Maverick upstarts, enigmatic iconoclasts, shredders of the status quo… Brand Blvd’s Shaun Lichtenberger and Chris Sinclair are many things, chief among them – the ideal example of what it means to be a new breed of entrepreneur in the 21st century.

When you think about the best and most prolific business partnerships – Jobs and Wozniak, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hell, even Keith and Mick – a pattern emerges: two sides of the coin, the yin and the yang, each with specific gifts and strengths. With that in mind, allow us to introduce Brand Blvd’s president, Shaun Lichtenberger, and vice president, Chris Sinclair – two people so well-suited to own a business together, who meld so seamlessly as best friends of 15 years with a telepathic shorthand that one glance tells the other what he’s thinking, their friends have given them their own amalgamated moniker: Sincenberger.

United, They Stand
Brand Blvd is based in St. Catharines, the Niagara region of Ontario, and when Lichtenberger, 38, and Sinclair, 34, launched it in 2007, they had just left a distributor company where they learned a lot – including how not to run a company they’d want their names on. “The best thing about working at our former company was that Chris and I became friends,” says Lichtenberger. “And by the time we left, knowing we wanted to start our own distributorship, we had a pretty good blueprint for how we wanted to run a company and treat our team, our suppliers and our clients.”

Sinclair, remembering the company’s origin story as it celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, laughs when he talks about the 15-hour days, working seven days a week and maxing out their credit cards to pay suppliers. “We were too young to know what we had to lose,” he says.

“I knew the minute I met these guys they had what it takes to succeed,” says Dan Rochette, founder/chief visionary officer of the Facilis Group, of which Brand Blvd is a member, and an early supporter – in a multitude of ways – of the company. “I’ve had the opportunity to witness their growth and development from inception. Shaun delivered vision and structure while Chris focused on sales and relationships. They challenged conventional thinking and understood the importance of culture and teamwork. I couldn’t be prouder of them.”

As close as they are as business owners, make no mistake: it’s their friendship that’s the genesis for the company’s culture, its success and its idealism. Consider that they make time once a month to get out of the office, hang out and reconnect not as business partners but as friends, as well as playing in a hockey league every Sunday night. Though incredibly similar in their business ethics and moral compass, it’s their differences – like in all great partnerships – that’s the secret sauce. More discerning and close to the vest, Lichtenberger is operations-oriented, happy in the office, and adept at being the adult supervision among a millennial-trending staff. As the more analytical of the two, he digests and metabolizes business decisions before making them, and has a dry-as-the-Sahara, sardonic wit.

And then there’s Chris Sinclair. Follow his many social media feeds on any given week and he’s downright omnipresent – representing Brand Blvd at charity events, on stage MCing conferences and hosting golf outings. (Lichtenberger, predictably, is nominally on Facebook and looks forward to the day when he can “vanish from it.”) Sinclair – who oversees the company’s sales – is more than a little Bono-esque, both with his active altruism and passion for projects with purpose, and is a charismatic personality so formidable when he’s in the room you feel it. So much so that when he spent some time out of the office a while back, telecommuting, it changed the dynamics of Brand Blvd – the staff felt his absence, and it had an effect on his relationship with Lichtenberger. “It’s a completely different atmosphere when Chris isn’t here,” says Lichtenberger, noting that on the rare occasion they do disagree, they lock themselves in a room and “whiteboard it out until we get to the answer.”

Lichtenberger is married with two young children and has a love of gardening, classic vinyl albums and craft beer; he grew up content and “decidedly blue collar.” Sinclair, meanwhile, was raised on a 100-acre Canadian beef farm, driving tractors. These are not haughty guys and they place a high regard on people who are humble and genuine. Lichtenberger, for example, is so comfortable in his skin and his role at the company that he has no problem with Sinclair being the face of Brand Blvd and, in fact, kind of revels in his anonymity. When asked if anyone would know who he was at a trade show if Sinclair, the industry celeb, wasn’t with him, he says no. Then adds, laughing, “thank God.”

Where they are in perfect sync says everything you need to know about their mission statement for the company: “When we started Brand Blvd, Shaun and I knew early on that above anything, we’d take our commitment to our team, our community, our clients and each other very seriously,” Sinclair says.

The company without Lichtenberger – the organized, methodical, happily-behind-the-scenes partner who keeps the train on the tracks – would be “unimaginable chaos,” Sinclair says, without hesitating. Lichtenberger, when asked to imagine the company without Sinclair, shakes his head and says simply, “It would suck … and that’s a company I have no interest in being a part of.”

The Real Deal
At the end of Brand Blvd’s first year in business, the company did $300,000; in 2016, $8.1 million. In the past five years alone, it’s had 53% growth, all of which is organic and notable for the sheer fact that during part of the time Canada was mired in a recession. “We just kind of chose to ignore it, and kept selling,” Sinclair says. “Marketing budgets may have been smaller, but clients were still buying from us.”

And while they don’t crave the limelight, it’s found them, as evidenced by the company being named PPPC’s Distributor of the Year in their size category for six years straight and landing on Counselor’s list of Fastest Growing Companies twice.

“Watching Chris and Shaun grow Brand Blvd over the past 10 years has been truly amazing – and I don’t mean just sales growth, but personal growth, culture growth and relationship growth,” says Chuck Fandos, the U.S. CEO of Brand Addition and the 2016 Counselor Person of the Year. “These two guys asked a ton of questions of everyone they knew, developed a plan, built amazing relationships with their team, their clients and the industry, and created something they should be really proud of. Good things happen to good people; outstanding things happen to outstanding people. Chris and Shaun are outstanding people.”

When you walk into Brand Blvd’s offices, what greets visitors immediately is a chalkboard touting the company’s core values of commitment to its clients and culture, innovation, passion, community and integrity. These values are ubiquitous, from being imprinted on their custom-made boxes they ask every supplier to use when shipping their orders, to the myriad of promo products – T-shirts, water bottles, USB drives – on display and given away to the many clients and visitors who stop by the office on a daily basis. “Everybody gets a promo item when they come in – clients, friends, delivery people – everybody,” Sinclair says.

The showroom, curated with an aesthetic sensibility that would give Restoration Hardware a run for its money, is a focal point of the company and one where clients often convene with the Brand Blvd team.

One wink to the company’s tongue-in-cheek humor comes in the form of its restroom doors: not so pedestrian as to have simple “Men” and “Women” signs, Brand Blvd has Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy Anchorman headshot signifying the male restroom and Christina Applegate’s Veronica Corningstone for the female’s.

In company’s lounge, next to the office Lichtenberger and Sinclair share, there’s an Xbox and local Niagara beers and wines on tap. Recognizing their team of 23 skews young and wanting to inoculate them from business mistakes they both experienced, Lichtenberger and Sinclair pay to have a life/career counselor and a financial planner come to the office to chat with staffers looking for advice. And when they had to make personnel changes a while back with two employees leaving the company, Lichtenberger and Sinclair hung out in the lounge for a full day so jarred staffers could have one-on-one time with them.

“Chris and Shaun genuinely care about the well-being, development and growth of all our team members, not just in the office but in life – they thrive on empowering others to succeed,” says Angela Jamieson, Brand Blvd’s sales and marketing manager who’s been at the company for seven years and who, with Emma Watton, the twenty-something operations manager, serves as Lichtenberger’s and Sinclair’s whip-smart right hand and sounding board. “Culture starts at the top, and Chris and Shaun live and breathe integrity that bleeds through to the very core of our business.”

Superheroes & Saracinos
It’s ironic that if you call the Brand Blvd office – instead of staid, antiquated “on hold” music – you’re regaled with fun facts about superheroes, like this gem of a quote from Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

And this team that Lichtenberger and Sinclair have assembled live that every day. Their level of enthusiasm is palpable and as many of them are millennials, they’re driven to give back by pooling their resources and donating through immersive experiences – they’re not just writing checks; they show up and they’re in it. Proudly Canadian and deeply rooted in their Niagara community where they make a living and live their lives, follow them on social media and you’ll see the company sponsoring regional events and charities that support local causes. Sinclair himself is co-founder of the annual Niagara Golf Marathon, in which he and dozens of other golfers play 100 holes in one day to raise money – nearly $300,000 to date – for the local healthcare network.

But of course it’s one thing for happy employees, grateful neighbors and satisfied clients to think you’re wonderful; it’s quite another when a direct competitor does, and it speaks volumes. Jamie McCabe, owner of McCabe Promotional Products in London, Ontario, often finds his company up against Brand Blvd, vying for business.

“I met Chris and Shaun seven years ago and had heard so many positive things about them, I thought they’d be really easy to hate,” laughs McCabe. “But within a minute of talking to them, I knew that would be impossible.”

McCabe maintains that Lichtenberger and Sinclair have a singular talent for attracting an incredible group of staffers who are more like ambassadors for the company’s brand than employees. “They walk in unison with one goal and one culture, being true to themselves and honest to others,” he says. “Together, they’ve built respect across the country and over the border among both distributors and suppliers. Believe me, I’ve traveled to many cities throughout North America with the boys, sharing best practices, benchmarking and telling tales of success, all while enjoying the cocktail named after BIC’s famous Dave Saracino. I think of them never as competitors, but always as colleagues in the industry who continually set the bar so high few can surpass it. I’ve called them a lot of things, but I’m most proud to call them my friends.”

In the end, when you consider the company and its two uniquely individualistic owners who do everything in such a grandly impressive way, it’s tempting to say their mantra should be, “go big or go home.” But that’s too trite for a company like Brand Blvd; better to use a quote from The Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen, a favorite of Lichtenberger’s: “Walk tall, or baby, don’t walk at all.”

Photo Gallery

While it’s important to note that Sinclair and Lichtenberger work as hard as they play (shown here, pre-golf outing) Brand Blvd is deeply entrenched in its community of St. Catharines, Ontario, and was involved with 170 charitable activities in 2016 alone.  

Sinclair and Lichtenberger, best friends for 15 years now, started Brand Blvd in 2007, when Sinclair was 24 and Lichtenberger was 28.

To say that Chris Sinclair – with a personality so large and electric it practically has its own weather pattern – is comfortable in front of a crowd is a masterpiece of understatement.

Brand Blvd’s Core Values are one of the first things you see when you walk into the office, a testament to how much of a premium the team puts on their mission statement.

Brand Blvd was named to Counselor’s 2017 list of Fastest Growing Distributor Companies, with 23% organic sales growth between 2014-2016.

Lest you think success has gone to their heads, witness the lengths Lichtenberger and Sinclair are willing to go to motivate their team.

Lest you think success has gone to their heads, witness the lengths Lichtenberger and Sinclair are willing to go to motivate their team.

While they’re clearly phenomenal leaders, Lichtenberger and Sinclair are quick to point out that Brand Blvd wouldn’t be the success it is without their talented and passionate team.

Michele Bell is executive director of ASI’s Editorial Department and the editor of SGR magazine. Twitter: @ASI_MBell