All in the family: alumnus Thomas Moncion has business in his blood

Posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2017

Thomas Moncion is the real king of Queens.

The enterprising 2009 Small and Medium Business Enterprise grad already owns two Dairy Queens.

Call it home field advantage. Moncion is a fourth-generation entrepreneur in Pembroke and the surrounding area.

“My family was one of the last few privately owned grocery store owners in Canada,” he explains.
“It started out with my great grandfather’s general store up in Cochrane, Ontario. He used to sell hay, change horseshoes, and whatnot. My grandfather Omer Moncion came to Pembroke to learn to speak English, and he started a little general store as well – mainly selling produce. He eventually expanded into building his own grocery store.”

Moncion’s father and uncles expanded the business even further; by the end of their careers, the family owned three grocery stores in the area. In 2012, the young Moncion entrepreneur decided to find his own food-business specialty; today, he is the proud owner of two Dairy Queens in Pembroke and nearby Petawawa, Ontario.

Upon graduating from the Algonquin College, Moncion worked as a crane operator for a couple of years. But he just couldn’t resist the family call.

“Business was always in my blood,” he says. “It’s something I knew that I wanted to do from a very young age, and I did have a lot of opportunity with my family to learn the business side – especially retail. Having the support of my family to back me up made my decision a lot easier to become an entrepreneur.”

The College’s program helped Moncion build on his family’s expertise and sparked new ideas.

“The teachers were amazing,” he recalls. “The resources were amazing and taught me to do business more efficiently… old school mixed in with new school.”

Moncion has already proved ambitious. His Petawawa Dairy Queen was the biggest Dairy Queen in Canada when we built it back in 2014 – and still ranks in the Top 5.

He credits his post-secondary program with also honing his interpersonal skills. “You know a lot of it had to do with people skills,” he says. “I learned a lot from the teachers about interacting with customers – really finding out what customers need. It’s more than just a numbers game.

“When you’re running a business, you’re dealing with people every day – regardless if (whether) it’s your customers, or your suppliers, or your staff. So, you definitely need to be a very big people person to be in business today. That’s what I definitely learned from Algonquin College.”

One key piece of advice he received in the classroom stays with him: “No matter what you do with your career, make sure you’re having fun doing it,” he recalls. “If you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life and that’s the goal for everybody. I was fortunate enough to take that and really apply it to what I do today.”

These days, it’s Moncion playing the role of teacher. “The goal of a manager, or an owner, is to get 100 per cent of the person’s ability out of every shift,” he says. “The biggest challenge to running a franchise is trying to teach people the same way I was taught through Algonquin College to do a job.

“We were always looking forward to the lectures and what they were teaching that day. So, I really try to bring that into what I do every day, and make it very interesting for the staff and keep a very positive attitude at the stores.”

His College program felt like a family and now Moncion tries to bring that spirit into his business. He enjoys watching new staff evolve into supervisors. “We really try to model our staff after the teachers at Algonquin College – people that are driven, and they care about their job,” he adds. “Some of our staff start at 14 years old and stay with us right until they go to college or university.”

Moncion has one piece of advice for current graduates – and especially aspiring business owners: “Never give up. Business is a lot of work. It’s an ever-changing environment, so if you’re able to adapt and keep up with the times, and truly never give up on what you believe in, you will be successful. I know from every single class I went to that never give up was definitely a motto of Algonquin College and the teachers that we had. And that’s something that I use every day running a business.”

The alumnus gives back to the College through donations and supporting Pembroke campus golf tournaments, and other college events.

Moncion speaks like he was born with an entrepreneurial spirit (and it’s a safe bet to assume that he was.) “It doesn’t necessarily matter what you’re selling – you could be selling hammers or lumber or ice cream – the basics of the business is all the same,” he explains. “My family was in retail with groceries; I’m in retail with ice cream. It was just something I felt like I needed to do and was good at.”

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