2024 Inductee

Paul Lavoie

Agency Builder

Paul Lavoie credits his parents with instilling the value of a strong foundation. They meant it literally. When building the family cabin, Lavoie’s father skipped the foundation. “After about five years, the house started [shifting],” Lavoie says. “So [my father] would jack it up. And then a couple years later, it would go the other way. And he said, ‘I made a mistake I’m going to pay for the rest of my life. So, get the foundation right.’”

Lavoie, co-founder and former chairman of Taxi, began his career in graphic design before joining Montreal agency PNMD as an art director. After a stint at J. Walter Thompson, he landed at Cossette where he would meet his life – and later business – partner Jane Hope. And at just 29, he realized that while he enjoyed advertising, he hated the silos. His solution was to open his own shop. And to rethink its approach to creative, he took inspiration from the pitch process.

“While we [were] pitching, we worked in small groups,” he says of the traditional process. “It was efficient and collaborative. We didn’t have a lot of time [so when someone comes up with a] damn good line, we run with that. [But after] the pitch, we’d all go back to our silos.”

That’s why, when Lavoie and Hope launched Taxi in 1992, they decided to blend the design and advertising disciplines, removing the isolation that hurt collaboration. “By merging design and advertising, we would have more touchpoints for the customer,” he says. “For instance, we would do the call-centre copy, packaging, in-store advertising.” It was an approach that would eventually help Taxi win one of its longest-standing clients, Clearnet (later Telus).

He opened the agency with other foundational principals, such as the idea that all members of a team should be able to fit in a cab to ensure greater collaboration (hence the name). Lavoie also wanted Taxi to be built on a philosophy of doubt. “I wrote this mantra: Doubt the conventional, create the exceptional,” he says. “If someone gives you a mandate, they probably don’t have the right question.”

The Montreal shop opened with little fanfare, but a lot of moxie. “Having won so many awards before I started Taxi, I thought that would translate into getting some business, but it didn’t.
[We] really had to hustle for clients.”

A year after opening, Taxi jumped at the opportunity to pitch children’s TV channel YTV based in Toronto. The team made it to the second round, but with a catch: the potential client wanted to visit Taxi’s local office. So Lavoie fibbed and said come on over. He planned to open a Toronto location; he just hadn’t secured anything yet.

Scoping out an empty office that previously housed an agency, Lavoie asked the realtor if he could “borrow” the space for a few hours, and he asked a couple of creatives from Cossette who were in talks to join Taxi to pretend to be on staff.

The pitch went great, but then one member of the client team asked to make a call. The office had no working phone lines, and they had to walk next door to borrow one. Lavoie came clean. “This is not our space. We borrowed it to impress you,” he told the YTV team. “But as president and co-founder, I have the authority to guarantee you this: If you give us the business, we’re getting phones.” The account was later awarded to Taxi from a shortlist of three.

In its early days, Taxi chased challenger brands. “We were like four or five people,” he says. “There’s no way a McDonald’s-sized corporation would give us their work.” But that changed, and the agency quickly added big-client names including Mini Cooper, IKEA and Viagra.

Over the next two decades, it grew from a handful of creatives to 150, and then opened a second Toronto location to accommodate growth. It opened offices in New York, Vancouver and Amsterdam, amassed thousands of awards, and saw the career launches of creative heavy-weights, including Judy John, Zak Mroueh and Peter Ignazi – among many others.

At the tail-end of the 2000s, following a minor surgical procedure that turned into an 18-day hospital stay, Lavoie says he had a lot of time to think back on his career. “Sitting in my hospital room, I thought ‘I am repeating myself.’” A few months later, the agency entered talks to sell to WPP. “I do not regret it. It was a win-win-win situation.”

Lavoie retired from the agency world in 2017, and in May 2024, the Taxi sign officially came off the wall at the Toronto location as the agency merged with Wunderman Thompson and rebranded
to become VML Canada. Today, Lavoie is in the client seat as he expands his luxury paddle board business, Beau Lake, into new categories through collaborations with artists, like Douglas Copeland, and brands, like YSL.

And as he looks to the next generation of industry creatives, he shares some parting words: “Production is cheap. What a customer is paying you for [is] critical thinking,” he says. “We need problem solvers – not storytellers. [Today] storytelling is provoking other people to tell stories. We want people on TikTok to talk about the brand. [Agencies] need problem solvers to help our clients navigate through this data, these channels – they need counsel. We’re creative people. Our instinct is to evolve to create something new.”