Decisions

Making the Right Ones, Righting the Wrong Ones

Jim Treliving

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781443411820
• eBook ISBN: 9781443411837
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Co-owner of Boston Pizza and star of CBC-TV's Dragons' Den, Jim Treliving reveals the secrets of his success, taking you behind the scenes at critical points in the building of his businesses—which also include Mr. Lube and interests in real estate and sports franchising. Covering the "big" decisions—from what to do with your life to how to source capital, find partners, handle change and inspire growth—Treliving sets out the tools for making effective choices and explains why every decision requires action. He also discusses how to bounce back from those no-so-good decisions, explaining how to refocus and recalibrate, just as Treliving had to do when he realized that Boston Pizza's expansion into Asia was causing the company to drift off-brand. Pulling back from Asian opportunities was a tough decision at the time, but the move became crucial to guiding successful BP expansions later on. Always candid, Treliving also shares his insights on some very public choices, ones you may have seen him make on The Big Decision or Dragons' Den.

Down to earth, sensible and filled with vision and humour, Decisions is a book for budding entrepreneurs and for those who want the inside business stories beyond what we see on TV. But it's also for people who want to transform their companies into ones that create steady wealth and lasting success. Even if you're not in business, Treliving's inspiring story and astute advice will help you make wiser decisions in your life and move forward with confidence in your chosen field.

1

HOW I MAKE DECISIONS

“Be willing to make decisions.
That’s the most important quality in a good leader.”
—T. Boone Pickens

Success Is about the Big Picture

How do you know you’re making the right decisions? That’s another question I get asked a lot. After more than 40 years in business, I thought I would have a complicated answer. But in sitting down and writing the story of my business and my life, I’ve come to see that my success has been built on a series of decisions—decisions that seem to follow a pretty consistent pattern. I like simplicity. I believe that simplicity is the key to success. So my pattern seems to be this: I make decisions about work with my heart, about money with my head, and about people with my gut. In other words, I’m emotional about work, practical about money and instinctual about people. This method is what seems to have guided me in the right direction. But I can only say this looking back now. I certainly didn’t start out in business using this method. I think it’s just how I’m built. But you can train yourself to make decisions this way by watching what happens when you don’t. Think about it: when you make emotional decisions about money or people, there’s a lot of room for error. That’s why I use my head when it comes to money. And when you make rational or emotional decisions about people, you can end up hiring the wrong person because you’re biased or playing it safe. That’s how a lot of companies end up with too much family on the payroll. I like to listen to my gut when it comes to hiring and partnering. It never lies to me, whereas my head and heart can. And I’ve never made decisions about work rationally or even instinctually; I make them with my heart. I have to love what I do. I have to feel that same passion for my work that I do for my favourite people.

Now, how do I know they’re the right decisions? The outcomes. If a decision about work creates more enthusiasm, it’s often the right one. If a decision about money develops more discipline, it’s often the right one. And if a decision about people builds trust, it’s right too.

DECISION	TOOL	OUTCOME
Work	Heart	Enthusiasm
Money	Head	Discipline
People	Gut	Loyalty/Trust

We live in a world that measures success with money, so these outcomes are not really considered popular results.That’s too bad, because the truth is, greater enthusiasm only grows businesses: it’s the essence of good word of mouth. Being disciplined about money attracts investment because it quells fears in tumultuous times. And loyal partnerships and employees contribute to the longevity of a company. That’s why money is a short-sighted goal. These results are always welcome because everybody benefits from them.

I’ve never looked at success through the lens of money. Apologies to Kevin O’Leary, my fellow Dragon, but you’re wrong about this one, buddy. I learned from my dad, Ted Treliving, that success is measured by taking in the big picture: you look at the health and happiness of your family and friends and what you’re contributing to your community. Success is about finding yourself and your business in a much better place than where you started out, and everyone, from employee to entrepreneur, measures that in very different ways.

So this is not a book about making more money. This is a book about making better decisions. It’s about recognizing opportunities and having the ability to act on them. That’s why I like to say that the harder I worked, the luckier I got.

We think good outcomes equal good decisions, bad outcomes, bad decisions. But it doesn’t work like that in business or in life, really. As you’ll read, many of the “worst” decisions I’ve ever made brought me the best outcomes possible, personally, professionally and financially. A decision is just a decision. It’s neutral. It outlines an action you’re going to take. It’s only because of the outcome that you look back on a decision and call it good or bad.

What about the labelling of decisions as “small” or “big"? I think that’s also a bit of wrong thinking. Remember, eating pizza for dinner changed the course of my life and no one would have called that a big decision. But I will say this: there is such a thing as easy decisions and difficult ones. Usually, the higher the stakes, the more people who are involved and the harder it is to make a decision—because you know you’re setting into motion a chain of events that you may not be able to stop, events that will affect everyone and everything in their path. At the end of each chapter, I list some of the things I keep in mind when making big decisions about work, people and money.

I’m continually amazed at how Dragons’ Den has enlivened the spirit of entrepreneurship in this country. I especially get a kick out of kids, some as young as eight years old, who can debate the merits of a business’s valuation with me. I love that. And to think I almost passed on the opportunity to be a Dragon.

Here’s another truth: Not everyone can get rich, but everyone can be satisfied with what they’ve built, with what they have, with who they are. The hallmarks of every truly successful person I know are these: they want what they have, they like what they do, and they love who they are. At the end of the day, despite the detours my decisions have taken me on, I am, I believe, exactly where I’m supposed to be, with exactly who I’m supposed to be with, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. And that, to me, is the true definition of success.

2

WHO WILL I BE?

Making Your First Life Decision

“We have no simple problems or easy decisions after kindergarten.”
—John W. Turk, financier

An Adult Is a Decision Maker

When you’re a child, your parents make big decisions for you—hopefully good ones. As you reach adulthood, you start making your own decisions. But there’s that tricky place between childhood and adulthood where your decisions can sometimes take you 10 steps forward and a few back. You’re new at making them, which is why no one turns 18 without at least a few scars, inside and out. So I consider myself lucky to have come of age in a place like Virden, Manitoba. I suppose a lot of people feel the place they grew up was the most beautiful place in the world. But Virden is particularly pretty, with its fieldstone churches and Victorian buildings. Then, of course, there’s the sky. Maybe that’s why I took so easily to Texas, where I live today, because I love a wide-open space and a big sky. But it was a great place to grow up. I was a happy kid there, probably because I never doubted that my teachers and coaches had my best interests in mind. Because my folks were a big part of the community, shopkeepers and farmers knew me by name on Main Street. I wasn’t an angel, but I never shook the idea that my behaviour would reflect on my family. So I was a pretty good kid. Though if I was going to make a bad decision, I did do my darnedest not to get caught.

Virden is a couple of hours west of Winnipeg, and like a lot of Prairie towns, it sprung up alongside the Trans-Canada rail line as it expanded across the country in the 1800s. Virden started out as a farming community, population 3,500, eventually almost doubling during the oil boom in the 1950s, when big money came to town and changed everything.

Both my grandfathers came from other countries, Scotland and England, settling in Canada in the hope of better lives. Funnily enough, when I look at my fellow panellists on Dragons’ Den, past and present, I’m struck by the fact that almost all of them are either immigrants themselves or only one generation removed. Arlene Dickinson was born in South Africa, Robert Herjavec in Croatia, and the unforgettable Laurence Lewin in Britain. Kevin O’Leary’s dad was from Ireland, his grandparents, from Lebanon, his stepdad, from Egypt. And Bruce Croxon’s mother is Jamaican. While we differ in many ways, what we all have in common is the adaptability that most immigrants pass down to their kids, and a profound passion for this country. All of us are grateful, proud, enthusiastic Canadians. And I never forget there was a slim chance I could have ended up in Australia.

The Treliving name can be traced back to the 1500s and Cornwall, England. I’m descended from a long line of naval types, so I came by my police aspirations honestly if not genetically. We ended up in Canada because of love. Before the turn of the 19th century, my British grandfather, Walter Treliving, made the wonderful mistake of falling for a pretty Irish girl named Jane Gordon. Back then, it was scandalous for an Englishman to marry an Irish woman. So he was faced with two choices: move to Canada or move to Australia. He picked Canada—Fleming, Saskatchewan, to be exact, because it was at the end of the rail line, right on the border of Manitoba, about as west as you could go at the time. (Fleming’s grain elevator once graced the back of the Canadian one-dollar bill. In fact, when it burned down in 2010, it made national news.) Fleming was where my father, Ted, was born.

As a teen racking balls in a local pool hall, my dad started to apprentice with a barber who cut hair there. For the first couple of years, he worked for free. But this was at the height of the Great Depression, the dirty thirties, so good jobs were scarce in Fleming and the town didn’t need two barbers. That meant the younger barber had to leave. My dad lit out on his own, nothing but a pool cue and a pair of scissors in his suitcase, and he did what a lot of young men did at the time: he moved to the closest big city. In Winnipeg, he set up his own chair at the Grain Exchange, where he made about $7 a week, a dollar of which he spent on room and board, another he kept for himself, and the rest he sent home to his family. But the big city wasn’t his cup of tea. So, in the late 1930s, he took a train back to Fleming. When it made a stop in Virden, Manitoba, my dad got off. And, thinking like an entrepreneur, he soon realized the town could use a barber. He decided to stay.

Meanwhile, my grandfather on my mother’s side, James Gardner, had long been settled in Virden, Manitoba. He was the entrepreneur of the family. A booming Scot, he brought his wife, Mary, to Canada from Edinburgh. He was 23 years old when he got to Virden, and it didn’t take him long to find his place in the world, making friends and becoming the town’s mayor, a position he held for 29 years. He was also the town’s grain buyer, a central role in any farming community. So there wasn’t much going on in Virden that Grandpa Gardner didn’t know about or wasn’t a part of. And, like I said, he was a born entrepreneur, a guy who worked for himself and made money until the day he died.

He did intend to retire. He had big plans to relax in BC after almost 30 years at the Grain Exchange. But his retirement lasted two weeks. He then bought a corner store with his son, and a few years later got involved in a gold mine. He probably would have stuck around another decade had it not been for a tragic fall from a ladder while climbing after some peaches. His broken hip got infected and he died at the age of 93. He was a great man, and as much as I inherited a military bent from my paternal grandfather, Walter Treliving, I like to think I got my entrepreneurial spirit from Grandpa Gardner.

In Virden, my dad at first dated my mother’s sister, Rita, but after a few weeks, he decided she was not for him. Then he became smitten with Rita’s quieter sister, Mina. Mina and Ted married in 1940, when my dad was 37 years old; my mother had just finished high school. I was born a year later. It was considered a pretty big age difference between my folks—then and now. But my father had deliberately waited that long to marry. He didn’t want to get married until he had saved enough money to actually afford a family. And by “afford” I mean he waited until he had enough money to pay for a house—cash, no mortgage—and to ensure that his wife would never have to work outside the home. On a barber’s income, that took a while. There was none of this “We’ll build something together” or “We can survive on love.” My dad felt that a solid financial foundation was as important as love when it came to marriage, if not more so. And there was no borrowing from the bank. He was of the mind that a man provided and until he could provide he was not a man.

We lived near the training base for Commonwealth pilots, and my earliest memory is of planes flying overhead, during World War II. I have a picture of me in my dad’s arms, pointing at the sky. Then we moved to a beautiful two-storey Victorian a block from downtown, originally built by a doctor who died before his family could move in. My father paid cash for that house, about $1,500. He bought nothing on credit, unless you counted my mother’s shopping. In those days, you could do all your shopping on the honour system. My mother would buy something at the clothing store and the clerk would write down her purchase. She’d do the same thing at Bill Baird’s butcher shop, then make a stop for other groceries at Scales and Rothnie. And every Monday morning my dad did the rounds, paying each store on his way to work. After my younger sister, Joy, and I were old enough to fend for ourselves, my mother actually got a job at the grocery store, which lasted all of a couple of hours. When my dad came home from work that day, my mother announced that, come Monday, she too had a job to go to. My dad wasn’t amused. He made her go back to the grocer’s and quit. No wife of his was going to work, he said. Shortly after that, she became pregnant with a late-in-life baby, my sister Pat, who became the apple of my dad’s eye. What can I say? My parents were a product of their times. And if my mother ever resented my father, she never showed it. She was devoted to him.

In high school, I had two very different sets of friends. Playing sports meant I hung out with the jocks, but I also hung out with the so-called bad kids—the future criminals, according to my dad. I’ve always found myself at ease in various worlds. This skill paid off later as a police officer and, of course, as a restaurant owner.

The other thing about Virden was that it had no class system—everyone seemed to have the same things, make the same amount of money, have the same worries and joys. Or so I thought. Money—who had it, who didn’t—wasn’t something I thought much about until the Turnbull boys came over to our house one winter morning for a visit. Bad enough they were only wearing rubber boots in the snow, but when my mother saw that they didn’t have any socks on, her face went white with concern.

“Boys, where are your socks?” she asked, trying to not sound too alarmed.

They shyly replied that they didn’t have any.

“Oh well, lucky for you, Jim’s got lots of socks,” she said, running upstairs to grab them a handful to take home. She did this quickly and cheerfully, so as not to make a fuss and embarrass my friends. The things I took for granted!

We might have had more than others, but we were far from rich. In fact, we didn’t own a car until my dad could afford to buy one outright. Even then, my mother did all the driving. My father was a sharp, cautious man, but a disaster behind the wheel.

Our first car was a 1954, two-toned Chevy Bel Air. My dad wouldn’t buy a Lincoln, the car wealthier folks in town drove. He didn’t want to alienate his customers, who would be turned off if they saw their barber driving a fancier car than theirs. He understood such social subtleties. Fancy cars were beginning to appear on Main Street at an alarming rate—a new model every day—driven by total strangers who were beginning to populate the town. We eyed them suspiciously because we knew something was up. I can’t say exactly when our small town became a medium-sized town or when the focus turned from farming to oil, but somewhere in the mid-1950s, things really began to change.

Money Changes People … and Places

There had been rumours that people drilling for water wells in and around Virden were hitting natural gas veins. That meant one thing: oil wasn’t too far below. The McIvors were the first to hit oil, in 1954. Shortly after that, a geological team came in to do some seismic work, and sure enough, it found a big oil field about 1,750 feet down, just a mile outside Virden.

An entirely new thing arrived in town: not just oil, but money—and all the industries that go along with making it. It’s incredible to witness a sleepy town wake up, change and go in a different direction. All of a sudden there was a huge influx of people coming from all over North America: BC, Alberta, the Maritimes, even Oklahoma and Texas, their kids with their funny accents filling our classrooms. Streets were lined with big trucks. Butler steel sheds popped up everywhere to house equipment. My dad usually worked until 10 p.m. cutting hair. I was a teenager, so to me it was all exciting—it felt like things were finally happening in Virden. My dad, however, remained cautious, quietly eyeing the changes from his barbershop in the centre of town.

Before the boom, my dad had bought the building that housed his shop, leasing part of it to a bank. At the back of the building was a room he rented to an oil survey company—which meant that if a farm was being scoped out, my dad was often one of the first to know about it. I worked as a rod man for a while, helping the survey teams working in the field. In 1955 alone, over 350 oil wells were drilled in and around Virden. That’s also around the time my dad earned the nickname “The Banker,” his barbershop being the first stop farmers would make after an oil company offered to drill on their land...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: HOW I MAKE DECISIONS
• 2: WHO WILL I BE?
• 3: DO I WANT A JOB, OR DO I WANT TO CREATE JOBS?
• 4: HOW WILL I FUND MY DREAM?
• 5: WHO WILL JOIN ME?
• 6: WHAT IF I’M WRONG?
• 7: HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU’RE READY TO GROW?
• EPILOGUE
• THE BOSTON PIZZA FOUNDATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher