Bertin Rioux spent two decades in modular construction, including a stint as owner, before joining Clyvanor as Sales Manager. This episode is a field manual on supply-chain vulnerability, the sales muscles that atrophied during COVID, and why wood is now competing for buildings that used to be steel by default.
In early 2021, Bertin Rioux's team had a Rockwool insulation order confirmed, delivery Monday, a Hydro-Québec project ready to start. Thursday, three days out, the order was cancelled. The product had gone elsewhere — allocated to whoever would pay more. His crew spent the next 48 hours driving across Quebec buying bags off store shelves.
That story captures something cost tables and product sheets don't: the COVID supply chain wasn't just slow or expensive, it had no loyalty. Confirmed orders were fiction. As Rioux puts it, "if somebody was going to pay higher and if they have the product it would go to the highest bidder" — your order was a placeholder, not a commitment.
Rioux is the Sales Manager at Clyvanor, a Quebec-headquartered manufacturer of roof trusses, open-web floor joists, and prefabricated wall panels. The company runs three plants — Saint-Georges, QC; Palmer, MA; and a modular facility — with roughly 250 employees, selling into Quebec, Atlantic Canada, Ontario, and the northeastern United States. Grand Falls, NB is where Rioux is based. The episode covers 59 minutes and a career arc most construction podcasts wouldn't know how to make useful: forestry technician, Pepsi Canada, car sales, 22 years in modular construction including ten as owner, then a move to structural components at Clyvanor in 2018. That breadth is the point.
The supply-chain lesson nobody wrote down
The Rockwool story isn't the worst of it. Across the COVID stretch, lumber prices moved so fast that a job quoted in the morning could be uneconomic by the time the material was sourced. Contracts priced months earlier arrived with a different number on the invoice: as Rioux describes the scene, "the PO said it was ten thousand dollars but you invoiced 17... we had to sell the job again". Salespeople had to go back to customers they had already won and re-justify the margin. Twice, sometimes three times, on the same job.
The deeper structural problem was critical-path dependency. When a key engineered lumber product disappears, there is no workaround — as Rioux puts it, "in our business if you don't have any lvls you're not building" and there is nothing to be done about it. LVL — laminated veneer lumber — is the structural backbone of a truss or joist package. No LVL, no production. The lesson for any building-supply operation with critical-path materials: multi-source relationships are an operational necessity, not a procurement preference. You find out which suppliers are real partners the same way you find out who your friends are — under pressure.
What COVID actually did to construction sales
For roughly 30 months, construction suppliers barely needed to sell. Demand outpaced supply and orders filled themselves. Relationships, follow-up, qualification, competitive pricing — those muscles went soft. Then the cycle turned.
In 2023, with interest rates climbing and buyers more cautious, the old skills had to come back fast. Rioux describes what that looked like on the floor: "we actually have to work to get the sales in now we have to follow up that's something we haven't done in 35 30 months". The rate sensitivity is direct: when "if interest rates are high people are a little bit more hesitant so we have to double down as sales people" that's not a theory — it's the week-to-week operating reality.
Rioux's read on what sales actually is is worth sitting with. He doesn't frame it as persuasion or pipeline management. "I'm not really good in sales I'm just good at relationships" — that's the whole framework, stated plainly. His theory is that the musician's state and the salesperson's state are the same thing: you're reading another person, responding in real time, staying present to what they actually need. As he explains it: "same thing in the sales environment when you're pitching something when you're responding to questions" — the flow state is the same, the input is different. The sales training industry sells systems; Rioux's version is simpler and probably harder. You have to actually care about the other person's problem.
The orthodoxy against getting too close to customers doesn't survive contact with B2B construction reality either. "theoretically you should not make friends from your customers... but I think you do automatically" — and in his telling, that's not a failure of professional discipline, it's just honest about how long-term supply relationships actually work. When you're working with the same contractors, builders, and promoters across years of projects, the relationship isn't a soft extra. It is the working capital.
Engineered wood and the six-storey shift
The structural-product side of the conversation is where the episode earns its technical depth. The 2015 National Building Code of Canada expanded permitted wood-frame construction from three storeys to six for residential, business, and personal services buildings — a change verified by the Canadian Wood Council. That shift is now showing up in the commercial project mix Clyvanor bids on. As Rioux notes, "with the engineered Lumber you can do up to six story buildings which is pretty cool because not too long ago it was only three" — and that extra three floors is the difference between a mid-rise wood project and a default steel one.
The floor it opened was commercial work that previously went to steel without much deliberation. Cost pressure is driving the recalculation. "Engineers are becoming much more price sensitive so you know it used to be hey it's just we do it in steel" — that default assumption is eroding. The result is a wave of hybrid structures: concrete or steel ground floor for load-bearing and parking requirements, wood-frame upper floors for cost efficiency. Engineers who used to default to steel for mid-rise are running the numbers on wood, and the numbers are often making the argument for them.
The supply side of those buildings runs through a product stack — LVL, open-web joists, laminated lumber, mass timber — that Clyvanor manufactures and delivers via its own transportation division. Design work is handled partly by offshore staff: "we even have worked with people out of Vietnam right now designers because sourcing" — a tight domestic design-labour market drove the call. Production labour is sourced internationally as well. "we have workers from Mexico we have workers from Colombia... contractors are getting their own lifts" — the labour geography has changed, and so has who owns the equipment.
Modular on a deadline: the Gray Rock Casino
The most concrete project in the episode is the Gray Rock Casino Hotel in Edmundston, NB — an 85-room hotel and casino complex operated by the Madawaska Maliseet First Nation. The build used a hybrid approach: site-built first floor with wall panels, modular boxes for the upper floors. Workers came from Quebec, across the border during COVID, with all the entry complications that involved.
The schedule argument for modular is what tends to surprise people who think of it as primarily a cost play. Once the modular boxes are ready, installation is dramatically fast. As Rioux describes the crane-set: "a couple three four days later the hotel's after it's like a big Show everybody's like wow" — that reaction from onlookers is not incidental, it is the commercial argument. Crane drops boxes; building goes up in days, not months. For owners with a hard opening date or a tight financing timeline, that schedule compression is the number that matters — not the per-square-foot comparison.
For commercial structural projects, Clyvanor works backwards from the required delivery date through design approval, material order, and manufacturing. "we work backwards we just you know we reverse engineer the whole project" — that's the planning discipline, stated plainly. Commercial jobs typically run six to nine months from first contact to delivery. The builders who arrive six months early with a partial set of drawings get a budget number; the ones who show up two months out don't get a number at all.
The market structure you're competing in
The Quebec truss and structural-component market has roughly 13 manufacturers operating within a 160km radius — a density that looks like a price war from the outside. It doesn't run that way. "there's probably like 13 manufacturers... it's a very friendly competition they communicate a lot" — competitors share capacity intelligence, talk through lead-time pressures, and coordinate at the association level. Competition benefits customers; the association provides cover for conversations that would otherwise be difficult to have.
The US market runs on a fundamentally different channel model. In Canada, Clyvanor sells direct to builders and contractors. In the US, "100 of our business is lumber yards we don't sell directly to the Builder" — lumber yards get early-warning demand signals that manufacturers don't see directly, a structural difference with real implications for forecasting and inventory.
Rioux is measured about construction's future. The industry has been structurally stable for a century. But the combination of sustained labour shortage and improving automation tools is accelerating — and the window over the next 20 to 30 years looks different from anything the industry has seen. He's not pessimistic about it. He's just paying attention.
Clyvanor Ltée
Clyvanor manufactures custom prefabricated wood structures — roof trusses, open-web floor joists, and prefabricated wall panels — for residential and commercial construction across Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and the northeastern United States. The company runs three facilities, employs roughly 250 people, and delivers via its own transportation division. Its roof-truss line is described by Rioux as the only fully automated line of its kind in North America.
Guest: Bertin Rioux, Sales Manager, Clyvanor Ltée. Episode 54 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Source for the 6-storey wood-frame building code change: Canadian Wood Council.