Bet On Me

Leading and Succeeding in Business and in Life

Annette Verschuren

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781443437608
• eBook ISBN: 9781443437615
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Finalist for the National Business Book Award

National Bestseller

In Bet On Me, leading entrepreneur Annette Verschuren lays out her surprising and inspiring philosophy for what it takes to lead and succeed in today’s economy: tenacity, the willingness to embrace risk and an unwavering commitment to remain true to yourself, no matter how unorthodox you may seem. Drawing on her experiences as a Cape Breton farm girl who went on to lead Home Depot Canada’s expansion from 19 to 179 stores, among other business ventures, Verschuren outlines a bold vision that will change the way you approach your work and your business. The book’s key message: modern leadership is not about learning skills and techniques in order to become someone else. Rather, leaders achieve breakthrough results when they learn to trust in, listen to and fully be themselves. As vital as Lean In and as must-reading as Good to Great, this book will change the way you look at business today.

CHAPTER 1

KNOW YOUR BASELINE

I don’t have many pictures of myself as a child. Five kids, a busy farm—we were so engaged in living our lives that we didn’t have much time to document the process. But there is one photograph that I cherish. It’s a faded, grainy, black-and-white picture, but it’s me all right. I’m about eight years old and standing in front of the milking stalls in the barn. I’ve got a bucket in one hand and a milking machine in the other. Arms as muscled as a teenage boy’s, bowl-cut blond hair in my eyes and a look of blithe determination on my face. I love that photo because it captures the heart of who I am: strong, independent, happy and not afraid to get my hands dirty.

My life has altered dramatically since that picture was taken. I’ve traded the cow stalls of Upper North Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the heart of one of the world’s busiest financial districts. But I keep that photo near because it reminds me that, in a fundamental way, I haven’t changed. That hard-working girl with dung under her fingernails? She’s my baseline. And as long as I stay true to her, I know I can’t go wrong.

Becoming a leader is one of the most profound professional and personal journeys you can take. The path starts out innocently enough. You get a promotion and suddenly you have people reporting to you. They’re following you because of your title. Because you’re working closely with your team, you have the opportunity to get to know everyone individually. Over time, these close working relationships blossom into a mutual respect that reinforces your leadership, over and above your job title. When this happens, people follow you not because they have to, but because they want to. But at some point in your leadership career, you cross a threshold. You simply cannot develop intimate relationships with your entire team, because that team is the size of a small city. Front-line workers don’t report to you per se; they report to supervisors or managers who are many steps away from your name on the org chart. At that point, leaders who rely on title alone are dead in the water. When you get to that level of leadership, your credibility as a leader comes not from your title or from who you are, but from what you represent. I have witnessed this phenomenon over and over again in authentic leaders of all stripes, from the world of business, politics and social change. I never met Nelson Mandela, but I know what he represented: justice, freedom and perseverance. His unrelenting commitment to his values stood him through his long years in prison, and later helped to amplify his message and vision as a leader. His power was derived neither from his title (he was a prisoner for much of his adult life), nor from who he was (only a tiny fraction of his followers ever actually met the man). His power was rooted in what he represented.

So take a minute and think about it. What do you stand for? If you want to be the kind of leader the world needs now, you’ve got to be crystal clear on the values you uphold and represent. You’ve got to know your baseline.

ESTABLISHING MY BASELINE

In a perfect world, all aspiring leaders would be required to spend a year of their lives on a family farm, milking cows, doing barn chores, plowing fields and shovelling shit. I’m only half joking. I have a degree in business administration and I have had the honour of working with some of the world’s greatest business luminaries. Yet I got my introduction to the fundamental principles of leadership on our family farm.

It has been decades since I last milked a cow or drove a hay wagon. (Actually, there’s been one notable exception—in 2013 I took part in a cow-milking competition with Mark Eyking, an MP from Cape Breton who just happens to have been raised in one of the island’s most prominent farming families. I’m happy to report that at the end of the three-minute hand-milking competition, I had five and a half cups of milk, and he had half a cup.) No matter where in the world I find myself, I only have to close my eyes and boom! I’m right back on the farm, standing on the grassy hilltop, the tangy smell of silage and warm milk filling my nose, and a cool breeze blowing up off the harbour.

My parents, Anthony and Annie Verschuren, emigrated from Holland in 1951, part of a wave of Dutch immigrants who settled across Canada. After working for two years in Truro and then another two years on the St. Francis Xavier University farm in Antigonish, they scraped together enough money to buy a one-hundred-acre farm just outside the town limits of North Sydney, Cape Breton. The property had a house in decent condition, an old barn, ten cows and two horses. When my Opa came to visit from Holland, he called his son’s farm a “pile of rocks.” Pop called it paradise. Mom called it a whole pile of stuff to get organized. Three fundamentally different viewpoints all coming together in support of a single vision—making it in the new country. My grandfather’s skepticism helped my parents remain rooted in the real world. My father’s optimism fuelled the long, hard years required to bring their vision to life. And my mother’s pragmatism was the organizing influence they needed to fulfill their mission. You could say I was baptized into what I now know to be a highly successful team dynamic: the visionary (Pop), the organizer (Mom), and the analytical truth teller (Opa).

Over the next decade, my mother would give birth to five children—me, my sister, Dorothy, and my three brothers: Turk, Andy and Steven. I was number three. Ask anyone raised on a farm and they’ll tell you that an agricultural childhood is a mix of pure exhilaration and hard labour. Family farm isn’t a misnomer; it accurately describes the “all hands on deck” reality of what is now a fast-disappearing institution. My parents both left a potentially comfortable, middle-class life in Holland for a decidedly harder go in Canada. Throughout my childhood—even after the farm became better established—there was never much money to go around. When my siblings and I were very small, Mom wore the same winter coat for a decade. As we grew up, we became aware, in the way children do, that we were among the poorest of our peers. We wore hand-me-down clothes from friends and could never afford the niceties others enjoyed. But while we seldom had new threads, we were always clean, our shoes polished and our clothes ironed. Maybe it was this have-not experience, or maybe it was something totally inherent in me—either way, I hatched big plans for myself. When I was seven, I told my mother that I was going to be “president.” President of what, I doubt I knew. Some years later, I’d tell my relatives visiting from Holland that I wanted to be a millionaire. Even though we lived in humble circumstances, my entire family was building something together. The experience inspired in me a desire to dream big, and an understanding that I’d have to overcome obstacles and work hard to get what I wanted.

My parents were practical people with little money to spare, but they bought us toys when they could. I can remember a little buggy they gave us—we called it a “jigger”—that could drive on land and float in water. It was nearly always broken, but we loved fixing it almost as much as we loved riding—and ultimately breaking—it. Life was very, very simple. Mom and Pop wrote letters to family in Holland in which they described their new life in Canada in glowing terms. Maybe a bit too glowing. They were a proud couple and didn’t want their parents to worry needlessly. The reality was that our family lived from one milk cheque to another. No saving—just surviving and reinvesting.

As my parents worked to transform the rock pile into a functioning farm, we kids were gradually folded into the mix. We started out clearing land and picking rocks, and graduated to feeding calves, doing simple barn chores and milking cows. Meanwhile, our parents looked for ways to bring extra money into the household. Our neighbour, Mr. Al Lantz, worked as a salesman for L. E. Shaw Ltd., a brick company in Sydney. His company needed temporary help hauling gravel by wheelbarrow to make foundation blocks for houses. Pop took this job for one week when I was very little. He would get up at five to milk the cows, feed the animals, shovel out the manure and take the milk cans to the end of a steep driveway, where they’d be picked up by the dairy truck. Then he’d drive over to L. E. Shaw to start work at nine o’clock. He shovelled gravel all day. At five in the afternoon he would drive back home to do the farm routine, all over again. It was exhausting work but the pay was good and we needed the money. Over the years, Pop picked up odd jobs like this to support us. Mom did her part too. We also took in boarders who were studying at a nearby trade school, and a great deal of Mom’s time was spent on the extra work required to house and feed these young men.

Years later, in the early 1980s, my family was instrumental in working with our church parish to sponsor a Vietnamese family to settle in North Sydney. We still had little to spare, but we did our best to ensure the newcomers had the practical support they needed to integrate into their new lives. I was a member of the Parish committee that worked to find jobs, a home, hospital care, et cetera. For many years, they would thank me for the kindness my family showed them and I still receive Christmas cards from them. To this day when I think about our role in supporting that family, I feel a sense of pride. I learned that generosity and helping those in need is a form of currency; my parents taught me that helping others is an honour.

Our parents or caretakers are often the first leaders we encounter. Their example can either lay out how good leadership should or shouldn’t work. As I watched Mom and Pop and their unrelenting willingness to do whatever it took to bring their vision to life, while supporting us kids in our own development, my own baseline with respect to leadership emerged. I started to see leadership as a form of service. It was about leading by example from the trenches. My parents never once asked us to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. They set a powerful example I followed consciously and unconsciously, my entire life.

Because there was so much work to be done, our parents couldn’t afford to hold us back or baby us. As soon as we were seventy-five percent capable of doing a job, we were doing it. I was driving the tractor when I was nine years old. Imagine: a nine-year-old driving a tractor! I loved it—the freedom, the challenge, the responsibility. We never got bored on the farm because we were constantly being stretched to do more, try new things, push ourselves just a little beyond what we thought we could easily handle. I learned early on that giving people a big sandbox and lots of room to stretch is an essential part of motivation.

But life wasn’t all work. We had a lot of simple pleasures. Our parents planned an outing on the Sunday closest to their anniversary every year. They’d pile us five kids, a full picnic basket, a few toys, blankets and a bar of soap into a little wagon that was attached to the back of the tractor. Pop would drive and Mom would stand on the tractor tire bumper next to him. Off we went to Pottles Lake, which bordered the farthest edge of the farm, all of us breathing in diesel fumes. We’d set up our blankets on the lakeshore and spend hours playing in the water, eating goodies and relaxing. Then a quick bath in the lake so we wouldn’t have to have one when we got back home. I’ll admit, I get a little twinge of guilt over the phosphates that streamed into the water from our soapy hair but, as you’ll see, I made up for it later in my career. Looking back, those days seem like heaven. They didn’t cost anything but felt as wonderful to me as any expensive trip ever would. Being together was the important thing. From birth to age eleven, life was pretty much perfect.

And then everything changed.

It was the summer of 1967. Pop was forty-four and hitting his prime. The farm was turning a small profit, which he was reinvesting in the business. He was working especially hard that summer building a new barn. He also wanted to move a small storage building about twenty-five feet to the new barn so he wouldn’t have to walk so far carrying the heavy milk cans to the cooler. He had devised a plan to move the building with his brother, my Uncle Cor. He’d use the tractor to pull the building off its foundation onto some strategically placed round logs. Then he planned to roll the building, using the logs as wheels, to its new location. It rained the morning of the move and the logs were wet. In the process, the building slipped off its rollers. I don’t know exactly what happened next, but whatever my father did to try to stop the building from slipping was intensely strenuous. He had a massive heart attack, straining his heart muscle, which had already been scarred by pleurisy when he was very young. And just like that, my life changed completely.

FINDING THE GOOD IN THE BAD

I’ve noticed that people spend an awful lot of time worrying about catastrophes. What I’ve learned—beginning with the very first catastrophe I ever experienced, my father’s heart attack—is that intense hardship brings out the very best in people.

The doctors told us that there was a fifty percent chance that Pop wouldn’t survive. But they were one hundred percent certain that if he lived, he’d never be able to do hard labour again. Farming has changed a lot in forty-eight years, but in those days farming was ninety percent hard labour. Dad’s prognosis meant he’d never truly be able to work on the farm again.

Overnight, Mom was left at home with five children under fourteen. Haying season—one of the busiest and most important times on any farm because it is when the feed is harvested that will sustain the cows for the long winter—was a few short weeks away. We kids were capable, but there was no way we could bring the hay in on our own. My uncle and aunt who lived next door helped out when they could, but they had their hands full running their own farm. Nor could we ask other farmers we knew for help; like my relatives, they’d be flat out in their own fields. We couldn’t buy feed for the winter because we had no savings. Meanwhile, the cows had to be milked twice a day every day. These were the blunt realities we faced, even as we dealt with the stress of almost losing Pop. It quickly became clear that the only thing standing between us and the poorhouse was my fearless mother and her brood of gangly kids. There were no drawn-out meetings or negotiations. Together we sprung to action. We didn’t overthink, we did. And that’s what saved us.

Mom, my oldest brother, Turk, who was twelve, and I, then eleven, shared the milking duty. We got up every morning at five to milk the cows. Andy fed the calves. Dorothy, who was fourteen, stayed in the house with our youngest brother, Steven, who was only two. Dorothy cooked breakfast, made lunches and dressed the younger children. We had no shower back then, so Turk, Andy and I ate a quick breakfast and washed up before school. In the afternoons we’d come home and follow a similar routine. Weeks passed. Every day Dorothy went to the hospital to visit our father. He was beside himself with frustration that he couldn’t help us. Dorothy told him that between Mom, Turk and me, the milking was getting done. His biggest worry was how we were going to bring in the hay.

Then one day there was a knock at our door. Mom opened it to find an old acquaintance of ours, Frank Beaton. Frank had been a district councillor for the area and had met my parents when he was campaigning several years earlier. He and his wife, Joan, had seven children and had once been farmers, though they hadn’t been able to make a go of it. So Frank had taken on a government job with a good salary and four weeks’ holiday. His daughter, Lorna, was my best friend, and when I wasn’t needed on the farm, I would visit her house. He told my mother he’d heard we were in trouble and was there to help us make the hay. Frank spent his entire vacation driving the mower and balers while my siblings and I packed the hay bales in the barn. When my father got out of the hospital a month later, he cried at seeing the barn filled with hay—enough to feed our herd during the cold months. My parents called it a miracle. Without Frank’s help, there would have been no way we could have hung on to the farm. To this day, I get emotional thinking about Frank Beaton, and how his act of generosity saved our farm. Today, we focus a great deal of our charity efforts on giving money. Money is a wonderful thing—it makes the world go round. But Frank’s deed was a powerful testament to the power of giving something other than money. I have followed his example throughout my career.

Over the next few years, my parents worked together to lead the farm. My mother—the practical, thrifty one—managed the finances. Pop set the direction and made decisions over how we’d spend our time and money. The kids did a lot of the work. I developed ropey muscles and callus-hardened hands. I can remember one year I went trick-or-treating with Andy. We had taken great delight in creating costumes that rendered us totally incognito. When we got to one of our neighbours’ houses, he made a great production of trying to figure out who we were. He studied the only parts of us that were exposed—our hands—and declared that we were clearly both boys. I took his candy and said thank you, but I was mad as hell and couldn’t understand why Andy thought the episode was so hilarious.

Another reason why I think farming is a great preparation for leadership is that you learn the secret of work-life balance. And the secret is this: Make your work fun. I was always looking for ways to make money. It wasn’t the money itself that thrilled me; it was the rush of actually making it, a rush I enjoy to this day. Although the farm was doing okay, there was never any question of us kids getting paid—my parents simply didn’t have the money. So if I was going to get my hands on some cash, I had to do it on my own. There was just one problem: I didn’t have the time to work anywhere other than the farm, which took a good four hours of my time each and...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Know Your Baseline
• 2. Not Good, Not Bad, Only Better
• 3. Forget the Best-Laid Plans
• 4. Cultivate a Brazen Attitude
• 5. Mediocre Strategy, Brilliant Execution
• 6. Put Yourself on the Line (So You Know What You’re Capable Of)
• 7. Embrace the P-word: Understand Your Power, Apply Your Leverage
• 8. You Are More Than You
• 9. Your Network Is Your Net Worth
• 10. Go Far Together
• 11. Taking Risks Pays Off
• 12. Get Comfortable in Your Skin: Tell Your Story, Own Your Brand
• 13. A Word for Women
• 14. Success = Getting and Staying Organized
• 15. Lead Responsibly
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher