ENTERING THE DRAGONS’ DEN
Cinema mogul joins CBC series and warns: ‘Either I can be your partner — or I have no use for you’
For the past 12 years, Montrealer Vincenzo Guzzo has watched Dragons’ Den from the couch. Now the cinema mogul is looking forward to having a voice as he enters the Den as a Dragon on the popular business competition/reality TV show. Guzzo and another new investor, Lane Merrifield, join Dragons Arlene Dickinson, Manjit Minhas, Michele Romanow and Jim Treliving on the show’s 13th season, with host Dianne Buckner. The two replace Joe Mimran and Michael Wekerle. The season debuts Thursday on CBC.
Guzzo, 49, is the president and CEO of Cinémas Guzzo — the largest movie operator in Quebec, with 141 screens and 10 locations, and the third-largest in Canada. Guzzo had heard Dragons’ Den was looking for investors, “and I let them know that I may be interested,” he said. “It was a collision of great minds.”
He said he was welcomed into the Den with the other Dragons “without any issue.” Although “we are all very different,” he said, they got along well during the recording of the season’s 20 episodes over a three-week period this past spring.
A snappy dresser, Guzzo sports several medals on the lapel of the jacket he wears on the show. One is the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic — “like the Order of Canada, but given by Italy,” said the native Montrealer, who has dual citizenship. Below it is the Order of Malta, and beneath that he wears the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. His outfit features splashes of yellow. He says it’s a nod to his nickname, Mr. Sunshine, which reflects an inherent duality. “Remember something,” he said: “The sun can be warm and comforting — but if you get too close, it could burn you.”
“My business experience is a cutthroat one,” Guzzo says in a Dragons’ Den interview clip. “Either I can be your partner and we can make money, or I have no use for you.”
“If you have a good pitch, we are going to have a deal,” he says. “My best tip is that if you don’t have a good pitch, you’d better bring a box of Kleenex, because I have a feeling you are going back home crying.” Cinémas Guzzo was started by his father, Angelo Guzzo, who remains chairman of the board. He came to Canada from Italy in 1967 and worked as a machinist for Pratt & Whitney. In 1974, he bought a movie theatre.
One of Vincenzo’s earliest memories is picking up popcorn as a four-year-old from hard-to-reach spaces on the floor between the seats. He was a kid with boundless energy, an only child, and it was his parents’ way “of keeping me out of trouble,” he said.
As a student at a private school, Guzzo would do his homework in his father’s office at the movie theatre. He later worked as an usher, and then in other capacities in the business.
He studied business at Western University in London, Ont., and law at the Université de Montréal, and joined the family business in 1996. As the chain expanded in the late 1990s and new locations were established, a construction division of Guzzo did the building — and the younger Guzzo had a hand in their design.
“In most of the theatres, the very personal look of my theatres comes from my choices,” he said. “My father does what I would call the layout — the construction and the four walls — and I’m the one who walks in and says, ‘We should paint this, this colour, put a sign here.’ “I do it as a hobby, but I also do it because the biggest problem we were having when we were building in ’98 and ’99 is that design is very personal. I know how theatre operates. I know what materials need to be used. Many times, designers try to use materials that look beautiful but have little resistance to the traffic the theatre gets.”
The business grew and branched out. Today, in addition to the construction division, there is a hospitality division, which includes restaurants, and a medical division. “As an entrepreneur, it is very important to know ins and outs of your product and your distribution network,” Guzzo said. “When I am looking at a pitch, I am thinking how the product can fit in the various businesses that I have.” He also asks himself whether the person making the pitch is someone who will be able to continue his or her journey, or whether they will need handholding.
“I invest as much in the individual as the product,” he said. “I am a big believer in the product, but even bigger in the human spirit behind it.”
Guzzo said he is always on the lookout for a branding component to an investment. “If there is no branding spin, I don’t really consider it that much,” he said. “Some people are more subtle. I am the guy who overdoes it: It has to be bombarded with the name, with the brand.”
He and his wife, Maria, are the parents of five — four sons and a daughter — and are also philanthropists. Guzzo will celebrate his 50th birthday next June, and plans are in the works for a roast and a fundraiser being organized with Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, where the Guzzos are helping to fund nanotechnology research.