Crossing to Rubicon means joining a world of ideas

When Stefani Vukmanovic sat down for her job interview with the government relations firm Rubicon Strategy Inc. in 2021, she knew exactly what she was looking for. “I really wanted something that was fast paced and challenging in a rewarding way. I wanted to be able to grow and to learn. That was a really big thing for me.”

Four years later, she knows she got what she wanted. She’s had two promotions after starting out as a consultant and is now an account director overseeing daily operations in the life sciences section of the firm’s health care practice. “I’ve had access to lots of brilliant people and the opportunity to learn, grow, ask questions and feel empowered to do that,” she says. “Senior leadership is approachable and there’s a really strong emphasis on mentorship and learning.”

Based in Toronto and Ottawa, the growing, 30-member firm’s main business is helping Canadian companies deal with governments in six select areas of practice: health, energy, defence, mergers & acquisitions, transportation and labour. “We’re a lobbying company,” says co-founder and CEO Kory Teneycke, with its clients largely public in government lobbying registers. “These are market-leading companies who may have issues with things either the government is doing or things it is not doing that they'd like to see it do.”

That probably sounds like a highly political business for employees, and indeed both Teneycke and former Hill & Knowlton Strategies leader Michael Coates, who together founded the firm in 2018, have long associations with the Conservative Party. But Teneycke notes that in 2024, he brought on David Herle, a former top Liberal Party strategist federally and in Ontario, as a partner. Teneycke says the team is probably divided “roughly 50-50” between supporters of the two parties “with the occasional New Democrat.” The firm doesn’t participate in elections itself, though members at times take leaves of absence to join the fray.

But politics is not really the point. “The mechanics of government and moving ideas forward in the idea marketplace is something that really doesn't know partisanship,” Teneycke says. “These things work irrespective of what the government is.”

The more important qualification, he says, is experience with government and subject-matter expertise. “A lot of our people are former chiefs of staff” for government ministers. At the entry level, he adds, the firm takes in a couple of student interns each year and is willing to hire people straight out of university as part of the broad mix of professional backgrounds.

Vukmanovic is an example; she joined the firm after graduating from York University’s bilingual Glendon College in international relations and political science. She began as a consultant monitoring and summarizing media reports, then became interested in the health-care files and became part of the life sciences group, dealing primarily with pharmaceutical firms.

Now, as account director, she is able to offer strategic advice directly to clients. “At the forefront of a lot of our conversations is the impact on patient care,” she says. “That is what persuaded me to join the health-care team, a driving moment for me.”

Teneycke says retaining people like Vukmanovic is a key goal for the organization, and it offers an unusually wide range of big-company benefits for a small firm. “We’re pulling a lot of people from government, which tends to have very robust benefit packages, so it's important that we, at minimum, match that level.” Plus, he adds one more highly effective retention factor: “We pay more than anyone else in the marketplace.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Top Small & Medium Employers winners, published April 8, 2025 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.