Jim Treliving

Transcription

[applause] Diana Swain: Hello everyone. Good evening. Jim really needs no introduction, but we'll go through the formality anyway. Of course, he's an original member of the Dragons' Den, which, I believe, is now in it's fifth or starting sixth season at CBC. Are we into seven now? Oh, it's good, you got all the figures, not that I was able to see that with the glasses on, that's good. Of course, many of you will be familiar with the program. It's one of CBC's most watched programs, and in fact, is one of the most watched programs in terms of Canadian television across all other networks. So, a tremendous success on many levels not only because it's really sort of opened many people's eyes about the value of entrepreneurship and what's involved because there is a portion of our population that is not involved directly in small business other than perhaps to work for someone, and so it's really opened people's eyes and I think increased their understanding of how it works. So, we'll try to do more of that tonight as we discuss it. DS: Jim is co-owner of the Boston Pizza franchise with more than a billion dollars in annual sales and co-owner of Mr. Lube. I'm hoping that there's no synergy there, totally separate businesses. Boston Pizza has been chosen by Deloitte and the National Post as one of the 50 best managed companies every year since 1994 which is tremendous and extraordinary, and it was recently recognized as having one of Canada's 10 most admired corporate cultures, and you can imagine how difficult it would be to crack that list. You may not know though he was once considered a small town bad boy. Yes, we are getting into that tonight. [laughter] DS: And for a time, I was surprised to learn reading the book, ran a basement nightclub. That I would not have guessed. [laughter] You will also know him much better about an hour from now, and we'll also be taking some questions from you toward the end of the evening tonight. And hopefully, you'll also have some take away advice from someone who started a small business and has helped pioneer it into one of the largest that Canada has. His book is called, "Decisions, Making the Right Ones, Righting the Wrong Ones." Please join me in welcoming Jim Treliving. [applause] DS: Hello to you. Jim Treliving: Hi, how are you doing? DS: Nice to see you. JT: Nice to see you. JT: Nice to be here. DS: You can see now why when I fill in for Mansbridge, I'm on a riser. [laughter] JT: Yes, I can see that. DS: Just a fake night. DS: What a tremendous book, I really enjoyed reading it. JT: Thank you. It was a lot of fun putting it together. DS: Alright. Let's go through some of the things in this book that I found fascinating. First of all, you and I have a lot in common. We were both born in Manitoba, I in Thompson, you in Virden, Manitoba. JT: Yes, yes. DS: I didn't know that, so we got our prairie roots. JT: Small town, little town for me. You're a big town. DS: Thompson? [laughter] JT: Yeah. We had 2500. DS: We might have had 3500. 02:55 JT: There you go. DS: It's interesting what I learned in reading the book what your takeaway was from life in a small town, in particular what your father taught you about money. How to earn it, how to manage it, and his thoughts on borrowing money. JT: You know, we grew up on a... My dad never got married till he was 37 years old. He married my mother who was, her father was a mayor of my hometown for 29 years, so you couldn't really do anything bad there because he knew everything that was going on in the town. But it was amazing for us to grow up in that environment because he was more like an older person that when I was growing up and my mother was closer to me because she was younger by 17 years than my dad. And I had asked him one day, I said, "Dad, why did it take you so long to get married?" And he said, "I couldn't afford me, never mind a family." In those days, there was no credit cards and we never grew up with a credit card. I never saw a credit card till I got one. And I can remember we never had a mortgage on our house. We lived in... The first house he lived in was a little terrace house that when I was born there was a picture of me as a baby, I think, just after the war. And then, the second one was we moved in this little house, and of course... That was $350. And then, the house that we moved in where I lived and really grew up was in a house that was $1500 and he paid it cash, he paid it $500 in three-month periods, and so that was the only time. We never knew about mortgages or borrowing. JT: So, he was the type of person that if you couldn't afford it you didn't have it. Now, imagine living on the prairies for 12... I was 12 years old when we got our first car. I rode the Greyhound bus up to my grandmother's place in Saskatchewan on a weekend or took the train that stopped at every little town along the way and took you an hour to go 35 miles. And those were what I grew up with and thought everybody else did that, but we lived well. I thought everybody lived like us, I thought everybody was... We went to church on Sunday and that was our thing because my mother said you had to. My dad looked at me and said, "You have to go because your mother said you have to go." [laughter] JT: I said, "What? Are you going?" He said, "Well, I'm going because you're going." [laughter] So, that was the lifestyle we lived in, and it was a great lifestyle. My mum just passed away about four years ago. She was 90 years old. Never remarried when my dad died. And I said, "Why?" And she said, "'Cause I was too scared to get a skunk," and I said, "Oh." [laughter] "I didn't know there were skunks out there, mum." But she was the princess in our family, and my wife will tell you today that she, at 90 years old... She died on New Year's Eve when we were getting ready and the first thing she said to me was, "Are we having a party tonight?" And I said, "Yes mum, we are." "Are we having a band?" "Yes." JT: And two hours later, she was gone. But she died of a stroke and went out, and I did the eulogy at her funeral, and mum was always late for everything. She had maybe 15 minutes. She would always be late or what she thought was 15. My dad was the complete opposite. If we were catching the train or going somewhere, we were there an hour-and-a-half ahead of time. [laughter] So what we used to do was he would come in and say, "You know the train leaves at 8:30." Well, it actually left at 9:30 or quarter to 10. So, we were sitting in the station, and we had two-and-a-half blocks to go to the station, so you know what it was like. [laughter] So, that's the lifestyle that I grew up in a small town, and we thought that everybody lived like we do. DS: There's a passage in the book that I just wanted to pull out, to illustrate, what I thought was interesting about what he was teaching you about money. And it reads, "To the day he died, my dad was a cash-only kind of guy. As a child of the Great Depression, he never shook off his mortal fear of debt. And banks to him were not benevolent entities out to give someone a hand, they kept people shackled. There's a lot of wisdom in his way of thinking, but there's also a lot of fear. In business and life, I've tried to find a balance between risk and growth. To grow, I need to borrow money. To secure those loans, I had to take on some risks. Luckily for me, it paid off." It was interesting, your colleague on the Dragons' Den wrote "The Wealthy Barber". You're dad, in fact, became the wealthy barber. JT: Yes, he did. He was a barber. DS: And he was a kind of a bank himself. JT: Yeah, and he was called the banker because in those days all the barber shops, and they made, I think it was 35 cents or 40 cents for a haircut, and 10 cents or 15 cents for a shave. And so we lived on that, and we got a little oil boom that hit Manitoba about 1955, and we had a bunch of oil wells around our area. So, my dad always had cash. He would go in his back pocket and... He had a lot of cash in his back pocket, but it was hard to get it out of the back pocket. [laughter] JT: So, you'd go back on Friday night, he'd lean back and he'd pull out this wad, and it had a black strap around with a bunch of bands on it, elastic bands. And he'd lick his hand and pull a one out, he'll look at you. [laughter] And I said, "Dad, I can't go anywhere with it," one more. And I swear, the queen's head moved every time he did it. [laughter] 'Cause he slid it out, but that was how his way of telling you that it was very important to have money the way, to live like that. JT: Again, credit cards were, the funny thing about this piece where we talk about the credit card thing. When I joined the police force, and this is a few years later, I decided to take my mum and dad on a holiday. Now, we went from Virden, Manitoba, 90 miles... Or 65 miles south to the US border, and then across the border into North Dakota and there's not a whole lot in North Dakota. And then across to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Minneapolis, Saint Paul. That was a big city for us, it was like Winnipeg. And I remember driving along and the first time I came up to a gas station to get gas. And I pulled up and I had a credit card. And he was sitting in the right hand side, I was driving, my wife was at the back, in the back seat with my mum. And the guy came up to fill the gas, come back wash the windshield, come out and I hand the credit card out. I signed it. Now, I'm in North Dakota, I signed the credit card and handed it back out and he tears a piece off and hands it back. It was a Chargex card, in fact. Now it's called Visa. And he looked at me, and he looked at the guy, and he looked back, and he said, "What the hell was that?" [laughter] JT: And I said... And I hear mum in the back, "Don't swear." [laughter] And he said, "What is that all about?" And I said, "Well, it's a credit card." He said, "I know that it's a credit card, what the hell are you doing with one? You don't have any money." I said, "Well, I got a good job at the police." "No, no. But how are they gonna get your money?" I said, "Well, as they entered it in the computer... " Now we're going. [laughter] "And it goes back to Toronto or somewhere and then they bill me at the end of the month." "Has everybody got one of these?" I said, "Well, a few of us got some." JT: I said, "Most people are starting to pick them up because they mail them out to you there" and so on. And he said, "So everybody's got one of these cards? How do they know you live in BC, and you don't know anything about this stuff?" I said, "Well, they'll find me because it's on my form that I filled out." "Nobody's cash?" I said, "Nope, no cash." He looked at me for a minute and he said, "Boy, the country is in a hell of a mess." [laughter] He wasn't that far wrong. [laughter] JT: But he wanted to know you could get paid from one part of the country to the other, and how you could be billed. It was just beyond him. And that was why we lived in... Why I didn't have a car, we didn't have a car until I was 12, 'cause he paid cash for it. He paid cash for his house, he paid cash for his car. We never knew what it was to have bad meal or no food in the house, that was a given. My mother stayed home, although she was a very bright woman. He thought that was her... She looked after that and he had to provide everything for that. And so, that was the area you grew up in and that's... If she looked out the window and said that it was snowing, I didn't have to look out the window. I would say, "Mum, it's raining." And he'd look at me and say, "It's snowing." [laughter] JT: "You listen to your mother." So that was the... There was no... If the princess talked and that was the way it was. You never thought anymore about it and that's how he taught us to be in the respect we had. DS: It's interesting in reading the book how that small town experience really framed your view of the world and what you knew. JT: Oh yeah. Yes, it did. DS: And then, as you've mentioned, as some people would know from watching the program as well, at 19, you were taking on what you think is going to be your life plan, which is to be an RCMP Officer and your first posting is Prince George. I also lived there. I know, rough and tumble place. How did that frame who you became as a business person? Because that is one wild shift of experience going from small town Virden to policing the wilds of Prince George? JT: Well, I think the biggest thing that happened for me was when I left home, and there were 32 guys who went through training at that time, and remember it was 11 months of training, 10-1/2 to 11 months of training. That's what's wrong with the outfit today, and I'll say that to anybody who wants to talk. We weeded the garbage out, as we called it. If you couldn't make that eleven months... It was hell. I've never went through anything in my life like it. But it gave me a backbone and it gave me a thing that I'd never back away from anything, that I got... The fear sort of got out of you. They knocked it out of you. So you never had a fear again. I never had a fear of business, down the road in the business world. But the first thing was that when I... I remember, I was a big kid back home. And we played football and we played all the games. But when I got there, I was nervous. I was never a big guy that could go out and start a fight. I could probably do okay in one. But it wasn't until I got there that they took that fear of the unknown in a scrap or whatever. So I never had that fear again. And in fact, they taught us so well, you used to walk down the back alley and hope that somebody would jump out, so you could do something. [laughter] JT: So, your attitude changed and your thinking changed, but what it did was give you, like I say, a little bit of backbone and strength, and I've often said in this business is what changed me completely was the training. And we were the best of the best when we came out of there, and we had to earn that because if... I've seen guys get knocked out in the last three weeks after you've been through nine and a half months and you don't make it, I mean because they... That's what they wanted. So, when we got to the streets of Prince George in the Kamloops and the front, what we called like your little frontier cities in those days because Prince George when I got there was about 16,000 people, it's a city of 80,000 to 100,000 today. One of the things we did was one Christmas there, I think it was 1962 I sent a telex out across the country, and it went in to the US and back, and it said, "How many people are we holding in the cells around the world that are in for murder?" And Prince George had seven. We had seven different people sitting in our cells. New York City had five and Detroit had nine. [chuckle] JT: So to give you some idea how tough it was and how we were in there, not that we were a tough bunch of guys, but that was what was going on. It was four pulp mills running, they were building a new railroad through, the whole thing. So, when I came out of training, I was very ingrained in what I had to do. When I got to that city, I didn't have fear. I wasn't worried about that. In fact, if you know what Prince George was like, on Saturdays, they used to... Not Saturdays, Friday nights and Thursday nights, they used to sit in their cars on the top of the... The Shell station across from the toughest hotel in town watch the mounties pick up guys and see the fights out there. You never thought of it, you never had... DS: It was cheaper than cable. [chuckle] JT: Yeah. It was a lot of fun too. But it was a tough town and you had to respect, you had to earn the respect. And I think that was the first thing. You worked hard at it, and you had to be in shape, and you had to be ready to do the things you had... The other thing it gave you the stamina when you're in the... Later years, it helped me with the business side because when somebody came up to me and say, later in, when I started in business, "Aren't you afraid?" "Afraid of what? I mean, you should have seen what I was doing before. That was afraid. This is fun." [chuckle] DS: Well, and I love the anecdote because you can see it happening where you and your partner end of shift, 2 AM, nothing's open, and again, I remember when I was doing late news early in my career, your whole circadian rhythm is off because you're having dinner at 2 o'clock in the morning, you're working different shifts because that's what your life becomes. And you're always trying to find a place that's open late to go somewhere to eat. You guys end up at this little place, a pizza joint. JT: A little place called Boston Pizza and Spaghetti House. It was in Edmonton. I got transferred out of Prince George and I was in Edmonton. And my partner at that time where I felt I really knew really well, he wasn't my partner at the time, but he became my partner. He was an Edmonton city policeman. And my uncle was an Edmonton city policeman who had been a Toronto city policeman who moved up to Edmonton. And he introduced me to Don, and we were going out, and he said, "Where do you wanna go tonight?" We'd just come back off a case and I said, "We usually go to the Chinese restaurant. Go in the back door. They feed us for nothing and we get out of there." So, he said, "Let's go down to this place. I was there the other night." and he said, "They're great friends and I got to know them." And he said, "It's a great place." JT: So, I'm walking through the door, I'm looking up and it said Boston Pizza and Spaghetti House, and it's a hole in the wall. There's a water-cooled pop machine there. So, I'm walking thinking this Spaghetti House is gotta be Italian. So, I see these two guys standing there with moustaches on, and black pointed shoes, and a black pin tie. And I'm looking at these guys, "Oh, little Italian guys.". Well, it turned out they weren't Italian, they were Greek. I didn't know the difference. DS: Running Boston Pizza. JT: Running Boston Pizza. And they walked over and give me a menu and I said... The guy comes up and, "What do you want?" I said, "I'll have a pizza." "What kind?" I said, "I don't know." DS: Had you ever had pizza? JT: Never eaten a pizza in my life. Never had anything to do with pizza. Never been in a pizza place. And they open the thing up and it's got 20 kinds of pizza. So, I'm looking down the numbers. "I'll have the number 20" 'cause it's listed 20. Turned out to be a Hawaiian pizza. So, I get this thing, open it all up, and then I'm standing there waiting for the knife and fork. They came in a paper plate and I... As the waiters come by, the Greek guy or the Italian guy, whatever he was at that time that I thought, and he comes back and he looks at me and he said, "What do you want?" I said, "Knife and fork." "Eat with the hand. Don't you read the menu?" So I open the menu it says, "Eat with your fingers." [laughter] JT: So, here's I'm at, trying to eat this thing, and I bit into it, and I liked it... No, the rest wasn't I bought the company right away. I thought, "This is not bad." And so that's how it started. That was my first experience of being there. Now, they didn't know what I did for a living, which is another story because I had long hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. DS: But I think what struck me in reading this, not as an entrepreneur someone who maybe someday will be, who knows, but that you saw pizza differently. JT: Oh yeah. DS: That you saw this as a different experience because as you say the only meals you'd had up to that point were... JT: Beef and potatoes. DS: Everyone keeps their hands to themselves, knife and fork. This was a shared experience. JT: Keep your elbows off the table. This one was just you dig in. DS: But isn't that the quality of an entrepreneur to see something that everybody else has seen, but to see it differently and start to imagine a different path for it? JT: I think at the time I was really looking for something that I'd never eaten before and to see it I wasn't even thinking anything of business. That came down almost six months, nine months later. And I'm looking at this thing and then we started going back on Friday night and we'd hang out at the place. Gus kept saying to me, when I found out he was Greek and he wasn't Italian, and he was Santorini, and he'd jumped ship in Vancouver, and I hear this story and I'm going, "Oh my God, he's illegally in the country." [laughter] "And he doesn't know what I do for a living." [laughter] So we had a lot of fun with that for a while. But there was an amnesty program going on in Canada at that time, and I convinced him to go down and get a citizenship and that's what started the whole the thing to go in the other direction. And then I was being transferred to the bad, bad city to do some stuff in a place called Toronto. [laughter]