The Pontiac Chamber of Commerce has appointed a new president, Sébastien Bonnerot, a realtor based in Fort-Coulonge. The appointment was formalized at a Nov. 21 meeting of the organization.

“I’m just very excited. To be honest, I’ve never thought I would be doing this,” said Bonnerot in an interview with THE EQUITY.

Bonnerot is originally from Ottawa, and moved to Fort-Coulonge in 2017 with his wife and three children. “We wanted to get out of the city, and this was three years before COVID-19. We just had the urge to get out,” said Bonnerot.

Bonnerot started his professional life in the disability management industry from 2000 to 2010 after which he started a career in real estate in Gatineau. When he moved to the Pontiac in 2017, he expected he would continue doing businesses in the city and just live here, however those expectations evolved.

“I started really working in the Pontiac maybe two years after we moved. I initially thought there would not be enough business. But then I started selling one house, two houses, three houses and things started picking up really nicely over here. If it means traveling less, I’ll do it and it became really fun to sell different things like waterfront which I was not used to or smaller homes in the village.”

Though he splits his businesses between the city and the Pontiac, he’s gotten more involved in the region as the real estate market shifted during the floods and then covid.

He began getting involved in Pontiac Chamber of Commerce and when the former president of the Chamber, Todd Hoffman, indicated he was stepping down from the position, after which Bonnerot volunteered to take the job.

Now that he’s president, Bonnerot pointed to three areas that he believes the Chamber needs to work on immediately.

The first objective he outlined was to increase the competitiveness of the local businesses by offering more opportunities locally, which in part means meeting the geographic challenge of coordinating the needs of such a spread out group of business owners.

“As opposed to Gainteau, where you can reach five other business people within a two kilometre radius, here you have to create networking events or training events that go from Bristol, the Municipality of Pontiac, all the way to Chapeau,” said Bonnerot. “Just physically to attend to everybody’s needs and attention as a Chamber of Commerce, to be competitive, you need to be able to address that and keep people motivated to participate, because the added value of Chamber of Commerce is networking.”

To go about this Bonnerot mentioned taking advantage of social networks, as well as organizations like SADC, which have already started a Shop le Pontiac campaign meant to showcase location businesses across the region.

“My second objective in the medium term is to achieve a higher level of communication with all other organizations and try to get them participating with us and funding and creating new events,” he said.

Bonnerot said he plans to model the Pontiac Chamber to the similar Chamber in the MRC Vallée-de-la-Gatineau by partnering with organizations like Hydro Quebec and Desjardins. He hopes through securing more partnerships the Pontiac Chamber can become self-sufficient.

Thirdly, in the longer term, Bonnerot said he hopes to double the membership of the Pontiac Chamber. “We are just under 100 businesses in the Pontiac who are members of the Chamber,” he explained. “We went very low during covid. Of course, we did not do any activities in person, so that hurt but I think we are post covid now and everybody’s motivated to get going. So what am I going to get to 200 members. That’s a very steep goal but, I’ve talked to the executive committee, everybody’s on board and I think we’ll be able to achieve that.”

He said the more members the Chamber has, the higher the impact of networking events will be and the greater influence the group will have

Bonnerot also listed what he thought were challenges faced by Pontiac businesses, which revoked around three “polls.”.

“You have three different polls where we lose business locally. And well the first one is Ontario. If you go west there’s Pembroke, the Home Depots, the Walmarts, the restaurants, etc. Then we lose probably 30 or 40 per cent of our business in the east, which is Gatineau. I mean everybody goes to Costco, people go to school in Gatineau, people have family in Gatineau, etc. And then the third poll is the web. So how many dollars are spent on the web, we all do it. There are some things you have no choice to do on the web, because they’re not available locally. I really want to get an opportunity to push local businesses because we’re losing a lot of local opportunities to these three polls.”

He also added that the website for the Chamber needs to be revamped, which they are in the process of doing, which would help streamline the membership process for businesses.

“I think we have all the tools to get there. It’s very aggressive objectives that we have, but we want the Chamber to go back to its original vision, if you will, which is to increase the economical growth and the Pontiac,” concluded Bonnerot. “We don’t just represent our members, we represent every business owner in the Pontiac. So if anybody needs advice, services, or contacts, we’re there for that.”

Bonnerot will serve as president for a two year term.

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