Gabriel Lalumière
Entrepreneur · Triathlete · Builder — “This is only the beginning.”
It all started very young.
From a very young age, Gabriel has always loved building projects and turning ideas into something real. One of his first entrepreneurial experiences was a bike-cleaning service: he knocked on doors offering to clean people's bikes, finding his own first customers.
Later, still in elementary school — likely around grade 4 — he started making coasters out of cork, gathered and shaped by hand. That's when he had his first real business collaboration: Domaine Saint-Jacques supplied him, free of charge, with cork stoppers no longer usable for their own operations, which he turned into coasters. That collaboration taught him early on that a business can create value from resources someone else considers useless.
A few real milestones
- 1Childhood — bike-cleaning service, finding his own first customers.
- 2Elementary school (around grade 4) — cork coasters; first business collaboration with Domaine Saint-Jacques.
- 3Discovered triathlon at an event in Saint-Lambert, signing up on the spot the same day.
- 4Age 18 — structured real-estate project (accepted offer, advanced financing), which ultimately did not close.
- 52022 — launched AquaChezToi.
- 6Today — 18 years old, Founder & CEO of AquaChezToi, training toward Ironman 70.3 races.
Try. Build. Learn. Start again.
For Gabriel, entrepreneurship doesn't just mean building businesses that work — he has also tried plenty of projects that didn't pan out, and he insists on keeping that reality in the story rather than telling only the successes.
At 18, he worked on a serious real-estate project: the numbers were done, an offer had been accepted, and financing was well underway. The project ultimately didn't close. Rather than staying stuck, he redirected his energy toward AquaChezToi — a business he had already started.
Triathlon as a way of thinking
One day, walking with his father, Gabriel came across a triathlon in Saint-Lambert. There was about an hour left before the start; he wasn't prepared. They signed up on the spot. That's how his triathlon journey began.
That experience captures exactly what he loves: taking on a challenge without necessarily being fully ready, and pushing his limits anyway. Triathlon has since taken an important place in his life — his goal today is to race Ironman 70.3 events. Sport has become a way to work on discipline, progression, and performance.
The main project
AquaChezToi launched in 2022 and progressively became Gabriel's main project. The business has let him develop skills in entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, management, operations, technology, customer service, and product development.
One verified fact he wants to share honestly: the team built an application representing roughly $70,000 in development value, in about two months.
“Everything can be improved.”
This is a real philosophy for Gabriel: if a better way of doing something exists, he finds it very hard to accept keeping the old one. He's constantly looking for a better method, a better product, a better experience, better technology, a better organization.
That constant search comes with some humor and humanity — for example, a very real tendency to always want the best equipment possible, even in a sport like tennis. “Excellence is a direction, not a permanent state.”
“Wanting to reach excellence is already part of the process of excellence.”
For Gabriel, excellence isn't something reached once and for all — it's constantly looking to do better, never staying still when an improvement is possible.
That standard comes with a belief in efficiency: work hard, but above all work efficiently. If something can be done in two days instead of a month, he wants to understand why it should take longer — a way of working, not a promise, which directly shaped how AquaChezToi was built: build fast, test fast, fix fast, move forward.
“Giving more people a reason to smile.”
Even while growing the business, Gabriel stays directly involved in lessons — because he sees the smile on a child's face when they succeed at something they couldn't do before. He deeply believes self-confidence matters for young people: an accomplishment that looks small from the outside can be huge for a child.
That's one of the reasons AquaChezToi exists: not just to sell lessons, but to help create experiences that give kids confidence, pride, a sense of accomplishment, and the desire to keep going.
A journey still under construction
Gabriel is 18 and doesn't claim to have already accomplished everything. His ambitions: keep growing AquaChezToi, keep racing triathlon and take on Ironman challenges, build new businesses and new projects, keep improving his skills, and grow the technology and business models behind AquaChezToi.