Billionaire Pattison keeps on trucking

Tycoon takes a hands-on approach to his $10B empire

VANCOUVER— Jim Pattison roars through rural Saskatchewan in his silver pickup truck, barrelling down the prairie road that runs arrow-straight to the horizon. Tossed into the back seat is a sleeping bag and crimson pillow — the unlikely berth for Canada’s self-made billionaire when he can’t find a motel.

It’s here in Canada’s vast breadbasket that Pattison was born and where, at age 90, he’s overseeing one of the newest arms of his $10-billion empire: Pattison Agriculture, a string of John Deere equipment dealerships serving 21 million acres of farmland.

“We’re seeing more opportunities than we ever have,” Pattison says, steering confidently, his diminutive frame overwhelmed by the cavernous, black leather seats of his Ram 1500 Laramie truck.

The road trip offers a rare glimpse of the intensely private Pattison, Canada’s third-richest man, who created his iconic business group in seeming defiance of modern empire-building. He eschews emails, carries a cellphone but barely checks it and can count on one hand the number of times his group has used an investment bank in recent memory.

Pattison is often dubbed Canada’s Warren Buffett — a trope that underscores how relatively unknown he remains outside Canada despite a conglomerate that operates in 85 countries across a dizzying array of industries: supermarkets, lumber, fisheries, disposable packaging for KFC, billboards across Canada and ownership of the No. 1 copyrighted bestseller of all time, the Guinness World Records. Believe it or not, he even owns the Ripley Entertainment Inc. empire.

“Back in Omaha, I’m known as the Jim Pattison of the United States,” Buffett quipped this month when he surprised Pattison onstage in Toronto as the billionaire was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame.

Pattison has driven 1,700 kilometres from the Jim Pattison Group Inc. headquarters in Vancouver to the Prairies where he’s acquired four farm equipment companies to create Pattison Agriculture. He likes to drop in unannounced on his holdings, but word quickly gets around.

“You’re the man we’ve all been waiting for,” says the receptionist at the dealer-

ship in Moosomin, Sask. “You got a call, did ya?” he says with a grin as he shuffles into the shop, helping himself to popcorn as he quizzes employees.

He listens intently as they share their pain points — the dearth of mechanics, narrowing margins on new equipment sales and the intolerable noise in the cab of a new tractor that has farmers complaining.

Pattison’s rags-to-riches story recalls a different era. Born in Luseland during the Great Depression, he wore clothes stitched together from the castoffs of other children because money was so tight. The family moved out west when he was 6, settling in Vancouver’s gritty east side. In the summers, he’d return to the family homestead in Saskatchewan, where the land was still plowed by horses. He was touting seeds door-todoor at age 7 and within a few years was trouncing grown men in a competition to sell the most subscriptions of the Saturday Evening Post.

His path to a fortune began with a Pontiac Buick dealership in 1961. He bought it with a $40,000 Royal Bank of Canada loan after persuading the local manager to exceed the branch’s lending limit fivefold.

Pattison says his favourite job is still being a used-car salesman. He parlayed that into a global business empire over the next five decades.

One of his biggest stakes in an outside company is Westshore Terminals Investment Corp., North America’s biggest coal export facility, in Vancouver — a cash cow with a shrinking life span in an era of tightening emission standards.

His biggest public holding is a controlling stake in Canfor Corp., the lumber company that has plunged about 35 per cent this year as the U.S. housing market slows.

The Pattison Agriculture dealership in Yorkton is a newly renovated hub in a region of 60,000-acre farms, some bigger than Lichtenstein. Most of the equipment inside costs half a million dollars each; some customers will drop as much as $40 million a year in purchases.

Historically, he’s kept the existing management in place after takeovers, and he gives his deputies a long leash.

For a company with 45,000 employees, it’s still run a bit like a startup.

To this day, the corporate headquarters on the 18th floor overlooking Vancouver Harbour and Stanley Park doesn’t have a human resources department. The most important hiring decisions over the years have been made by Pattison and Maureen Chant, his executive assistant of more than 50 years.

While he loves to regale visitors about his company’s past, Pattison is firmly focused on a disruptive future. “One thing is for sure, things are going to be significantly different 25 years from now,” he says.