At the top end of places on offer is Necker Island.

It belongs to eccentric billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin Group, and at $45,500 a night is Luxury Retreats' most expensive property.

The 74-acre Virgin Islands paradise is expensive, but not outrageously so if you share the cost with 27 of your closest friends. "You're talking $2,000 per person per night, all included," Poulin said during an interview at his downtown offices.

The price includes the services of the island's 50-person staff, the pools, kitchens and even a private beach. Compared with the cost of more than two dozen hotel rooms, Poulin thinks it's worth the price.

But for vacationers on a more modest budget, Luxury Retreats offers places for as little as $200 a night.

Poulin's is a success story you can't help but be jealous of. He has a fancy new car, fancy clothes, a high-rise corner office, and owns a company he built from scratch. He flies to exotic luxury vacation areas around the world to tour multimillion-dollar homes and claims a confidential list of celebrity clients. As well, in the history of his business career he can't think of a single major mistake he's made.

Oh, and he's 25, and his company has never had a single penny of debt. It's enough to make you sick to your stomach.

A lot of it is luck, but a quick glance at Poulin's history shows his company's success is also due to a keen business sense, some new ideas, and the ability to capitalize on a golden opportunity.

Poulin has always been passionate about business, ever since he began selling computer parts out of his bedroom at age 11. It was the early 1990s, and he was living with his parents in Pincourt, using Internet newsgroups to advertise.

As the decade went by and the World Wide Web began to explode, Poulin taught himself how to build websites and became a Web designer.

Eventually, he was approached by the owner of a luxury home in the Caribbean, who wanted to set up a website to advertise it as a villa for rent.

Renting is a common practice for people who own expensive homes in vacation areas and are travelling too much to enjoy them all the time. To recoup mortgage and maintenance costs, they rent them out for a week or two at a time.

Poulin, who at 17 had never been on a plane before and had not travelled farther than Ottawa, wanted to learn more, so he went online and searched for websites of leading firms in the industry.

He couldn't find anything. The industry existed, but nobody had developed an online presence for it.

So in 1999, Poulin started a company called Caribbean Way, which advertised villa rentals for a fee. The business model quickly changed and he became a middleman in the transactions, taking a commission.

The business took off.

From his bedroom, Poulin had enough work to allow him to drop out of CEGEP. Eventually, there was so much to do that he hired his brother, Jazz.

"The business expanded from one bedroom to two," Joe Poulin said. When it became clear that they couldn't be taken seriously as teenagers running a company out of their bedrooms, they left home.

That's when they created a second company, Luxury Retreats International, which rents villas and yachts around the world. Jazz Poulin quit his job as a sandwich artist at Subway, dropped out of a political science program at Concordia University and jumped in full-time.

But even as they set up an office and started hiring employees, Joe Poulin wasn't convinced he was invincible.

"I thought, worst-case scenario, I lose everything, move back to my dad's house," Joe Poulin said, half-joking. "Good home cooking, free rent."

That didn't happen. Instead, his company continued growing, opening offices in the Barbados and Shanghai. He also bought another company in Maui.

Despite their successes, the Poulin brothers don't live an extravagant lifestyle. Their salaries are low - they prefer to invest money back into the company - they fly economy class most of the time, and they eat fast food just like the rest of us.

But Joe Poulin did admit one thing he splurged on: his new $64,000 Lexus GS 450 hybrid. "You have to understand, I do like cars," he said.

Source: The Gazette