It’s worth celebrating 25 years in business! On the occasion of the quarter century of operation of the Centre nautique Pierre Plouffe, to be celebrated with great fanfare on June 30 and July 1, Tremblant Express met with the captains of this nautical adventure, Canadian water skiing legend Pierre Plouffe and his business accomplice, Sylvie Mayrand. A three-wave article in this issue and the following two (May and June). 

“If we’d been accountants, we wouldn’t have made it to our 25th birthday,” says Sylvie Mayrand, as Pierre Plouffe nods his agreement.

“If we’d taken the accountants’ advice, we would have closed the business. But we hung on. We’re still here because of our passion.”

The usually inexhaustible Pierre is silent and smiling. For once, everything’s been said!

The business established on the shores of lac Tremblant, on a site it shares with the Beach and Tennis Club, has the wind in its sails with some 50 employees, 200 rental watercraft, its popular floating structure and its rich array of water skiing and surfing courses. But its history is also marked by less splendid times.

To each his own

Initially, in June 1993, the centre had only one employee, one boat, and was set up in a small mobile building it shared with the beach’s other renters. Reservations for water skiing courses were written in chalk by Sylvie on a small outdoor blackboard. It was a daily challenge to make ends meet.

“I’m not embarrassed to say that in the early years, we did the cash at the end of the day and if there was $1.75 missing, we recounted, because we needed that money,” says the 68-year-old entrepreneur, who holds more than 20 Canadian championships in water skiing…among others, in the senior category on 2016. “I’m also not embarrassed to say that the first time I want to a bank for a loan, I told my lawyer that I would rather he didn’t invite the manager to have a coffee because I didn’t have 25 cents in my pockets.”

Sylvie adds that she and Pierre did not pay themselves a salary for the first 12 years of the centre nautique’s existence.

“We reinvested the smallest amounts. I remember that in January 1994 or 1995 we rolled coins to make payments on the boats.”

To be able to manage and to finance the centre’s activities, Pierre worked in the winter at the mountain (as he still does, as a ski instructor) while Sylvie went to Montreal to work in her trade as a costumier.

The employees

And what are they proudest of, what’s the best memory of their entrepreneurial and nautical adventure of the past 25 years? You could ask the question a dozen different ways, or even ask them separately to try to get different answers, but you’d be wasting your time. The answer is always the same: their relationship with their employees.

“Our finest trophy is the bond that we have succeeded in creating with them over the years,” says Sylvie. “We have always considered them to be like our children, and we’ll have about 50 this summer. Some employees have left to follow careers elsewhere, but they come back in the summers to work with us.”

Pierre intervenes: “One employee wrote ‘If someone’s been to heaven on Earth, it’s because he worked at the centre nautique.’ But it’s not always all peace and harmony between the employees and ourselves, particularly me, I’d say. In families, there are squabbles. But you have to listen to your employees, even if you don’t agree with them. Nobody can always be 100 per cent right or wrong. An employee who suggests something to me, well, he does it because he’s interested in his work. I have to listen to him.”

To hear them talk, you’d undoubtedly conclude that Sylvie and Pierre are the queen and king of the world when they’re at the centre nautique, in spite of the fact that that work long, long hours from May to October.

“I work seven days a week, but in the morning, I head for work on my bicycle,” says Pierre. “I go put on my swimsuit, and I spend the whole day outdoors. I have the most beautiful sunset in the whole region, I head for home…and then I do it again the next day. It’s hard to complain.”|

“Around this lake,” Sylvie interjects, almost whispering, “there are people who have paid 7 million, 10 million or 15 million and they’re not even there all summer. We are!”