The guy who shows up at your place
My name is François Paradis, founder of FP Service, based in Boucherville. I’m a hands-on guy. I work with business owners here when their data is scattered and their systems don’t talk to each other.
On the home page, I said you know your trade and I make sure your tools keep up. Here’s where that comes from.
Twenty-five years in operations, walking into other people’s businesses
I started out as a labourer. Restaurants, warehouses, lawn mowing, ski hills, cash registers, a book production line: about three jobs a year on average. The repetition drove me crazy, but figuring out a new place got me going every time.
At 21, I set foot on a film set. That changed everything: back to school for film, then animation.
My career started in 1994 in audio, video, and interactive content production. Assistant editor, then coordinator, then head of post-production at Technicolor and other Montreal houses. Some big projects too: immersive installations for a museum in Paris, and for casinos in Las Vegas and Detroit.
I was never the pure technician or the pure manager. I was the bridge between the two.
In 2013, I went out on my own as a product photographer for online stores. I learned WordPress on the job, and my role slid toward something else: running those stores day to day, publishing, updating, keeping everything alive.
That took me to Génération Ecom, where I managed Amazon accounts for five years. Then I went to see what happens after the click. I ran operations at a distribution centre, to understand the whole chain right up to the box going out the door.
Bringing order to what matters
I’m a collector. Films, music, figurines.
I grew up when information was scarce. Radio, the papers, TV: those were the only ways in, and you had no control over any of them. We traded cassettes, copies of copies, just to have your own and play it again whenever you wanted. If you didn’t catch it, it was gone. So I caught things, recorded them, filed them. I was an archivist without knowing it.
It became my job without my noticing. I supervised the digitization of archives for the Montreal International Jazz Festival (FIJM), built databases of photos and graphics, and went through several generations of storage. Later, I digitized and organized my entire personal music library. The challenge was deciding how each thing had to be named and filed so it could be found again, using metadata.
Since YouTube and streaming services came along, nothing is scarce anymore. Everything is available, or close to it. Younger generations don’t feel the need to collect things and make sure nothing gets lost, because everything lives in the cloud.
About five years ago, I discovered software like Notion and Airtable. Relational databases, but finally user-friendly, that let you sculpt information instead of just looking it up. That’s how I built my first tools for project management, inventory, and data.
In the last two years, tools like Base44 have made it possible to build software without writing code. And now, with AI like Claude and Gemini, I build apps just by having a conversation.
Ready to make your operations simpler?
A 30-minute meeting, free and with no strings attached, to take stock of what you’re up against right now and see how I can help.
No sales pitch, just a straight conversation between business owners.