Corner store king eyes global conquest

Couche-Tard’s Bouchard on growth spree

Alain Bouchard in the late 1970s bought a corner store in St. Jérôme, just north of Montreal. Today, the chairman of Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. is one of Canada’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, having parlayed that single shop into a sprawling chain of 12,500 gas bars and convenience stores that circles the earth.

Couche-Tard has become so big that next year it is set to vault past the five biggest banks and become Canada’s largest company on global revenue of $50 billion.

Though Bouchard gave up the chief executive job two years ago, Canada’s corner store king has no immediate plans to cede the throne of the Couche-Tard empire. He plans to visit Toronto this week to talk to investors about the company’s future as a dual-share company that would keep control with his family and three other founding shareholders.

Investors can hardly blame Bouchard for wanting to retain control, given all the hard work he has put into creating a global retail giant. That hard work is a big reason why he has won this year’s International Horatio Alger Award, which recognizes individuals who have persevered through challenges to become successful entrepreneurs and community leaders. The awards are named for the 19th-century American kids’ book author whose novels, such as Tattered Tom and Sink or Swim, sketch out the route from rags to riches: determination.

Bouchard’s rise to power is more like riches to rags to riches. In a funny and colourful new biography called Daring to Succeed — How Alain Bouchard Built the Couche-Tard and Circle K Convenience Store Empire, Montreal journalist Guy Gendron attributes Bouchard’s drive to “a son’s desire to restore his parents’ honour.”

His father, Jean-Paul Bouchard, in the early 1950s built a thriving road-construction business in Quebec’s Saguenay region, owning bulldozers, trucks, steam shovels, a gravel pit and even a tree harvester. But an entrepreneur who had granted Jean-Paul a fat roadbuilding contract went out of business, and Bouchard, too, soon declared bankruptcy.

The Bouchards moved to a mobile home in Baie Comeau. Alain’s mother Rachel gave up her Cadillac, downgrading to a used Oldsmobile station wagon to cart around her six children; his father took work on the hydro dams north of town to make ends meet. Raised on steak, the family switched to baloney.

As he grew up, Bouchard sought to recover the good life he remembered from his early childhood.

“I think (what motivated me) was the life before and the life after, the difficulty that we had after the bankruptcy, and how life for me in my little kid’s mind, was so beautiful before,” he said.

As a footnote, Bouchard’s dad rebounded quite well; he developed a hydraulic pump to inject cement into dams and mines, and became sought-after from Algeria to Sri Lanka.

“When he died he left quite a bit of money to his children. It was pretty surprising,” Bouchard said. “He restored the family’s honour himself.”

Gendron’s book links Bouchard’s rise to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, when the province’s French majority took control of business. Bouchard acknowledges that he was part of the wave, but not because he sought to stick it to the English.

“My motivation was to build a big company,” he said. He is proud of what his generation achieved, but notes that the fire fizzled out in Quebec Inc. about 20 years ago.

But he sees reason for optimism. “Today, it’s the opposite. In the past three or four years, there are startups all over the place. I meet young entrepreneurs. I get calls, and I make myself very available to mentor people. And it’s working. We can see an effervescence now.”

Even Couche-Tard is hiring what Bouchard calls “a