The Stormy Stories Show
Building a company isn’t a straight line. It’s messy, unpredictable, and sometimes a little stormy.
On The Stormy Stories Show, Angela Robertson sits down with CEOs, founders, and tech leaders to talk about the moments you don’t usually hear about. The tough decisions, the unexpected pivots, the pressure of leadership, and the lessons that only come from navigating real storms in business.
These are honest conversations about building, scaling, and leading through uncertainty in the world of technology and innovation.
The Stormy Stories Show
Jean-Pierre LeBlanc - Founder & CEO, The Alchemy Network | Co-Founder, Saje Natural Wellness
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What if the biggest thing holding your business back isn’t your strategy, your team, or your resources, but your own growth as a leader?
In this episode of Accelerate with Amber, Amber Nelms sits down with Jean-Pierre LeBlanc, co-founder of Saje Natural Wellness and founder of The Alchemy Network, for a conversation about entrepreneurship, leadership, culture, and human potential.
Jean-Pierre shares how his personal search for relief from fibromyalgia ultimately helped inspire the creation of Saje Natural Wellness and how he and his wife, Kate, combined their strengths to build the company.
They explore why great organizations are built around people, why founders need to invest in their own development, and how a scarcity mindset can limit both personal and business growth. Jean-Pierre explains his belief that an organization can only be as healthy as its leadership and why developing the person behind the business is essential to unlocking its potential.
Jean-Pierre also shares some of the most challenging moments of his entrepreneurial journey, including high-pressure situations that forced him to think creatively rather than rely on what had worked in the past. For him, those “stormy moments” reveal why creativity can become the answer to the biggest problems.
This conversation is a reminder that building a successful organization isn’t only about growing the business. It’s also about knowing yourself, developing yourself, and becoming the kind of leader capable of helping others reach their potential.
Interestingly enough, I thrive on the stormy moments, and they're the ones that are so demanding that you can't really rely on your past. It's where you see how creativity is the answer to the big problems.
Angela RobertsonWelcome back to the Stormy Stories show. I am your host, Angela Robertson, CEO of Ace Tech, a nonprofit membership society for tech CEOs and founders across Canada. We exist to make sure that no one has to go through this journey of founding and growing their tech company alone. And so that our members can thrive alongside their teams and their companies. Today's guest is Jean-Pierre LeBlanc, co-founder of Sage Natural Wellness. He transformed a personal journey with fibromyalgia into one of Canada's most recognized natural wellness brands, an EY Canada Entrepreneur of the Year award winner. He now helps founders and leaders build purpose-driven organizations through the Alchemy Network. Welcome so much to the Stormy Stories show. Jean-Pierre, great to have you.
Jean-Pierre LeBlancThank you, Angela. Boy, I wish you were around when I was alone at some time building our organization. I had my wife with me, but we could sure have used an organization like yours.
Angela RobertsonWell, we're so grateful to have you here to share a bit of your journey because Sage Natural Wellness really began with your personal search for relief from fibromyalgia. How did that experience become the foundation for building a nationally recognized wellness company?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancNo doubt that the initial goal was to find a solution to a health problem I had. And once that solution showed up, I turned to Kate and I said, gosh, like all of Canada needs this. Would you be okay if that was going to be our next venture? And and she agreed. And she loved retail. And I love the idea that I understood how to make formulas that actually worked. And so we put our two talents together. And that launched Sage.
Angela RobertsonAnd you and Kate had done ventures before, or this was a new foray for you? What was that leap of faith like?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancYeah. When I first met Kate, I saw so much potential in her that I was excited about inviting her into co-creating a human resources consulting outfit. And the idea was that we were going to help people find jobs that match who they really were, not their resumes. So many people were just doing work to get a paycheck, and I had a fascination about human potential and what I call dharma, Sanskrit word for life purpose. And so we put that together and were surprisingly successful until we hit a recession, that is. We were successful at helping put people into jobs that really mattered to them and finding employers who understood that concept.
Angela RobertsonThat's such an important distinction, too, in that line of work, right? Really designing roles for the person and matching in that way. You and Kate built Sage around a strong company culture long before culture became a business buzzword. What role did the culture that you instilled in your team play in the company's growth?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancWell, as it turns out, you're right, we didn't even know the word culture. What I had discovered is through the HR consultancy, I had discovered the importance of people. And since I was what I would call a human potentialist, I had discovered hypnosis as an interest course in university. And I discovered that people were able to do so many extraordinary things in hypnosis that it occurred to me that as a species, we're living only a fraction of our capabilities. So I became fascinated by what can humans do. And so even though I was getting a business degree, all three of my majors were psychology. And I've been studying and teaching psychology ever since. So we go back to the 70s. And the idea is that if you build a business based on people, so you might have a business idea, but it's all about what team can you create. That makes all the difference. So it turns out that culture is sort of the core of who you are as an organization. And who you are as an organization is a series of people. It's a collection of people. We call it team. We never had any employees at SAGE. We never had any staff its age. We had team members and team leaders. And that team is everything. And I think that that's why I'm so passionate today to help young entrepreneurs through the Alchemy Network have access to that by knowing what are the tools out there that allows you to understand your team? Those are not the things you find in most business schools.
Angela RobertsonAaron Powell Yeah, you mentioned the Alchemy Network, which you founded alongside Sage in the 90s. What was this part of the inspiration to create it? Was this feeling like there was a lack of understanding of this inherent potential that everyone could have and contribute to the team?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancAaron Powell You know, ironically, it came out of necessity. Imagine almost 40 years now wanting to turn people on to natural health using you you know, I had two philosophies. Number one, you should be your own doctor, and number two, you should let nature be your first medicine. Well, those concepts were so foreign, no one was gonna lend me money to build that business. And so I needed a source of income. And since I was passionate about helping people be healthy, and that was a holistic picture, to be physically healthy, you need to be mentally healthy. You need your relationships to work, you need your bank account to make sense. So there was this it's how coaching actually came to be. I was doing it at a time when it was just being invented. The founder, Thomas Leonard, was a financial um uh he was a financial consultant who realized that people's lives needed help so that their finances could remain stable. If you didn't have a stable life, you didn't have stability in your finances. So he was the sort of the grandfather of coaching, and I happened to come across him in in a conference and and have a very impactful relationship with him. And it occurred to me that if I could help people, I was doing something I love to do, and I was going to get money for my time that had no overhead. So imagine building Sage where we were doing our own manufacturing, our own retailing, our own distribution. It was like seven businesses stacked one on top of the other. It was just like cash demands on top of cash demands. We were very bricks and motor. I mean, as bricks and motors you can imagine. And so, on the other hand, I had this coaching business that was just cash that I could generate literally pacing my living room in my bathroom with an old-fashioned phone plugged into a headset. And so that's how the coaching business came to be. It was necessary to keep my family under a roof, keep Sage operating before financing was ready to show up.
Angela RobertsonI think especially today, it feels like there's someone who's a coach or some type of coaching around every corner. How would you describe the Alchemy Network as being different from traditional executive coaching? And what transformation do you hope your clients experience?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancAaron Powell, that's a great question. And when I began coaching, it was classic executive coaching and it was helping people be clear on their goals and what strategies and tactics and time management and things of the sort. Along the way, I discovered that it was really about the human potential in that executive, and ultimately today I s I I work more with founders and people who run philanthropic groups and boards. And the idea is that the organization will only be as healthy as its leadership. And that leadership starts with founder energy. And so when I can work with an individual who has a vision, who's willing to make the development of him or herself as important as the business, then I have a client that inspires me. I like to say I don't work with people who need me, I work with people who inspire me. And that's someone who gets that their human potential is going to be reflected in the potential of their organization, business or charitable or whatever. And so that's what excites me today is to see my clients grow into something that's sometimes even bigger than what they can imagine, certainly what they can imagine at first.
Angela RobertsonI think that what you've just shared is so important. And yet we come across founders and CEOs who spend so much time almost avoiding investing in themselves because they're trying to invest in all these other areas of their business. And it can be a barrier that they don't even realize if they're not investing in themselves to gain that additional potential that they have. What are some of the ways that you approach those kinds of conversations with people who maybe go, well, I don't have time for that. I'm busy building, or I don't have the resources to start to invest in myself as I'm growing?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancWell, knowing that that's the big cosmic joke, people say I don't have time to invest in myself is a complete lack of understanding of what's going to give them their ultimate success. When I reach someone who says I don't have time for that, I realize that someone is just not ready to be successful. So if you look around, you will see we live in a society that is swimming in scarcity mentality. And it takes an abundant mentality to create an abundant or successful business. And and I would know well because I grew up with a dad who went bankrupt five times as an entrepreneur, and I grew up with a scarcity mentality, and it took me a lot of personal growth work to transform that. And that's why we call it the Alchemy Network, because alchemy is the transformation of one thing into another. Originally it was thought of transforming lead into gold, but it's really about transforming the alchemist. It's about transforming the human being into its full potential. And so that's who I work with. And if someone just can't see the value in working on themselves, I wish them well and wait until that person recognizes, you know, someone who gets the value of EQ being as important, if not more important, than IQ. That person looking for EQ will recognize it when they see it in someone else. And my I don't find my clients as much as my clients find me. They'll say, like, I see the way you talk to your wife. I want a life like that. And then I know that they can have a business like that too, because they want a life like that, and life is personal and business. There, you know, people talk about life balance. I don't believe in life balance, I believe in a whole life that's so rich and so exciting, and you don't know if you're working or playing, and and so you know, you end up at five o'clock with as much energy as you had at 9 a.m. And and then you can have like a very rich personal life as well. Kate and I's idea of a happy hour is we have a chess game or two at five o'clock, and that replaces the gin tonic that we used to need because it it just clears the mind and and practices the mind and and it's playful, and then our evening stems from there. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Angela RobertsonThat's a beautiful anecdote of how to transform something that may have given you joy before into something that's an even deeper and richer experience for you. I want to sort of pull on that thread a little bit because you know we talked about moving to this more abundant mindset, and yet sometimes it can be hard to do that in moments of adversity. What has been one of the stormiest moments in your entrepreneurial journey? How did it shape the leader that you are today?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancWell, interestingly enough, I thrive on the stormy moments, and they're the ones that are so demanding that you can't really rely on your past. You need it's it's it's where you see how creativity is the answer to the big problem. So you can have all the strategy you want from the big Ivy schools. Something really difficult happens. In my case, I was invited to speak uh to the five o'clock news on CBC on the subject of making natural remedies. What I didn't realize, because they invited me with 10 minutes to spare and mic me up and then started going three, two, one. The person next to me was a bright MBA from the Canadian government. And the first question that the anchor lady started with is Mr. LeBlanc, we understand that you're making natural remedies. And we have Miss Jones from the Canadian government and listed all of her qualifications. And she's here to protect the public from people who are making natural remedies in ordinary warehouses or in their in their in their garage. And and I realized I'd been set up for a massive failure. And and talk about a stormy moment. And in that moment, I thought, I am completely out of my league. And I just kind of I remember flicking my eyes to the sky to a God I didn't understand or have concept of, and going over to you, big guy, like this, you know, like I can't believe my life is over. And what I heard come out of my mouth was, well, making really good natural medicine is like making really good natural wine. You're going to get your ingredients from the south side of a high-altitude organic grape, and you get need to know how to pick those ingredients. And for essential oils, it's all over the world where the the the best, you know, the best eucalyptus is out of of of Australia and the best lavender is out of France. And and so it's an art as well as a science. And to my amazement, the anchor woman turned to the government person and said, Is the government now going to tell us how to make cheese as well? And the whole thing had shifted. And and I got to live another day. Because in, you know, the I truly thought that was going to be the end. And the same thing occurred some months later when someone showed up at a sage store with uh this big cameraman back in those days. Cameras were huge. And and she was also an anchor woman, and that this one's going to be on the six o'clock news. And she said, I hear you claim you can remove a headache in four minutes or less. And this is Susan over here, and she has a headache. And and I have a chronometer here, and I'm ready to go. And I said, Well, hold on a second. Let me just ask Susan, Susan, what kind of headache is this? Like, where is it and how bad is it on a scale of one to ten? Susan looked at me all, you know, like lost and said, Well, it's actually not a headache, it's a migraine, and it's a seven out of ten and it's climbing. And so I turned to Pamela Martin and I said, I claim to remove headaches, not migraines. Well, at this point, she turned to the cameraman and she goes, start filming. She clicks the camera, and I'm realizing there it goes my career and my business. Once again, the media who's there to supposedly be helpful was there to crucify me. And to my to to to the only thing I knew how to do is I immediately sat Susan down and I put on more peppermint halo on her than I'd ever put on any human being out of desperation. And four minutes later, Pamela goes, time, and she looks at Susan, and the camera focuses on her face and she says, How's your headache? And and and Susan kind of looked to the right and looked to the left, and she goes, It's gone. And and so it turns out that for a migraine, I say usually takes how much time it takes, and it depends on the on the migraine. But in this particular case, a massive amount of peppermint halo that I put not just on the halo area, but also on her scalp, had done the trick. And again, I got to live another day and uh frankly got wiped out of peppermint halo. I couldn't produce fast enough, and it was one of the things that gave us a leg up. So how did that happen? Well, you know, from the sheer passion of telling everyone your story, and that's how it got to her that some guy was claiming to remove headaches in four minutes or less. I now say 19 out of 20 times because there are the odd headaches that are impervious, and that's that that's the numbers I've experienced. But my point is that the the passion and and the being in the business for the sake of not the business, but the cause. My cause is I wanted to put a dent in the wellness of Canadians. I knew that so many Canadians were waiting until they were sick, going to the doctor, getting a prescription, and starting on a slippery slope of one prescription after another. And I just wanted to make a change. I wasn't looking to make money, I was looking to make a change. And so every time it looked like I was going to be put out of business, I just thought, well, if I can survive one more day. And as it turns out, one more day lasted long enough till on year 19, if you can believe it, someone came along and offered to lend me a million dollars at 15% interest back in the days of 1.5%. And if I was willing to trade that million dollar loan for 35% of the business one day.
Angela RobertsonWhat did you say?
Jean-Pierre LeBlancI said yes. Reluctantly, I said yes. But my partners, my wife and and uh one other key uh team member that was part of the three of us building the business together, um they just they were just tired of the ca what we call the cash flow wars. And uh and we said yes, and that was the classic story of the overnight success after twenty years of of blood, sweat and tears.
Angela RobertsonAnd in the end, that was what opened up by that point a new opportunity for growth for you, and it was the right time, it sounds like for you to make that choice.
Jean-Pierre LeBlancAaron Powell At that time, the marketplace had caught up to us and we knew what to do, we just didn't have the cash to do it. So when the cash came in, that was when we were able to expand. And this is crucial, is that if you talk about culture, now that I understand the word, our culture was made up of three key pieces. And the first one was we held the philosophy among each other based on some some laws of how the universe works, borrowed from Ayurvedic philosophy and and and and uh medicine, which is a very old Eastern. So we just asked everyone at Sage to follow those those seven philosophies, and if they didn't suit them, then the business didn't suit them. So I learned along the way that the culture should not be a democratic process. It should be a founder-let, this is who we are. And if if that's you, please join us. And if that's not you, please don't join us. And and it needs to be pretty clear that way. And the second piece was that because we knew that we were working on human potential, we needed people who either knew themselves, had high levels of self-awareness, or were willing to learn. And we used a uh a concept called the Enneagram, which is an age-old psychology system that allows you to understand yourself to a whole new level. It's actually a human development system, contrary to like a personality assessment like Myers-Briggs or disk. This was a human development system that we were using and inviting people to if if someone wanted to interview with me, I'd ask them to actually go read up on the Enneagram. Come and tell me your thinking of what your Enneagram is. And if someone said, I'm not interested in that kind of stuff, I'd I'd go, well, that's wonderful. Let's talk about what kind of business you really suit, because it's definitely not Sage. Here we, you know, it's it's your your potential as a human is too important to us. It has to be equally important to you. And so at Alchemy, we do the same thing. We we teach founders that first they need to know themselves really well and they need to be willing to grow themselves, or else their business will be chaotic and difficult and challenging because those challenges are the very things that they're not willing to deal on the inside. They're gonna keep seeing them on the outside.
Angela RobertsonSo true. It's so true. Know yourself and then know to grow yourself.
Jean-Pierre LeBlancIf you know yourself, you can know others. If you don't know yourself, you you won't understand others, and you'll be particularly confused as to why they don't think like you, but you don't even know why you think like you do.
Angela RobertsonYes. I so appreciate our conversation today, Jean-Pierre. It's been so wonderful. I know we could dive even deeper into all of these pieces, and I already am looking forward to whenever our next conversation may be. So thank you for joining us.
Jean-Pierre LeBlancI look forward to it as well. Thank you, Angela.
Angela RobertsonAt Ace Tech, we believe one of the most valuable resources a leader can access is another leader's experience. That's why I created the Stormy Stories show to bring you honest conversations about the moments that test us, shape us, and ultimately make us better CEOs and founders. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.
