Billionaire Jimmy Pattison is not only one of the richest men in Canada but in the world as well and has been for a very long time. He’s 85 as of this writing and still as spry as ever. Being from my hometown, Jimmy was one of the first tycoons to appear on my tycoon radar. He serves as an inspirational figure for anyone wanting to go down the tycoon path.

In addition to being famous for having built a huge and very profitable conglomerate over the decades, he’s well known for a few other things.  For one thing, he pronounces “business” as “bidness.”  No one knows why but people just accept it. (There’s another tycoon who pronounces the word as “bidness,” but I can’t recall who it is at the moment.)

Jimmy Pattison

Jimmy was also notorious for being unable to pass a public telephone without checking the change slot for coins even after he had become very wealthy. Growing up I heard stories about him rushing to a meeting, where a half-billion dollar deal would be cut, with his entourage in tow and still stopping at every pay phone to check for change. I don’t know if he still engages in this practice now that pay phones are as scarce as hen’s teeth.

One time back in the 1970s a firestorm of controversy was sparked when word leaked that at the end of every month his car dealership fired the worst performing salesman. The public was aghast. An angry mob holding pitchforks and torches congregated outside his office. (Okay, not really but there were a lot of angry letters to the editor condemning the policy.) Jimmy stayed quiet for a few weeks before finally explaining why he did it. Basically it came down to this. If you were the worst performing commission salesperson it meant that you weren’t making any sales or money to feed yourself and your family. Therefore, the smartest thing you could do was to seek another opportunity with better odds of earning a pay-check. So Jimmy would give them a nudge knowing that most guys don’t want to be seen as quitters.

It was one of my first insights as a teen into how tycoons think.

To show you how much of an independent thinker Jimmy is, I will share one more story that shocked Canada 12 years ago. He hired a professional politician without any business experience from the country’s far left political party, the NDP, to run one of his divisions. Everyone thought Pattison was crazy but Glen Clarke has proven himself to be a very capable executive. He’s now president of the Jim Pattison Group. (It’s one of the most bizarre stories I have come across in business.)

The Growth Strategy

Jimmy was and still is, first and foremost, a salesman which is arguably the best business talent to have. As the old saying goes, if you can sell you will never go hungry. Not having patience for school, he dropped out of college just three courses short of a degree and jumped into the real world.  His first full-time job was at a car dealership where he was quickly promoted to “manager” of its new one-man used car division. A decade later he was able to buy a Pontiac dealership with a $40K bank loan.

After almost going under due to some mistakes he had made, he was ready to start building his empire. His first plan was to acquire a second dealership but discovered that GM didn’t allow anyone to own more than one GM dealership. It also didn’t allow its dealers to sell competitor’s lines. This forced Jimmy to look outside the car industry. His first acquisition was a troubled radio station which he knew would help to reduce his dealership’s radio advertising costs. He sweet-talked another businessman into providing the capital. A couple of years later he continued his rapid growth with an acquisition of a billboard company. A year later it was the Overwaitea Foods chain in Canada. Then he just kept acquiring.

Here’s a timeline of Jimmy’s acquisitions.

Today Jimmy is worth $7 billion and is one of Western Canada’s biggest philanthropists.

Here’s a short interview where he talks about how he got started and grew his empire.  Notice how he is very humble and remembers everyone who helped him even if it was 60 years ago.

Jimmy is one of the true Boy Wonders.

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