AFTER ATTENDING UNIVERSITY in Sherbrooke, Nathalie Gagnon briefly thought of making a career elsewhere. But the Saguenay native never forgot her roots, was drawn back to her hometown of La Baie, where she’s remained for the past decade.
Gagnon is now director of marketing and communication at DéryTelecom, a telecommunications company specialized in rural services. Since 2016, she has been part of the quartet of co-owners, along with longtime Déry employees Éric Banville, Cédric Tardif and Bryan Godbout. In a region that has long been defined by its company towns and large industrial conglomerates that have built and supported cities, DéryTelecom, particularly in La Baie where they are the largest employer, has adapted the company town concept to the modern era. They have no plans to leave. “The idea of contributing to economic development in the regions of Quebec, keeping services alive and creating jobs, is very motivating for us.”
The company was established by Gilles Déry in 1954. “Gilles Déry was a TV salesman, and he saw that sales of TVs weren’t as high in the mountains, because reception wasn’t as good. He went to the United States and saw that some companies had solved that problem with cable, so he got into the cable business. At the beginning, it was to help sales of his TVs, but over time it became the motor of his business.”
Gagnon and the other co-owners, Cédric Tardif, Éric Banville and Bryan Godbout, all longtime Déry employees, acquired the company in April 2016. “Our arrival [as owners] corresponds with an expansion phase in the company,” says Gagnon. “At the time, the situation within the industry meant that a lot of smaller telecommunications companies had to expand or sell, and [Déry] chose to expand. For us, ending up as co-owners was the continuation of a long adventure.”
(The DéryTelecom leadership team at the company's La Baie headquarters: co-owner and IT director Cédric Tardif (left), co-owner and director of communications and marketing Nathalie Gagnon and co-owner and general director Bryan Godbout. Absent: Éric Banville, co-owner and director of engineering and project management.)
Founder Gilles Déry established the company in Portneuf, outside of Québec City, and expanded it initially to La Baie, in Saguenay, and to Baie-Saint-Paul. in the Charlevoix region. Now, the company provides phone, cable and internet service to more than 200 rural communities, spread across vast stretches of the province.
“If they wanted to sell, we’d be happy to go into an urban market, but that’s not what we do.” – Bryan Godbout
“We are the rural specialists,” says Godbout, co-owner and director general. “We don’t compete with Cogeco or Vidéotron because we don’t have the same markets. If they wanted to sell, we’d be happy to go into an urban market, but that’s not what we do.”
“The average population of the villages we serve is around 600,” Gagnon adds. “Other companies don’t always go into those communities. Going into those communities requires more investment— more buildings and more infrastructure. But we have no choice, particularly if we want to stay close to people in rural communities.”
Gagnon and Godbout clearly enjoy their work. “What I love about working in small communities is that when we start a new project and try to involve the municipality and the community, everyone gets involved,” Gagnon says. “It’s not impersonal at all…it’s more than business.”
DéryTelecom owns its own network infrastructure. In many municipalities in Déry’s coverage areas, small, volunteer-run co-operatives assure the day-to-day service, with occasional help from headquarters. “We work with municipalities, co-ops and small distributors. In 30 villages, we work with local co-ops to keep service running,” Gagnon explains. “They pay a fee, we give them our expertise and access to our equipment, and when there are technical issues we send out our technicians.”
Godbout and Gagnon look at the map of Quebec and see nothing but opportunity. “There’s still a lot of unserved territory in Quebec,” says Godbout. “It’s really surprising! There are still a lot of homes where internet service is nonexistent or very slow.” According to a 2013 study by Quebec’s Centre facilitant la recherche et l’innovation dans les organisations, à l’aide des technologies de l’information et de la communication (CEFRIO), a think tank that tracks developments in Quebec’s digital economy, more than 1 in 5 Quebec homes still lacked internet access.
“We hire local people, we support the local hockey team and we contribute when it’s time to renovate the arena” – Nathalie Gagnon
Godbout and Gagnon dream of helping to connect the province. The company regularly receives expansion requests from across the province, and the co-owners say they have a full schedule of expansion work for the next two years and a lengthy waiting list. “We’re relatively young and dynamic, but we have our work cut out for us for the next couple of years!” says Godbout.
Community connections
The company invests in poles, and also in people. They are the region’s largest employer, with around 400 jobs. “We hire local people, we support the local hockey team and we contribute when it’s time to renovate the arena,” says Gagnon. “We have a great sense of team spirit. We have several families where both parents work for us, and we even have a gar-Déry [play on the word garderie, which means daycare] for our employees who have small children.”
The connection that Déry has with local communities is also evident in their offer of services, which goes beyond the CRTC minimum in some areas. For example, even though they aren’t obligated to support community cable stations, they do so wherever possible. “Overtime we acquire a new territory where there is already a community station, we keep it going with money and equipment. In rural areas, you really see the importance of community cable…a journalist from Quebec City isn’t going to come out to cover an event in Portneuf or Baie-Saint-Paul. Almost all of our community cable stations have a local news broadcast at least once or twice a week; they broadcast town council meetings…and Mass! Our viewers who are elderly or ill or who can’t leave the house for whatever reason, Mass is an important part of the week for many of them, and they get to see Mass without leaving home.”
Poles…and paperwork
According to Godbout, the best thing that governments can do to support rural cable companies like his own is to keep listening. “The paperwork that we need to fill out even to install one new pole is complicated,” he says. “I’m not one of those people who thinks the sole purpose of regulations is to make our lives more complicated, but [the regulation is] becoming more and more complicated, and it’s hard for smaller companies to follow.”
“The challenge for us is to teach all of this to our staff, so they can explain it to our clients,” adds Gagnon. “We don’t have quite the same situation as the big players, and that is taken into account to some extent, but I hope [the CRTC and the province] will keep listening to smaller providers.”
Looking forward
For the moment, DéryTelecom is still focused on expansion. “We’re growing faster than the big players, at a rate of more than 10% a year,” says Godbout. “We’re growing through acquisition and through extensions into new territory…we just acquired the territory of the Magdalen Islands [a relatively isolated archipelago in far northeastern Québec with the province’s lowest rate of internet penetration], so that will keep us busy for a while. No region is quite the same as any other.”
Despite their rapid growth, there are no plans to move headquarters out of La Baie. “We don’t want to forget where we come from,” says Gagnon. “As an employer, we want to keep contributing to the life of our region and giving young people a reason to stay. It’s in our hearts.”
Story written and translated by Ruby Pratka.
