🌿 Our story
Alix didn't come out of a business plan. It came out of a snowstorm, and a question that hasn't really changed since: why is it so hard to find someone reliable to look after your home?
It took us close to twenty years to answer it, and we got it wrong along the way. We assumed at first that the problem was technological. It was economic. Here's what we worked out, in the order we worked it out.
2008 – 2009
At fifteen, Cédric and a friend knocked on doors around their neighbourhood after every big snowfall. Their fleet: their parents' snowblowers, on permanent loan. Every storm, they started over.
2017
Another storm. Short on time, his parents decided to hire someone to clear the driveway, just once. Finding the right person took them longer than shovelling it themselves would have.
So the problem was never the work. It was finding someone reliable, at the moment you need them.
2019
If the problem is finding someone, then you build the place where they're found. Alix became a technology project: a platform connecting homeowners with service providers, the whole process automated from end to end. Request, schedule, pay, follow along, without having to chase anyone.
Cédric laid the first foundations with his brother, then spent the following years assembling the pieces.
2024
The platform worked, but it ran into an imbalance no software corrects: what a homeowner is willing to pay and what the work actually costs the contractor don't meet. Connecting the two faster doesn't narrow the gap between them.
The only way to hold both ends was to stop being the middleman. We brought the service in house: our own crews, our own standards, our own costs. From there, the gap became something we could work on instead of absorb.
Late 2025
Once the service was in house, one thing became obvious: the cost isn't in the work, it's in the travel and the unplanned. A property looked after all season on a schedule set in advance doesn't cost the same as one visited once, urgently, across town.
Hence the annual package: a steady amount, a full season planned ahead, and a client who never has to ask again. That's what brought their budget and our cost back together.
Mid-2026
The client portal opens: the season's schedule, the work already done, documents and billing, all in one place and available at any time.
It's the part of the 2019 idea that was right. Applied this time to our own service, where we answer for what happens.
What's next
There are still plenty of homeowners around here starting over every season, looking for someone who shows up. As long as that's true, we have work to do.
The direction doesn't change: more properties looked after year-round, fewer things our clients have to think about.
🧭 What hasn't changed
That was the 2017 observation, and it still holds. It's why Alix doesn't sell one-off visits, but a relationship across the year: one point of contact, a schedule set in advance, and the same people who know your property.
👥 The people behind Alix
Bringing the service in house means exactly this: a local crew, trained, coming back season after season to the same properties. Not a rotating cast of subcontractors.
The one knocking on doors back in 2008. He meets the clients, walks the properties and sets the crew's standards.
He runs the days on site: who goes where, in what order, and how far the finishing goes before anyone leaves a property.
On the properties from spring through winter. The kind of face you end up recognizing from one visit to the next.
Out on the road with the crew, from one property to the next. He knows the access points, the slopes and the awkward corners of the grounds he looks after.
Mowing, garden beds, leaves: he works the full season, always on the same properties.
The gardening specialist. Garden beds, perennials and whatever needs to come back next year: that's her ground.
He prepares the quotes and builds the tools that turn a morning request into a real number, not a promise to call back.
The first point of contact when it's bigger than a house: buildings, condo boards and property managers.
The numbers, the billing and the health of the business. It's what makes holding the same standards season after season possible.
In Hull, Aylmer and Chelsea, snow removal is handled by our partner Techni-Snow, a Gatineau company specializing in snow removal, chosen for its reliability through the winter. In serviced areas of Gatineau, our own team takes care of it.
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