When Sam Bendavid, BEng 02, took over as chief executive officer of TC Transcontinental this past April, he was stepping into a company he had spent 18 years helping to reshape.
That included engineering a $2.1-billion sale of its packaging division just weeks before his appointment. The decision to divest was not impulsive. Public markets were undervaluing the business and industry consolidation was forcing a choice between doubling down or getting out.
They got out and got out well, but Bendavid had not planned for the transaction to clear the runway for his own ascent to the top job.
Very little about Bendavid’s career trajectory was planned. He enrolled in software engineering at Concordia because, as he puts it, his friends were doing it.
He graduated in 2002 into the wreckage of the dot-com bust and took a job in quantitative finance, a hybrid role building computational models that happened to suit his degree and was what was available at the time.
Bendavid joined TC Transcontinental in 2008 as an analyst in the mergers and acquisitions department after spotting a job posting.
“Just pure luck,” he says.
What followed was anything but luck. Over 18 years, Bendavid rose through the company’s mergers and acquisitions function, led major acquisitions including Coveris Americas in 2018, and moved into operations with P&L responsibility running the advanced coatings division and the procurement function. He eventually returned to lead corporate development before being named CEO.
Bendavid was approached by other companies along the way but declined each time.
“The culture at TC Transcontinental is amazing, the challenges are amazing,” he says. “Even after 18 years, it’s still as exciting as the first day.”
He sometimes has to remind himself how far he has come.
When asked to reflect on the path from software engineering student to CEO, he points to the long-term value of his engineering background. “When you look at it in terms of hindsight,” he says, “it’s probably the best thing I could have done.”
He describes success as the accumulation of incremental progress over time. “At the end of the day, you turn back and realize you’ve climbed Everest,” he says.
His degree from what is now the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, meanwhile, proved more durable than he had anticipated. In a room full of executives, Bendavid says he is often the only one who can engage fluently with questions of software, AI and technology.
He credits his coursework in UI and usability — the study of how people interact with products — with giving him a valuable perspective.
“My background has allowed me to look at things a little bit differently,” Bendavid says. “Not just from having to create a product, but how usable it is, how attractive it is and how people are going to be hooked by it.”
It’s a lens, he suggests, that still shapes how he evaluates a business.
Bendavid finished his degree because he is naturally hardwired to finish what he starts. That disposition has carried him a long way, and he’s now applying it to a company that has been significantly reshaped over time, with ambitions to grow again.
As he leads TC Transcontinental’s next chapter, Bendavid has framed a simple rallying cry for teams across the organization: “Everybody sells, everybody saves, everybody transforms.”
The phrase, he says, reflects a culture in which growth, discipline and reinvention are shared responsibilities rather than the mandate of a single department.