A Milestone That Fills Us With Pride and Excitement
Every year for the last seven years, the Globe and Mail’s business magazine selects Canada’s fastest growing companies and ranks them in a prestigious list of the Top 400. The list celebrates the country’s boldest entrepreneurial businesses. This year, for the first time ever, Click & Mortar was selected to be part of the chosen few.
Join us as we celebrate this achievement and what it means for the past, present and future of Click!
An Incredible Recognition
“I’ve been eyeing this list since my early twenties”
- Gabriel Tassé, Click & Mortar co-founder
It had been a years-long dream of Click’s founders to make the list, so when we got the email, we couldn’t believe it! That being said, the nomination didn’t come out of nowhere, far from it: Click ranked 141st out of the 416 fastest growing companies in Canada, with a 3-year growth rate of 308%.
The Globe and Mail attributes this victory to our digital creativity and our standout expertise in data marketing: we tend to agree with that assessment! The only thing we need to add is that this win was made possible by the entire team at Click, non-data specialists included. We also couldn’t have made it without our clients. As Alex Bigras-Lauzon, Partner at Click, says, “this honor reflects our commitment to excellence and our dedication to building strong, mutually beneficial partnerships with our clients.”
We also feel that this national recognition is especially important for us, as a Quebec company. To give you an idea of the proportion: remember how the list has over 400 businesses? If you filter for the ones based in Montreal, Click ranked Ranked 13th out of only 23 companies. We feel especially proud of what this honor means for us as ambassadors of Quebec business.
Being featured on the list gave us the opportunity to meet with the other winners and connect with them. But more on that later! When an achievement of this scale happens and it’s specifically about growth, it makes us want to reflect for a second on how Click started out and how far we’ve come today.
Greatness From Small Beginnings
“We started out as a couple of guys working out of my apartment”
- Gabriel Tassé, Click & Mortar co-founder
Click & Mortar was founded by Gabriel Tassé and Olivier J. Bergeron in 2016. Please take a moment to consider the picture above: this was the entire staff of Click at the time! Today, we have nearly 40 employees. Time flies indeed…
Olivier remembers the early days fondly: “Back then, we knew we were underdogs in the marketing world. We wanted to motivate ourselves, so instead of regular job titles, we gave each other mission titles! I was our Hunter, making calls and going on meetings with prospective clients all day. Really, I was doing business development, but thinking about it as hunting gave me the energy to try to make every client meeting memorable. Gab was our Farmer, tasked with growing our team and our existing clients. I think it’s that mix of playful energy and marketing expertise we had early on that allowed us to distinguish ourselves: people saw that we looked fun to work with and joined our adventure.”
Our Time in Toronto Among the Greats
“When we attended the celebratory event in Toronto, we got to experience some next-level networking”
- Anastasia Skaya, Partner at Click
One of the best parts of being selected for the list was getting to meet the hundreds of other winners in Toronto. From fellow Montreal companies to Ottawa and even Regina-based businesses, we got the opportunity to network in a much broader way than we usually do thanks to the Globe and Mail celebratory event.
Anastasia Skaya was one of our proud representatives at the event. She said it was “exciting and humbling at the same time. It was humbling because we got to meet a lot of companies who were growing even more than we were: it was like being among the greats. And it was also really exciting because we got to trade business cards, make connections and celebrate our success with all those companies. Over there, I also felt the responsibility of representing the entire Click team: I would be telling completely new people about our business and I still couldn’t help name-dropping some of my colleagues to praise their work. It’s just about recognizing that we all made it here as a team: that’s what Click is all about.”
Onwards and (Sustainably) Upwards: Our Hopes For The Future
“At the end of the day, we’re always focused on celebrating our connections and helping our team and our partners grow”
- Alex Bigras-Lauzon, Partner at Click
Achievements like this one are an invitation to look back, as we did before, but they’re also an invitation to look forward! It’s obvious with one glance at the photo above: Click & Mortar has never had so many employees, so many partners: being featured on the list is a recognition of that trend of growth. Far from treating this achievement as an endpoint, we expect to grow even more in the coming years.
As Gabriel says: “I’ll tell you a secret: the most important part of the list isn’t the revenue or even the percentage of growth: it’s the amount of years a company made it on the ranking. That’s how you know that things are going well for your business and for your partners in a long-term, sustainable way. So that’s the way we’re going to aim for Click going forward: mutual and sustainable growth.”We want to thank The Globe and Mail for this honor as well as all our team members and partners. Sometimes, people’s hard work really does pay off: this is one of those times.
