Julie Laberge Is Done Being Called Resilient: A Quebec Founder’s Pandemic Story

Julie Laberge lost twenty years of savings, four hundred jobs and a building to fire. What she can't stand is the compliment.

By Joseph Tito

Julie Laberge — LSA & Cie, school food service, Lachine, Quebec

Tired of Being Called Resilient

Julie Laberge has been called resilient more times than she can count, and she has had enough of it.

"I am so tired of being called, oh, you're so resilient. Maybe it's a French-English thing, but to me resilience implies sufferance. You need to suffer to become resilient. And I was like — no. Can I just be successful?"

Champagne at One, Layoffs at Two

She has the credentials for the compliment, which is exactly the problem. At one o'clock on a pandemic afternoon she signed a major new account and $1.4 million in financing for Quebec's first fully LEED-certified commercial kitchen, a project three years in the making. They opened champagne.

"And at two o'clock I had to let go two hundred and thirty, three hundred people."

Inside six weeks the head office burned down, one of the main kitchens caught fire, and the landlord took back the building she had just leased.

"So it poured."

The province opened and closed the schools seven times that year, and across 109 locations each closure wrote off about a million dollars of inventory. She hired four hundred people, let them go, hired again.

"We started hiring literally anybody. Looking decent enough and capable of pouring coffee was a good candidate. So of course we destroyed the culture, and we almost lost our DNA. Really, it's been a shit show."

The Part That Was Not Bad Luck

She tells all of that fast, the way you tell a story you have already made your peace with. The part she slows down for is the part that was not bad luck.

Exhausted and running short on faith in herself, she hired a CEO to replace herself. She puts the cost of that decision at three million dollars.

"I lacked self-confidence. I was tired. I was completely exhausted. Mentally I wasn't there anymore. The lack of confidence in my own competence allowed me to hire people who were extremely competent on paper."

"You Need to Learn to Let Go"

She saw it coming before anyone else did and said so, and was told she was the problem.

"I was telling the advisory board, I think we're going to hit the wall. And they were like — no, Julie, it's you being a control freak. You need to learn to let go."

She called her mentor and cried, then called an emergency board meeting and made him present to it. He resigned the next morning. Asked why she thinks it went the way it did, she takes a run at the answer twice before she commits to it.

"I'm going to say it. We're going to talk, Joe. I'm going to say it. Being challenged by women."

Perimenopause and the Bottom of the Bottom

She was also, through all of it, in perimenopause, which she only worked out afterwards, in a pharmacy, buying a hair elastic, when she lost her temper so completely that security walked her out.

"I was not recognizing myself at all. I thought I was going crazy. I touched the bottom of the bottom."

No doctor raised it with her. Neither did the board.

"When it comes to CEOs, business owners, it's a bit of a taboo subject. There's no literature about women going through this transition. And women in power going through that transition."

It's Not Resilience. It's Success.

All of which brings her back to the word, and why she wants it retired.

"During the pandemic it was, we're resilient, we're resilient. No. We're agile. We pivot. We tried things. We failed. We turn around, we change, we adapt. We evolved. It's not resilience. It's success."