Clintar Employee Spotlight: Joanne Nicholson

Meet Joanne Nicholson, our amazing Controller at Clintar!

In this Employee Spotlight, Joanne shares her journey of starting in the commercial landscaping industry and how she’s evolved her role at Clintar over the years.

From the challenge of working with different people and personalities to the many things people don’t realize about her position, Joanne’s dedication to her work is truly inspiring.

Don’t miss Joanne’s Employee Spotlight!

Please introduce yourself including name, title, mains responsibility and tenure

Hi. I’m Joanne Nicholson, I’m the controller here at Clintar. My main responsibilities are to look after TruServe’s books, which is Clintar head office, as well as oversee all the franchise books.

How did you get started in the commercial landscaping industry?

Well, a bit of a funny story. I went to the University of Waterloo way back when, and I was on a co-op program so I worked for different accounting firms during my co-op terms. The last accounting firm I worked for did the audit at Clintar so I came to Clintar to do the audit three years in a row, and the last year I was graduated and I came to Clintar and their books were in a horrendous mess. I was at Clintar for weeks and weeks and weeks trying to do their audit. Finally, Bob Wilton, the owner of Clintar, hired me away from the accounting firm and that’s how I came to work at Clintar.

Describe how your role has evolved over the time you have been with Clintar.

Well, when I first started at Clintar we were just a one branch landscaping company and we also sold parts and equipment for snow clearing. We sold plows. We had a parts counter that was open during snowstorms and we also did landscaping, but it was just one location on Midland Avenue in Scarborough.

Describe what you enjoy about with at Clintar

What I enjoy about working at Clintar is every day is different. You work with a lot of different people. I enjoy helping the franchises from the very beginning to become successful big businesses. That’s probably the biggest part I enjoy. Like I said, every day is different, it never gets boring and there’s never enough time in the day to get done what I need to get done so I’m never bored.

Describe some of your biggest achievements over the time you’ve worked at Clintar.

Well, I think one of the biggest achievements is probably building the accounting department and the bookkeeping service because franchising wasn’t even part of Clintar when I first joined Clintar. We started our first franchise many years ago. It was John O’Leary and Murray Stebban, and they just couldn’t figure out how to get their bookkeeping done. And so, Bob approached me and said, “What would you think about doing the books for the franchise?” So I started doing the first franchisee’s books and it just went from there. We built this bookkeeping service for our franchisees and as far as I know we’re the only franchisor in Canada that does books for franchises.

I pride myself on providing a really, really good service for our franchises and it’s not an easy thing to do. Each franchise is a different guy to work with or girl and it’s challenging sometimes but we really want to give them some good quality financial statements, and that’s what we pride ourselves on.

What sort of activities to do you enjoy outside of Clintar?

I love gardening. I like to read. I do a lot of crafting but the most important thing now to me is I’ve been blessed to have a grandson who’s now eight months old, and I’m about to have another one in a couple of months so all my time is now taken up with my grandchildren and I absolutely love it.

What is one thing that you wish others knew about your position at Clintar?

I think a lot of people misunderstand my position. They think it’s just punching in a bunch of numbers and pushing a button and a financial statement pops out. It’s so much more than that. It’s dealing with people and personalities, it’s knowing about cash flow. It’s making decisions about cash flow. It’s knowing payroll. It’s knowing so many things about different things and a lot of people don’t realize how busy I am. I mean, it’s knowing so much about so many different things. It’s a challenging position and I’ve been doing it for 40 years.