Cons Family Holdings

We are operators first. The family has been running businesses in Montreal since 1974, and we have only ever made money one way: by owning a small number of operating companies, learning them deeply, and holding them long enough that compounding becomes the dominant variable. Allocation matters, but allocation is what you do with the cash flow an operating business throws off. It is not the thing itself.

We hold longer than the market expects us to, because the market is, on the whole, impatient. Public companies are rented out to shareholders on quarterly leases. Private equity funds have ten-year clocks. We have no clock. Our horizon is generational, which means we can absorb a bad year, a bad cycle, sometimes a bad decade, without selling a business that should not be sold. The advantage is structural, not strategic.

Generational transition is the hardest problem in a family enterprise, and we treat it as a fifteen-year project, not a board meeting. The second generation began entering the operating businesses in 2001 and did not take primary responsibility until 2014. The third generation is entering now, in 2025, and will not be expected to lead for another decade. We believe authority follows competence, and competence follows time spent on the floor of an actual business. There are no shortcuts here.

We partner with outside capital selectively, and only on terms that suit a permanent holder. We are not a fund. We have no LPs. We are not optimizing for a mark, an IRR, or a fundraising cycle. What we look for in a capital partner is straightforward: an operator we want to back, a business we can understand without a model, a structure that does not force us to sell, and a counterparty who measures the relationship in decades. We have walked away from more deals than we have done. We expect this to continue.

We do not talk publicly about what we do, and we are aware that publishing anything at all is a departure. We have made it because the people we want to work with — operators, founders, family principals, a small number of advisors — increasingly look for some signal that we exist before they agree to a first conversation. This page is that signal. It is not a pitch, and it is not the beginning of a relationship. It is, at most, a confirmation of one already in progress.

If you are reading this, someone gave you the link.

— The Cons Family · Montreal, 2026