Alex we would love to hear about your story and career development let's start from the very beginning how did your postsecondary experience lead you to where you are today right after high school I had the chance to go into business school I did the whole I want to become an accountant which never happened actually I never did any Accounting in my life but I graduated in accounting what happened afterward is that accounting gave me visibility on the big four and the Consulting world I went directly to Consulting at Delo I was doing technology implementation for
the banking sector which was really interesting and I had a fantastic time there then I had the chance to work with McKenzie and Company as a Management Consultant where I was doing due diligence Equity work and business building which means let's say company want to create a new division to sell a new product I would help them to actually achieve that now when I think about what I'm doing which is to give a bit of context in a partnership that invest into Brands and consumer products we invested into p like Sao bunny for example that
is large in the US coming in Canada but we go there we are really active we well trying to find creative strategies we will work on the operations and trying to make sure that we are maximizing and still providing a lot of value for our customers and all of what I am doing now it's what I did at McKenzie it's being able to have the right analysis being able to understand how this strategy can affect the consumer but also operations and also marketing it's bringing me to to a sense of what is the problem and
how should we solve it and if you don't really know what the problem is at least having the right tools and the right analyses to try to discover it because once again when you're doing consulting that's exactly what you do clients will call you they will say we don't know what is a problem but it impacts or cost you would just map the whole thing and see how can we actually create some value creation through our different processes that's what you do Consulting was the best thing that happened to me in my life personally and
I encourage everyone to start the career with Consulting but I'm biased though please don't don't pick every word for it Alex you started off with accounting you said and then you went into Consulting how did that transition take place oh my God it's just because my mother we were immigrant family from Montreal they were like if you go into accounting you will be set and you will have Financial Security but when I ended up doing it I just hated it it's not about oh yeah I'm going to continue that R and I'm going to make
money no I just hated it however what is great is that in Big Forest you have all the practice and you have the Consulting practice so that's how I got to know about Consulting so without doing accounting I probably just wouldn't know what Consulting was in ter transition it was really simple and what you realize is that accounting if I never done it because I didn't like it it still teaches you language which is balance sheets financial statements and that thing is super valuable in the business World regardless of what you end up doing and
I think that this transition is really helpful as well how did you transition from deoe what was that Journey like oh my God first and foremost I never thought I could work at McKenzie to be fully transparent I'm not saying I was bad at school but I never thought that was something I would do or even be the right profile for but then one of the recruiter saw what I was doing at the and saw also what I was doing at my nonprofit the black WF Club she sent me a message on LinkedIn and she
said hey would you like to work at McKenzie and go into the process which is crazy and I was like yes of course I did the whole process as a whole but to make it happen I had to have somebody that actually believ that I could do it because it wasn't even my radar that's how I basically got the opportunity through the thousand rounds of case studies and those kind of thing with the different partners I was able to do it with a lot of chance yeah I took the opportunity wow so you mentioned the
word courage and I'm going off script here a little bit I'm just very interested in hearing all the details you talked about courage someone helping you to see the possibilities I'm wondering have there been instances in your life where you had to give yourself a sense of courage and if you did how did you do that yeah once again I don't want to go too deep into that I'm Christian I I've been raised in a family where faith is super important so my courage was never really relying on who I was or my capabilities my
courage was based on my faith and knowing that you know what it's G to be fine if it's not I'll go back to my mother's basement and I'll grab a bus card and just try to figure out the rest of my life I think that's one the second part that I would say and I think this is a really relevant exercise for anyone that would love to take a risk whether it's a career or corporate job it's just trying to understand what are the key pillars for you that makes you feel safe in the midst
of making a big change in your life and for me it was three things I think the first one was oh I can live in the basement of my mother the second one was I felt like I had the strong enough Network to bounce back three is that I had the the right foundation from a skill perspective I spent maybe two years and a half or three years at at the L I felt I've learned something that was quite young at the time I hope I'm still young I thought that I had enough skill to
actually go back and not start from scratch these were the three really key pillar of oh okay I feel safe enough to do it faith and those kind of foundation faith is a huge part that's something I really resonate with because faith is also a huge part when I transition from corporate to an entrepreneurial role and that leads to my next question for you Alex what are some key learnings and key takeaways you've en whil transitioning from a corporate role in McKenzie and deoe to now an entrepreneurial role founding your consulting firm and the renowned
organization the black wealth Club yeah I think the most beautiful thing about corporations is that there is a Playbook and you learn how to do things this is how you interact with people this is how you communicate this is the rigor that you need in your analysis if you if you're spending a little bit of time there you leave those spaces with a token that I really believe that is extremely transferable for entrepreneurship and also helps you to build confidence in what you are able to do we went to the same thing you were also
in a big consulting firm we work together actually at that firm and he went to iidm and did so many incredible things but the reality is that when you're were 22 and your client is TD Bank or RBC and you go there and you give advice and you actually do some analysis you're like ah you know what if I'm able to do that I'm really able to start this thing or start that Boutique or start that entrepreneurship Venture I think that helps you to build confidence because you have a to kid you're being taught by
incredible people I I think that would be the the best advice I could give to somebody that is really young and trying to figure out what is next what is a big dream I regardless of the dream of that person I would say build the right foundation somewhere that you can really learn tangible things that teaches you mental Frameworks on how to solve things and how to bring value to people around you I think that's important and the second that I would say that is really interesting between those kind of transition is understanding that at
the end of the day it's just about people all the time what is great with those kind of firms that teaches you to deal with people for the first time you might meet people that are from different culture because University you had your own friends and you never spoke to anyone else or the same age or different ages and different kind of different values being able to be adaptable and understanding of the people around you enables you as an entrepreneur to really be great because at the end of the day entrepreneurship is just building relationship
with people and building trust it's trusting that you have the best cup in the world for the price that it is or trusting that Consulting solution that you will provide them is valuable that trust need to be built through talking with different people through understanding people and just trying to be great at this and so if you were to summarize three key skills that enabled you to reach the success you have today what would they be how can others also practice to gain the same skills the first one would be emotional intelligence the second one
would be sense of urgency and three would be rigor if I go back to my first answer which is emotional intelligence once again you're dealing with people all the time that's it you need to understand people more importantly you need to understand yourself because entrepreneurship gets easier when you understand why you're doing what you're doing that it's not just because you go on Instagram and you scroll you're like oh yeah I'm going to become an entrepreneur right it's trying to get a sense why you want to do something it's like super important that's one two
it was really about kind of sense of urgency what you realize is that people have busy lives if you receive an email trying to answer as fast as you can if there's analysis try to do it as good as you can and as fast as you can as because once again you control your output but you never control the outcome so you better really care about your output and really feel urgent about it then at some point can scale yourself and think that matters a bit less from a you perspective as an entrepreneur you can
delegate it without a doubt but at the beginning when everything that's on your shoulder everything matters and everything should be taken care the third one in term of rigor you need to really care you better give your all and really put your thoughts and really go within details when you do a document you're formatting not having two different fonts and then making with people's name and just being really rigorous in the way that you do things really set you apart that's the hard part between my second kind of skill and the third one is certain
of urgency and rigor often do not go together because set of urgency means that you're GNA go fast rigor means that you will take your time but once you find that right balance based on the different occasion that's where success comes in because you realize that for this one oh this is a level of rigor that is required and this one is this level of rigor and you get your times throughout the different kind of outputs or vbls that you have in your hands so that would be myig only three skills emotional intelligence sense of
urgency and rigor emotional intelligence that's an interesting one do you think people are born with emotional intelligence or maybe parts of it is nature and then parts of it is nurture I wonder what can help someone to nurture those skills maybe they're born with emotional intelligence already but how can they be even more emotional intelligent I truly believe that three things one read about it I got got into emotional intelligence by reading Daniel Goldman who is the guy that actually created that term and then he created a framework around emotional intelligence which is understanding how
somebody feels understanding how you can make people feel something and turn self Awareness on our own kind of emotional state that was really interesting the second thing is just get out your house and just go outside meet people in different ways in ways that makes you comfortable I'm not telling you to go to Every bar of the city if you don't if you're ENT and you don't like to talk to people go to a book club you will find other INF people and it will feel safe because maybe that's a space where you feel like
there is a context and how you feel relevant in that context then it enables you to actually talk with people so I think that having those kind of experiences and making sure that you are in those experiences but also with different kind of people really help you and I would say that the third thing about your statement do you have it do you develop it I think you're fully right obviously there is a natural aspect of it but you still need to work because the thing with emotions is that and we're seeing it now with
mental health and and all that is that it's a really personal subject we all have emotions but maybe you don't really understand them and we're all going to that kind of J in a sense ow it to ourselves to really work on understanding how we feel how other people feel and just create a deeper connection with the people around you as well in my opinion I think it's really important yeah that's a really key skill to master um a lot of time Alex you know what's interesting is I find the emotional intelligence that we practice
in the corporate world is a little bit different compared to the entrepreneurial world I guess there's some similarities if we're for example working with other businesses from our own business but oftentimes I find it's a different set of uh communication skills your ability to also sense things from other people that perhaps we don't even share the same upbringing or or experiences with I find that has been a challenge even for me is sometimes when I talk to people from very different backgrounds I'm already biased because I come from a set background and I use the
same jargons that people in the corporate world use or we talk a similar way we do things in a similar way but then you realize when you work with the wide public the world with so many different people it's a little bit different how did you overcome it how did you learn how to do that on your side well that I wanted to talk about this because I haven't overcomed it yet and want to hear from you how do you do it yeah and that's an interesting thing the way that I separate both from a
corporate standpoint entrepreneurship standpoint is that in corporations there is once again a guide book on how people talk if I work at McKenzie I see synergies all the time I will say value creation I will say let's problem solve and all those kind of words so there's that kind of Playbook that becomes culture I think that sometime we confuse culture with connecting emotionally with the people because the culture is built and connecting with emotionally with someone is not really something built it's something that you need to redo every day I think this is where like
my advice comes in it's really about starting from always a blank page and to not assume anything about anyone at any given time I think that not only it's great because it makes you more open to actually meet people for who they are to people feel more valued because you are not saying oh yeah I'm selling those threee things when you do things like this it just doesn't work so it enables you to also make sure that other person feel value and the third thing is just being a better listener the more you listen and
the less you talk the more you get to know the people in front of you that is the last part of my advice because to do that you need to be one open-minded to be openminded you need to start with a blank page when you start with a blank page to feel it you need to actually listen that's the way that I would frame it I love that being authentic and putting other people first so important love those things always awesome now let's dive into the black wealth Club Alex tell us what inspired you to
found the organization and what's the drive behind it and the mission forward yes first and foremost this is an organization that we built four years ago the objective is to recruit the next Acro descendant leaders of Canada together in the group and create the right program the right mentorship to make sure that they accelerate their careers or their entrepreneurship Ambitions that was really the goal from they W the tribe that came from this was that one I think there is power into building a community with your peers but what for us was even more important
is that we should bring other people from other backgrounds in there as well we have mentors from any countries we have sponsors from any backgrounds we don't really care about that we wanted to create that kind of connection of our community toward other kind of communities because the reality is that even if I had all the black people in my Association we are 5% of the country we're 30 million so that's two million people I would be missing out on 38 million of that 40 million it's so important to build Bridges between different communities I
think that is till this day something that is really impactful in the way that we actually work that has to be one of the main Force our driving force to really build Bridges then what happens next is just incredible because people have opportunities for themselves then you create friendship then you create access networks and then you have the chance to meet brilliant people doing this I don't think there's something that a with it now obviously I'm a bit less involved I'm Vice chairman now but this is still the best thing that ever happened to me
ever I'm super grateful honestly it's really a blast I could see that when you talk about the mission and what you've built I can see the happiness on your face thank you oh my God yeah smelling is great yeah and it radiates my day so thank you for sharing now my next question how can young Professionals in Canada start Building Wealth early in their careers what long-term habits should they develop yeah at first it needs to be super simple if you open a a registered account you find an ETF that you like that may make
the S&P 500 or NASDAQ or whatever you believe in you just put a little bit of money there that's the first thing you do it constantly you automate it even if it's $50 if it's 100 just do something you need to build the muscle it's more about the habit of doing it than the result of doing it at the beginning once you go into the corporate world every potential opportunities that your organization is giving you from a benefit perspective you maximize them that thing where they match the money that you want to put in for
retirement you max out on it they give you a bonus they ask you do you want to put the bonus on your paycheck or in your retirement saving account put it in the retirement saving account that's the think that it's really helpful because if let's say per year you put 5,000 of your own money for your retirement and then your company is matching that you're at 10,000 and it's free money literally then you have tax deduction you need to really maximize the benefits of your corporate job in my opinion lastly I think is just the
biggest mistake that people make early on is you start as an analyst and I will just say some random numbers I don't know if they're accurate or not but let's see you make 70k a year your lifestyle costs you 60k a year so you save 10,000 the next year you become a consultant consult the P your 100 career if your lifestyle goes up and you're not really Building Wealth anymore you're just spending so the best advice that I could tell you is to understand how much you actually need to live and have fun as well
we only have that much time on Earth you should still have fun and sometime treat yourself to a great restaurant but how much does it cost to actually live no matter how much money is thrown at you you take the money but you don't use it for your lifestyle and you keep it at it if you can do that I can assure you that wealth will come but if for example you're making 7K a year and then you make a 100 and then you decide to buy yourself a a new car you have a new
car but you don't have more sings so you might even go backward in term of your wealth strategy because before you were actually saving more money it's just boring slow kind of dedication toward wealth and then at some point when you feel more comfortable you can do whatever you want now you can put more money in your investment account you can buy yourself a bit of real estate you have a friend that is doing something interesting and you want to enoy invest then you can become creative but at first it's really about building a foundation
and not succumbing to what around you okay what is your perspective and outlook on wealth for me wealth is great because the optionality being wealthy for me is just having option option can be because of money sometime it can be because of networks something can be because of the set of skills that you're doing all of this for me it's what wealth is obviously the most important part which is health because if you don't have health everything else sucks but I would really say that living a life of options is having a life full of
wealth tomorrow you're like oh I want to build this you try it doesn't work go work somewhere else and you build this you have this project you can just move from one thing to another you're tired all of a sudden you take like two weeks off just because you want to all this little things this is for me incredible it's not based on a big number you don't need to be a millionaire to do that you just need maybe to plan a little bit more financially maybe studying something that give you optionality those things are
in my opinion really important is really the basis of Building Wealth for your own self I love that while you were just talking I thought about this there's a reason why Health rhymes with wealth Health come first before wealth for me personally probably the same for you Alex yes yes so important yeah I'm thinking Health how do you be healthy have fun play yes you need to play you need some play in your life literally honestly even for myself I don't take anything for granted so I'm good now and I hope it will stay but
I'm in a point of my life where I take care of my health because if not works become overwhelming and everything become harder if I don't have any energy anymore because I don't take care of myself I don't have the same drive I don't even want to do what I'm doing every day for me it's not just about oh yeah I want to look great it's really about oh this is how I can function at a higher level and also be present for people around me when I go back home after a long day of
work I still can go and have dinner with my mom because I still have energy because I'm healthy and I run in the morning and I feel great I don't want to be that kind of person that gives all of his energy on work and cannot beate it to people around me that matters as much to be able to be prosecute you need to be super healthy and be at the top of your game I love it and I think the term work life balance should actually be changed to work life integrate I didn't come
up with this I stole it from a YouTube video I saw the wonderful lady that talked about this at deoe then I was thinking having fun also is having a fun mindset when I think about wealth I'm thinking it's not really a task or obligation it's more like the game Monopoly in real life you get to really have fun with it Without Really Alex you said something earlier you said it's not necessarily all about the result but it's about building those muscles yes I think having fun helps you to build those muscles even better 100%
then if you get lucky in life fun and work intertwin for example psycho bunny were the main apparel for tennis Canada tournament that is happening next week early August to Mid August in Toronto in Montreal I'm lucky enough to go to the game now I'm watching a game but it's also a partnership that we worked on from the past year work become play play become work when those kind of thing happens for me it's really beautiful just our relationship we work together now we're doing this that's all and intertwining in some way I think that's
really the best outcome of all of this I love it I love it if individuals are struggling to find fun or passion I'm thinking maybe an Outlook a lens that they could employ could be lifelong learning learning is fun thinking about something new is fun challenging yourself sometimes is fun did the grows yesterday in Vancouver and oh my goodness it was hard for sure for sure but that was fun because I overcame my challenge at the top you're like I I didn't think I could do this but because I gave it a shot now I'm
at the top and I overcame my limits and that's fun exactly that's one the thing that people need to understand is that fun doesn't always have to be easy often for example the weekends where I'm like oh I'm not going to do anything and I don't know play video games that's a bad example or I'll just watch movies the whole day these are the weekend that I come out of it where I'm the most tired even the way that you rest can be active maybe it's taking a walk to go to a coffee shop it's
not much more hard than watching the movie but it's still a step that you need to take outside those things are the one that actually really fulfills you doing what you did is exactly this yes it's fun but it's not that easy fun but these are the most rewarding moment where today you're like oh my God was so fun now I know a little bit more about myself which is incredible now you know that hey this is nothing tomorrow we go somewhere else just go up gonna be like oh I did this before I know
how to do it I'm doing it again I think these are the little gifts of Life literally we need to maximize you talked about earlier that we can't control the result the outcome but we our output it's almost like you've got to rest in style find out what's the best output yes 100% you need to figure out because that's the only thing that you control the fun thing is that when you know that you actually did the best that you could on their output the outcome do not matter if you had the information that you
had at the current time and you make the most out of it and it didn't work out it's good because you at least gave yourself the chance to actually be accomplished in that specific situation I think it's super important and sadly people focus more on the outcome which is super weird but I get it but we don't know to who you were sending that email to maybe that person is sick that day and then reads your email it's like nah there's so many things that could happen or that person kid is sick you're the L
of their worries all of this you cannot control it regardless yeah of your effort but at least I know what I did I'm really happy about it and that's how I'm I'm trying to live my life when we're talking about wealth as in building wealth let's just put a dollar sign here let's talking about this kind of wealth how does wealth play a role in building an abundant and meaningful life to you when it comes to a dollar sign yeah like my response going to suck again but it's optionality if one day I don't know
let's say I live in Toronto and I'm tired of my condo downtown then I would love to have enough money to go to mosia or some other place and just live there in the cottage for a month of to just so that I can re-energize myself and just go back to the city afterward it's just always about option the great thing is that when you actually have the money for it you start having way more options and way more different ways of spending your time and place deciding which places you want to spend your time
in I think that's the best thing about it once again I think that it also allows you to be a lifelong learner because the reality is that not everybody has the opportunity to just take your time to read a book some people have literally two jobs and work all the time they kids the more and more you have time and a little bit more money you can actually take the time to learn more there's even that interview that I was watching about Bill Gates and you probably saw it as well will go on the plane
with 20 books he would go on reading weeks alone in his Cottage somewhere he would just take his plane go somewhere with 50 books arrive there alone read the whole thing every books every day that's the only thing he would do when Obama wrote his first memor he went to Hawaii alone Dr the whole thing left Michelle back home at Chicago and the guy was just writing but all those different things which is being able to make the time to to have options in the way the things that you want to do is incredible money
it's it's truly a resour that allows you to to do that okay here's my last question for you it's a really fun question if you were to give wealth advice to your 18-year-old self aspiring to become a multi-millionaire by the age 30 what what advice would you give to him I would say try to understand what the future is going to be make sure to build the right skill to be the most relevant as you can based on what is going on for the next 22 years or 20 years or 10 years or whatsoever that
would be my take I think that at 18 you and I we probably knew that technology was like a big deal being a computer science person is actually super valid if you have done that in the past and actually decided to go work at Google and becoming the best computer science guy you're 25 26 you're making like 2 year you have all your stock options I know that now it's a bit different because of Co and everything that happened but all I'm saying is that understanding where the future is going and understanding the skills that's
going to be relevant in that world is I think the most helpful skill that or I would say not skill but intuition that you can have to actually make it to that dollar amount in a quotequote short period of time once we all know life did not work this way but I think that this is really something important to have a sense or a muscle on do you have any specific tools or strategies that you would tell yourself to employ when you're 18 in order to become a millionaire when you're 30 yeah first and foremost
is talk to different kind of people the only mistake that I've done in University in my opinion is the fact that I only spoke to other people that were about to go in accounting obviously I had my friends from before University like start talking to people in engineering start talking to that guy that is doing a bachel in photography talk with everyone that you think that are interesting build that kind of broad networks that would be one two obviously don't spend money on stupid things we all know that but hey it's something I think that
you need to remember the third thing is really once again building the right skills get your internships or corporations where you want to work if it's not true school then cool trying to start something on your own but once again by having intuition about what the future is and understanding what is the kind of product that will be relevant in the next 10 or 15 years I think this is something that you should really keep in mind and for it's just like financial literacy as a whole the wealth building it's a slow and steady work
and obviously you know you can go into entrepreneurship and it works out well for you and whatnot but there's a lot of people that might not go into entrepreneurship or go in the most lucrative jobs but they have the habits of just saving money at the end of their lives they're the one that often ended up being super wealthy because they were disciplined and really squared on their wealth building strategy I love that and earlier we talked about having wealth gives you more optionality and what I heard was seeing a broader world then we just
talked about talking to people that are outside of our Specialties that's helping us to broaden our perspective I think that actually matches when you have a broader perspective you automatically can see a broad world and agreed with the broader world for example lately I've been talking to a lot of leaders outside of the education industry developers and um a lot of people in the finance industry as well and what I've realized is that they've broaden my perspective and thus my world has broadened I see that wow there's actually so many unique strategies so many ways
that you can have a more Abundant Life versus before I thought this was the only way you got to do this ABC but everyone has a different way it's so good to have that take into consideration of what works I fully agree I fully agree with everything that you're saying the reality is that to know about the future you need to talk to a lot of people that's the only way in that you need to talk to that guy that looks a bit weird in the back of your class but maybe he's the guy who
knows all about machine learning and people were not even talking about this and is hey by the way this is what's coming up you never know but this is how you make it happen it's by talking and and engaging with different kind of folks because I think you said it super well you need to broaden your horizon even when you have a clear plan don't hesitate to just look left look around like when you drive a car yes you always want to go forward but sometime you need to look back to know that you're going
to the right directions now you need to do your angles and all that this is the same thing with us yes you can become a partner at this firm but don't hesitate to look left and do oh okay that's interesting and you continue your path and that somebody like oh this is it this is where it's going so always being open minded It's going to bring you to so many different places I love that Alex thank you so much for being on the show today it's been so much fun and always a pleasure to talk
to you thank you for your invitation really appreciate
