budgets, how they make decisions, where friction tends to come about—and makes it easier to move smoothly without having to re-establish expectations each time.
Rochon builds deliberately toward that outcome. Internally, the hiring philosophy is to “buy the whole brain”—to bring in experienced people who can think through a project end to end, rather than execute a narrow scope. “If you hire the best in class, their value resonates all day long,” says president and owner Martin Rochon. “They’re making good decisions constantly.”
Because those hires come in with judgement and experience, Rochon can avoid micromanaging. Leadership spends time upfront defining strategy, but once those parameters are set, execution sits with the team. The expectation is that people will manage their own work, make decisions in real time and carry responsibility for the outcome.
That autonomy only works if people stay long enough for it to compound, and at Rochon, they tend to. The company invests in promoting from within, encourages people to move across roles, and builds careers over decades, not project cycles.