In 2014, our founder Nathalie Grenier was running operations for a mid-size logistics company in Laval. She kept sending her supervisors to leadership workshops. They would come back with thick binders and motivational quotes, and then manage exactly the way they had before. The gap between the training room and the warehouse floor was enormous.
She started designing her own sessions. Short. Specific. Built around the real problems her supervisors faced that week. Within a year, turnover in her department dropped from 31% to 14%. Other companies in the industrial park asked what she was doing differently.
By 2016, Nathalie had left operations to focus on training full-time. She brought on Marc-Antoine Dufresne, a former plant manager with fifteen years of experience in food manufacturing, and together they built the curriculum that became Principal Management Skills.
These are the principles behind every program we design and deliver. They are not aspirations. They are constraints we hold ourselves to.
Reading about feedback is not the same as giving it to a defensive employee at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. Our sessions spend at least 60% of the time on structured practice with real scenarios, not slides.
We cap workshops at twelve participants. Larger groups make it easy to hide. In a room of eight or ten people, everyone speaks, everyone practises, and the facilitator can give individual attention.
We do not run the same workshop twice. Before every engagement, we interview three to five participants and their direct reports. That data shapes the case studies, role-plays and discussion topics in the room.
A workshop without follow-up is entertainment. Every multi-day program includes a 90-day check-in where participants report on what they tried, what worked, and where they got stuck. We adjust the next session based on that feedback.
We are a small team on purpose. Every person here has managed people in an operational setting before joining us. Nobody teaches something they have not done themselves.
Founder and lead facilitator
Nathalie spent twelve years in logistics operations before launching the company. She specialises in first-time manager development and has personally facilitated over 300 workshops. She holds a graduate diploma in adult education from UQAM.
Senior facilitator
Marc-Antoine managed production teams of up to 120 people in the food industry. He brings a direct, no-nonsense style to difficult-conversations training and executive coaching. He is a certified coach through the International Coaching Federation.
Program coordinator and facilitator
Samira joined in 2020 after five years as a team lead in healthcare administration. She coordinates logistics for all workshops and co-facilitates the new manager foundations program. She is completing a master's degree in organizational development at Concordia.
Nathalie registered the business and delivered the first workshop to a group of eight supervisors at a packaging plant in Laval.
The team doubled. Marc-Antoine brought deep expertise in manufacturing operations and expanded our reach into the food and beverage sector.
We reached this milestone with a cohort of nurse managers at a regional health authority. That project also marked our first engagement outside the private sector.
When in-person sessions stopped, we redesigned our programs for live virtual delivery within three weeks. The format worked well enough that we still offer it as an option.
We crossed this number with clients across manufacturing, healthcare, tech and professional services. Our geographic reach extended to Ontario and New Brunswick through virtual programs.
After completing her coaching certification, Samira began leading sessions independently, allowing us to serve more clients without increasing group sizes.