‘People have to know you’re sincere’
Business hall nominee took a chance in launching career in business
Editor’s note: This is the second of a four-part series that profiles this year’s inductees into the Cape Breton Business Hall of Fame. The series will run on Saturdays leading up to the May 22 induction ceremony at the Membertou Trade and Convention Centre.
SYDNEY — Courage, faith in yourself and your abilities and finding good people to support you are the three key components to building a successful business, Bill Mozvik believes.
“That will spell success, in my opinion,” the Sydney man said in an interview, in advance of his induction this month into the Cape Breton Business and Philanthropy Hall of Fame.
“People have to know you’re sincere and know you’re not there to over-sell them. If you’re sincere and people like you, they’ll buy off you and they’ll trust you.”
He added he also believes the workplace should be somewhere that employees want to go to each day.
“I don’t want you coming to work with a pain in your stomach or, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go face that Mozvik guy,’ come on in, be happy, if you’ve got a problem, tell me, we’ll fix it,” Mozvik said.
In his mid-20s, Mozvik was working at Sydney Steel when he saw an ad looking for a salesperson, responded and got the job. It was a bold move for a young man who was married with two young children.
“It took a lot of courage, but I quit the steel plant,” Mozvik recalls. “I said, ‘OK, here we go,’ a lot of people thought I was crazy because I had a good job at the steel plant.”
The job was selling sanitation supplies and Mozvik was one of only two people doing the work for the company in the Maritimes, selling to hospitals, nursing homes, fish plants and the like. He worked his way up, becoming manager for the region, expanding the company’s workforce, and was later asked to move to Ontario and take on responsibility for that province as well.
Mozvik and his family then spent about a half-dozen years in Ontario and Montreal. That entity was purchased by an international company and Mozvik decided to move home and open his own similar business.
R&A Paper initially was a small operation selling paper products to local businesses, but Mozvik built it up, and began serving the local market with sanitation
supplies, eventually expanding its reach to clients like legions or hospitals as far as Halifax and Amherst.
“I had a lot of experience, being a national sales manager … I had a lot of connections so we partnered with a lot of international companies,” Mozvik said.
Around 2001, R&A Paper caught the eye of officials with Chandler, owned by JD Irving Ltd., and they offered to purchase the company. Mozvik stayed on to oversee the transition for about three years, under the condition that the Cape Breton base and employment be maintained.
“My mission was to take those sales people and teach them how to sell to other businesses, outside the Irving umbrella,” Mozvik said.
Around that time, Mozvik also started looking into other business opportunities, including bringing a national restaurant franchise into the Sydney marketplace. Smitty’s Family Restaurant opened in 2003. While there are a number of similar chains with locations in Cape Breton these days, Smitty’s was one of the first large national casual dining franchises to set up shop in Sydney.
The area had developed into a more service-based, post-industrial economy, Mozvik said.
“I said to myself, maybe if we start taking some franchise business in here, some other people might follow me and start to build some sort of service-based economy here,” he said.
Mozvik said he had wonderful childhood growing up in Whitney Pier, where his father, who arrived from Budapest in the 1920s, had also worked at the steel plant and his mother worked in housekeeping at a local hospital. He and his wife Beverly have been married for more than a half-century, spending many of the winter months the last few years at a vacation home in Florida.
Mozvik credits Beverly with playing an integral role in the establishment of their businesses.
“I love telling this story — we met when we were 15 years old, I’m 71 and we got married at 19, so you can do the math,” he said. “When we moved back, she played a big part in R&A Paper, getting the business started.”’
Their son, Tony, is a lawyer. Their daughter, Natalie, and her husband, Robert Miller, have worked with him in the former Orange Julius location at the Mayflower Mall food court, and more recently Habanero’s, and have since taken over that business. There are also plans underway for them to fully take over Smitty’s, which they currently manage. Their other daughter, Amanda, is in Western Canada and is working in online sales.
The decision to shift to a Habanero’s outlet stemmed from a desire to offer something new and also be part of a Maritime-based franchise, Mozvik said.
Businessman Marty Chernin, who nominated Mozvik for the hall of fame, described him as community-minded but underthe-radar about his contributions.
“He’s a clear entrepreneur,” Chernin said. “Then he went into something not even related to the business that he was in and be built that up … I think he’s befitting of the honour.”