You’ve no doubt heard of Alexander the Great, but how about Alexander the Happy? More formally known as Alexandre L’Heureux, he has helped transform a small Montreal-based engineering company once known as Genivar Inc. into a multinational giant called WSP Global Inc.
Since he became chief executive in 2016, WSP’s shares have soared almost 500 per cent and the company now has a market cap of about $32 billion, dwarfing that of rival AtkinsRéalis Group Inc., once better known as SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.
Over the same time frame, WSP’s revenues have grown 125 per cent to hit $14.4 billion in fiscal 2023 from $6.4 billion, and revenues in fiscal 2024 were tracking 7.4 per cent higher as of the third quarter, with year-end results to be reported on Feb. 26.
Perhaps more impressive is that WSP’s approximately 73,000 employees are working on 200,000 projects around the world — indeed, they are on every continent, including Antarctica. But those numbers are just some of the reasons L’Heureux has been named Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2024, as presented by Bennett Jones LLP, Caldwell, KPMG and the National Post.
“Alexandre L’Heureux has achieved exceptional success. Truly extraordinary,” Hugh MacKinnon, chair of the CEO of the Year Advisory Board, said. “Since L’Heureux became CEO in 2016, some 55 organizations around the globe have been acquired by and are now operating as part of WSP Global. He has kept WSP uncomplicated and lean, a company dedicated to ethical behaviour, profound regard for the communities it serves and professional excellence in its service offerings.”
L’Heureux also appears to be quite happy, though the moniker was given to him by the Montreal Council of Foreign Relations since it’s a direct translation of his name. Still, it fits.
“I’m a high performer, and I love our firm to perform, and I love our people to perform, but I also know when it’s time to have fun and when it’s time to really build bonds with our team leaders and team members,” he said. “I always try to create an environment where there’s camaraderie, but at the same time, we’re serious and are laser-focused on the goals that we have to achieve.”
As for how L’Heureux has fun, he loves to play chess. Indeed, he plays a few thousand games a year and even has a 21-year-old coach to help keep him up to speed on tactics and any new developments, something that seems to cross over into his working life as well.
That accounting background has proven to be an asset, especially when it comes to formulating strategies in a fragmented market and making acquisitions, something having the backing of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec has helped with, especially in 2012 when Genivar took over WSP Group PLC, a much bigger rival based in the United Kingdom, for $442 million.
“Can you believe that’s almost 15 years ago already? To have two pension funds investing on the same day in one company that had yet to prove a strategy was quite uncommon in those days,” he said. “I can tell you that without the support of those two pension funds, I don’t think we would be where we are today, because those two names are two of the largest infrastructure investors in the world.”
Having the backing of pension funds, something the federal government wants to see more of, has helped make WSP “a world champion in our industry,” L’Heureux said, and something he and others are proud of.
“Alexandre L’Heureux has taken a successful Quebec engineering company and turned it into one of the world’s leading engineering and professional services consulting firms,” John Wallace, executive chair of Caldwell, said. “Its growth into a global powerhouse has been led by a truly outstanding leader. Alexandre is a model of vision, strategic understanding and the kind of deep, insightful analysis that transforms courage into business success. He has created growth that also expands its expertise and reach — growth that offers clients ever-better service.”
What follows is a condensed and edited interview with L’Heureux in mid-January.
FP: Congrats on the award. You lead an engineering firm, but you’re not an engineer; you’re an accountant. Did you always want to be the leader of a company even when you were an accountant?
Alexandre L’Heureux: No, actually that was not in the game plan. At a very young age, I was attracted to science, but I was equally attracted to finance as well. And at a very early age, I decided to join a Big Four firm. Nobody in my family had this background, but I discovered when I started to research that those Big Four firms would be an incredible school for me where I would learn a lot not only around accounting, but mostly around operations, organizational structure, businesses and how to read a business from the outside. Frankly, it’s been an incredible school for me where I got to learn various industries and I got to learn very different businesses. At that time, I was already very much attracted to M&A, mergers and acquisitions, so very early on at Deloitte, I asked my partners to move me from audit straight into mergers and acquisitions and due diligence. But at the time, although my head was filled with dreams, I don’t think I could have envisioned something like this.
FP: How do you think having that background as an accountant plays a role in your leadership style?
ALH: It’s not so much because I’m an accountant, but perhaps because I spent my entire career in people-business environments. I spent my entire career mostly in professional services firms. I started at Deloitte, which was a professional services firm. Then I moved to a hedge fund, a professional services firm; private equity, again, a people business. It’s all about people and brain power, and I work with doctors and scientists and private equity, and then it was just a natural move to work with engineers. Later on in my career, working again with scientists, I felt that I was always bringing something to the table that was quite complementary to those people. I always felt comfortable in that environment of working with people. That’s one trait that has followed me all my career.
FP: You mentioned M&As earlier and your interest in that. Obviously, WSP has done a lot of acquisitions over the years. What do you look for in an acquisition?
ALH: There are four distinct criteria that are quite simple. I like things that are simple and easily explainable, first and foremost, if we wish to do an acquisition because, at the end of the day, an acquisition is not a strategy; it’s a means to accelerate or to deploy your strategy. For us, when we make a deal, I need to be absolutely certain that this is a strategic imperative. I always like to say, “If you want to improvise in business, you have to come prepared.” In other words, we want to be opportunistic in the way we do deals. But at the same time, we know where we’re going. We have a very clear idea of what we wish to accomplish.
The second one, going back to what I just talked about, is people. We have to share a common vision, a like-minded vision of where we want to go as a company and as an organization. We have to share a similar culture. I keep saying to whoever wants to listen to me: at WSP, we want to let our work speak for itself. We don’t market too much; we don’t do press releases about our projects. We want our reputation to speak just from the work that we do.
The third one, obviously, is that I’m entrusted to create shareholder value. I never thought that creating an incredible working environment for our people and creating shareholder value are mutually exclusive. Obviously, the price has to be right and the value has to be right, but where I think many companies are getting it wrong is the last criterion, which is, can you integrate it?
Oftentimes, people stop at number three: it’s good strategically, I like the people that we would be working with and the price is good, so I’m doing the deal. All of the first three criteria can be met, but can you really integrate this business into your organization and not destroy value? And that I will spend an enormous amount of time upstream with the prospective seller to see if we are going to be able to make this a success.
FP: A lot of companies that do acquisitions on a regular basis integrate those acquisitions completely and manage them centrally. But you’re set up more on a geographical basis. Why did you adopt that approach?
ALH: It’s very interesting the point that you’re raising. I’ve been greatly influenced by the Big Four firms. That’s where I’m coming from. When we started to build this company, I spent an enormous amount of time with the leaders of those Big Four firms trying to understand how they were deploying their footprint globally and geographically and by sectors. I came to the conclusion that, yes, we are a publicly listed company, we are a professional services firm, exactly like a Deloitte or a PricewaterhouseCoopers, and we do very similar work. So we came to the conclusion that having an empowering culture where we hold people accountable locally, in our local markets, was the right way to deploy capital and to really scale up at a very fast pace. If you take our structure today, it’s very similar to the large organizations globally, such as Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, and our goal is to create something similar in our space.
FP: That raises another question. The Big Four accounting firms control 56 per cent of their market, but I read the top four in your sector control 28 per cent, so that’s still quite fragmented despite all the acquisitions that not only your company has done, but others in this space have done.
ALH: If I look at the very 30,000-feet-in-the-air strategy and vision for WSP, there are four accounting firms you have to play for. For the strategist, you have McKinsey, Bain, BCG … But I saw a hole in the market where there’s really no real home for scientists and engineers, and we want to create this home for the scientists of the world and the engineers of the world, those who really resolve the complex problems that we have today. That’s really the long-term vision for WSP. There’s a home for accountants, there are many homes for lawyers, but there aren’t any real large, well-recognized homes for scientists and engineers, and that’s what we’re after, and that’s why we want to create a world champion in that space.
FP: A lot of people associate WSP with the environmental movement and that is obviously a part of your business, but I read it’s just 18 per cent or something like that of your business.
ALH: It’s funny you bring this point up because back in 2018, we were known only as an engineering firm in transportation and building, so I’m pleased to see that our brand has evolved over time with the building of our environmental sector over the past few years. Today, Earth and the environment, including water, represent perhaps around 28 per cent of our top line, but the vast majority of our work today is still strongly related to engineering work. Transportation is 50 per cent of our net revenue.
We’re the largest engineering firm in transportation globally, and one point of interest, because I feel right now it’s the flavour of the day, is that you very rarely see a Canadian firm being one of, if not the leading firm in its space in the U.S. Today, WSP is clearly a top three in the U.S. In our home market, we’re the leading firm, but in the U.S., we are also a leading firm. You rarely see Canadian firms abroad being so successful, and what makes me very, very proud is that we have been able to take our know-how and our Canadian expertise and export it wherever we are operating now.
FP: Where do you see the opportunities for the company in the future?
ALH: There are a number of growth levers that we are going to explore over the next few years. You need to remember that WSP is fuelled by global trends, and I’m quite optimistic about the future trends for our industry. Look at, obviously, the urbanization movement. Today, 56 per cent of the global population lives in cities; by 2050, seven out of 10 people will be living in cities. There are incredible opportunities for us to redesign the world in the next 25 years.
You think about climate change today. Four billion people are living in places that will be highly impacted by climate change, and it’s unfortunate for the world population, but it is a catalyst where WSP can assist. You think about infrastructure repair: one out of three bridges are either obsolete or have to be repaired globally. The energy transition, we’re going to have to spend trillions and trillions of dollars just to decarbonize the planet. All of those trends will fuel our growth over the next few years.
FP: There’s obviously political upheaval around the world, certainly in Canada, and there’s a presidential change in the U.S. and a lot of potential fallout from that. How do you manage that kind of exterior stress?
ALH: Well, a few years ago, globalization was the flavour of the day. Today, we live more in a nationalistic type of environment. We’re a global firm and an international firm, but we’re entrenched in our local market. Today, 98 per cent of the work that we do in the U.S. is dedicated to the U.S.; 98 per cent of the work that we do in Canada is done for Canada. It’s the same in the U.K., same in Australia. We are in a position to leverage best practices globally and are able to import expertise wherever the needs are. But we’re not overly concerned by borders and by what’s taking place outside our company because of what I’ve just described. We did extremely well under the Trump administration in 2016-2020, and we did equally well under the Biden administration over the past four years. Obviously, any tariffs are something that is unfortunate because it’s going to increase construction costs, both for the U.S. and Canada, but we’re going to have to manage this carefully.
FP: What are some of the lessons you’ve learned over your career?
ALH: Yeah, a couple. When things are going extremely well, I tend to have my two feet cemented on the ground. I tend to not get overly excited when things are going well, but, equally, when things are not going well, I tend to remain, to your point earlier on, happy. I know that life is about peaks and valleys, and you just need to remain calm when things are great and remain calm when things are not great. That’s certainly something I’ve learned along the way: to always stay cool-headed all the time.
No. 2, at a very young age, early 30s, I remember an old partner said to me, “Alex, if you want to reach the sky, you have to be able to stand on your team’s shoulders.” Surrounding myself with very, very strong people at a very young age is something I’ve never been afraid of. Always surrounding myself with the strongest people has always turned to my advantage, and when you empower strong people, they respect that and they love that. And that’s why I think we were able to achieve what we’ve achieved. We assembled an incredible team, and that’s clearly a team effort.
FP: Is there one thing you’ve done that you’ve been particularly proud of?
ALH: Many, many, many companies are family-owned in Canada. That’s a fact of life. At WSP, we are a truly publicly listed company, and we have been able to build a world champion in our industry. We’re not done. We have a ways to go, but from Canada it is possible to build a global champion and have a leading firm globally. I’d love more firms to have this ambition and this vision to do that from Canada.
Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year award was established by executive search firm Caldwell in 1990. This highly respected award honours an executive in Canadian business who exemplifies integrity, insists upon excellence, earns the trust of others and has built a globally competitive organization. It is the preeminent recognition for Canadian CEOs.
Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year advisory board comprises more than 20 of the country’s most respected business leaders and academics, including past honourees of the award. The board meets annually to select the current year’s recipient based on five key criteria: vision and leadership, corporate performance, global competitiveness, innovation and social responsibility.
The 2024 advisory board members are: Jim Balsillie; Charles Brindamour, chief executive, Intact Financial Corp; Marie-P. Charette-Poulin, parliamentarian in residence, Saint-Paul University, Ottawa, and corporate director; Dean Connor; George Cope, chair, BMO Financial Group; Patrick Daniel, chair, Daniel Family Foundation; Paul Godfrey, director, Cargojet Inc., and vice-chair, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care; Linda Hasenfratz, executive chair, Linamar Corp.; Krystyna Hoeg, corporate director; Dezsö Horváth, dean emeritus, professor, strategic management, Schulich School of Business, York University; Jim Leech, chancellor emeritus, Queen’s University, Elio Luongo, senior partner and former chief executive, KPMG Canada; Hugh MacKinnon, chair emeritus, Bennett Jones LLP; Dave McKay, chief executive, Royal Bank of Canada; Nadir Mohamed, former chief executive (retired), Rogers Communications Inc.; Gordon Nixon; Sarah Raiss, corporate director; Mike Rose, chair and chief executive, Tourmaline Oil Corp.; Calin Rovinescu, former chief executive (retired), Air Canada; Indira Samarasekera, president emerita, University of Alberta; Lino Saputo, executive chair, Saputo Inc.; Guylaine Saucier, corporate director; Frank Vettese, CEO emeritus, Deloitte Canada, investor and corporate director; Don Walker, former chief executive (retired), Magna International Inc.
• Email: aholloway@postmedia.com
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