“We have some great schools here. We still have schools that are well-ranked globally but from personal experience and even in the business world, you speak to a lot of people, a lot of backgrounds educationally and so on and we’re doing pretty well. I’ve been to Concordia. I graduated from Concordia. I went to McGill also, same thing. Took a lot of different certifications here and there’s all kinds of certification bodies. They all have presence in Montreal.

Quality of school is great. Cost is affordable. I know, just from looking into the cost of some states and so on, actually even when I went to Concordia at that point in time, I had also applied at the London School of Economics and a few places and there’s no comparison. It’s affordable, the courses are great, the teachers generally, always have good and bad but talking generally, quality is excellent. Faculties in all of the major universities of the two that I went to are great and I’ve heard similar stories from those who went to UQAM, HEC, and so on. I have to assume it’s the same there but my experience has been excellent. I’m a perpetual student. I just went back again for something else.”

“Probably my first job, I was 12 and then 13, 14, I worked every single year, sometimes multiple jobs until I was, today, actually til now. But yeah, I started my own thing and my own place, 18 on, school and working hard. That’s how you get where you want to go. But you know, it’s not difficult to find a job. You meet a lot of people. Montreal, it is a big city. Some people say it’s a small city but you know, a couple million on the island but when you’re getting off island, you’re including not necessarily Montreal but when you’re including the greater Montreal area and Laval, you’re getting up into four and five million people.

It’s not a small city. But in some ways, it feels like it but in a good sense of the word. Meaning, you run into the same people. There’s a business community that they do interact with each other, especially each in the different industries. The service industry, it seems like everybody knows each other and yeah, even yourself, we met and 20 years later, we still speak, and it’s the same thing. I find it’s always a challenge to make good friends. It doesn’t matter what city you’re in but Montreal is really great. People are warm and when you take the time to meet people and get to know them, they last a lifetime.”

“I travel a lot, sometimes more often than I would like. I spend a lot of time in different cities, different countries, I just got back again, and a lot of cities have a lot of charm or they have a few things that are really interesting let’s say from a tourist perspective, even from let’s say speaking to locals, speaking to coworkers and colleagues and things like that and they give you an idea of how things are but it doesn’t matter where I go, I always want to come back here.

People ask me, even when we open another office, well why don’t you go stay there for awhile, develop the business, spend several months or a year and then come back to Montreal? Which it doesn’t matter how often I go away, I’m always looking forward to coming back. Maybe not when it’s minus 40 on that particular day but generally.”

“I was a Montrealer. Montrealer forever. And yes, there is some debate and issues and there still is around language and so on but what I find, and it’s not even so much just a shift, it’s almost like a lot of the up-and-coming, the new, younger generation and so on, they don’t have the same let’s say issues or let’s say firsthand.

Everybody wants a better life so everybody’s looking for the next step, higher salary, a better company, something to put aside for their future, prospects, and Montreal has that. We’ve always had that. We have some giant companies here and yes, we did lose a few headquarters in the past to Toronto but other companies, we have our headquarters here and we’re not the only ones. There’s a future here for people for sure and I find it looks brighter and brighter.”

“The first thing is it’s not such a bad environment and even in the last two decades for small businesses. Just like cost of living is low here, there’s a lot of relatively affordable office space. We’re also dealing with a lot of other countries including French-speaking countries, not predominantly, but we do, all of our software is multi-language and so on so where we’re located doesn’t really matter, especially for us.

We actually have a lot of presence in Latin America and parts of Europe. We have English, French, and Spanish support and no matter what city we’re in, we’re gonna need trilingual and so on. So yes, we’re opening offices in Latin America and so on but they’re all integrated, it’s still one company. It’s actually kind of an advantage here to have people with multilingual skills.”

“I joined the company 14 years ago. It started small. It was this kind of missing space between giant companies and small companies to connect their systems, connecting to the Costcos and the Walmarts and all of that. If you wanted to be a supplier to these companies, even as a small business, even servicing one or two locations, you had to connect electronically to them. Small companies didn’t want to invest so companies like ours came into play. And over the years, when you’re already dealing in their supply chain, you’re handling purchase orders, invoices, and all of these things for them. It’s just a natural kind of evolution into inventory management, legal compliance, and a lot of the other areas where they interact with IT.”

“There’s a lot of businesses here, a lot of small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and some giants also. The CGIs of the world and so on. A lot of people don’t realize that, I mean, we’ve had a lot of tech companies here for many years. We were working on aerospace industry here for a long time. That brought a lot of tech companies, so there’s definitely space for it. Universities here, great programs, computer science, software engineering, people coming from all over the world for McGill University and maybe not as well known but definitely in the business area, Concordia as well, John Molson School of Business in UQAM.”

“I’m Anthony Nelson. I’m the president and co-owner of Meade Willis. It’s a 24-year-old softwares and service company. Basically, we work B2B area, supply chain, software. Basically, we’re creating software to meet all the different needs of small, medium, huge companies all over the world and we’re a Montreal company. We have offices here, Latin America, one in Peru, employees in Costa Rica, an office in Ukraine, and we’re expanding, Columbia soon, and yeah, we’re going from there.”