John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire

From a tiny village, John Bragg quietly built an empire that controls half the world's wild blueberries and North America's largest private telecom network. In this rare interview, the famously private billionaire reveals how he defied conventional wisdom by transforming a small farm into two multi-billion-dollar giants. Discover the contrarian principles that helped Bragg dominate seemingly unrelated industries—from frozen foods to fiber optics—and build businesses designed to thrive for generations, not just quarters. Newsletter The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Upgrade If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of the episode, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://fs.blog/membership/⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Follow Me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farnamstreet Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-parrish-050a2183/ Sponsors: Overlap: https://www.joinoverlap.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why we succeeded is we tried to find a product we could run and run the hell out of it, as we would say. We're by far the largest wild blueberry producer. As we sit here today, we're processing carrots. We're the largest carrot processor in Canada, so we learn how to do it and do it well, and then just run it as much as we can. And then we do battered products, and we try to do the same thing there. So stick to your knitting, do what you can do, and do more of it, and try and grow it. Don't try and do everything. So many people fail by getting successful in one and then think they can do everything.

• 0:51Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Perrott. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best what other people have already figured out. If you're listening to this, it means you're not a supporting member. Members get early access, no ads, my personal reflections at the end of the conversation, hand-edited transcripts, and so much more. Check out the link in the show notes for more information. My guest today is John Bragg, the Blueberry Billionaire. From humble roots, this entrepreneur that you've never heard of has grown Oxford Frozen Foods into the world leader in harvesting and processing wild blueberries. And if that wasn't enough, he also started and grew North America's largest private telecommunications firm, East Link. And all of this from a small town with a population hovering around 1,200

• 1:35Shane Parrish?

  people. I traveled all the way to Oxford, Nova Scotia, to hear his story. How did he start? How did he grow? From the early days of picking wild blueberries with a rake to huge acquisitions across the border, we cover it all. This is one of my favorite conversations in recent memory, and I'm so happy I get to share it with you. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:58Shane Parrish?

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• 2:40Shane Parrish?

  I want to start with your childhood. Take me back. What was that like?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Well, I grew up in a village of 300 or 350 people. As I remember it, we had a sports event of some kind going all the time. From the time I was five or six years old, we'd have a sponge ball game. And so a lot of sports activity and skating on swamps and hockey games on swamps. And in grade eight, we had a new regional school in Oxford, brand new school with a gymnasium, which was just a wonder for us because we'd been playing baseball in hayfields. And to get a gymnasium and a gymnasium teacher was just fantastic for us. So it became a big part of our life.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  I was a member of 4H and had a winning calf. And all those little things that, you know, I guess you build on them through the years.

• 3:39Shane Parrish?

  What kind of values and principles did you learn from your parents?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  They were both very straightforward. My father grew up in a country store. You had to have repeat clients, small community, and people didn't travel. So you had to treat people with respect. And, and honorably, if you tell somebody you're going to do something, you're going to do it. And if you say you're going to be there at seven, you're going to be there at seven or before. Very straightforward values, you know, good base to build on.

• 4:08Shane Parrish?

  So you started collecting wild blueberries in high school?

• 4:12Speaker 00

  I did. My very first year, I was 15. So I had to hire somebody to drive the pickup truck and, and we had four or five pickers and picked 4,000 pounds of blueberries. When you think today we do 150 million pounds, quite, quite a difference. It was the beginning of an entrepreneurial career, I guess.

• 4:34Shane Parrish?

  And you used that to pay for university?

• 4:36Speaker 00

  My last year of high school, I actually made $4,000 picking blueberries because that had developed. And it cost 1,200 to go to Mount A. The game was I could pay my way and while my parents could afford to. And then by the end of university, I was doing a lot better than that. Had a choice to teach school for $3,800 and an extra hundred if I'd coached the basketball team. And I had made several thousand more than that picking blueberries that year. So I do what I was going to eventually do.

• 5:14Shane Parrish?

  So you built an apartment building during university too, didn't you?

• 5:16Speaker 00

  As I left university, a fellow student and I built an apartment building. You're well informed. I forget about that. But, but it was a great venture and a great learning curve for us.

• 5:27Shane Parrish?

  And you ended up owning that for like 50 years?

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Owned it a long while. And finally, when we were, were doing one of our major cable acquisitions, we said that we would sell some non-core assets and that was a non-core asset and went along with some other non-core items.

• 5:48Shane Parrish?

  But after Mount A, you went to Dalhousie Law School?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  I went to Dalhousie Law School, which was kind of interesting because I didn't ever plan to be a lawyer. A friend of mine was going and... So then I had talked my way into law school at the last minute. But I was only there about three weeks when I realized it was for lawyers. But it was a great education. I met some great people, good friends. It was probably my best education was first year law.

• 6:17Shane Parrish?

  And how did that help you in the business world after?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Where it helped me was the principle of a fair deal on both sides of the table. We'd like to think that when we've completed a purchase or a deal of any kind, that the other side's happy and we're happy. You can't always do that, but it's a good objective.

• 6:39Shane Parrish?

  So you left and then you went into the blueberry business?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  I came back to the small village and decided that my father and brother were in the cell mill business, that I could help them, but that I could pay my way with the blueberry business, which worked out all right. Then in 1968, we had a real turning point when there were big crops in Maine and the grower price went down. And in some cases, couldn't sell them on some days. We had to stop picking. I had already made a decision I was going to be in the blueberry business. And I decided if I was going to grow blueberries, I better have my own freezing plant. So I built a freezing plant in 1968 when I was 28

• 7:25Speaker 00

  and didn't have any idea what I was doing, just to focus.

• 7:30Shane Parrish?

  Who taught you the blueberry business? Like, how did you even start to build a frozen plant?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  On the farming side, the Department of Agriculture in Nova Scotia had some very good extension workers and a commitment to try and grow the blueberry industry in Nova Scotia. And so I kind of came along with that. It was truly a cottage industry at that time. And then the frozen food side, we were fortunate to find some consultants in Pennsylvania that had done work in Maine. So we hired these consultants to design.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  We built the plant with our own help, but really, we're naive. There's no question we're naive. You know, if you're dedicated enough, you can make it work.

• 8:14Shane Parrish?

  What was the reasoning for the frozen plant? Like, why go frozen? You're picking wild blueberries.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Picking wild blueberries. Well, in 67, we couldn't sell them. And if we did, we felt we were giving them away. Not a good base to go forward on. If you're trying to grow the industry, but you can't sell them. I decided I should become master of my own destiny. And it, you know, wasn't easy. The first year, we had a complete crop failure, the only one in the history. We've had poor crops and good crops, but that year, we had a disaster.

• 8:48Shane Parrish?

  And that was right after all the factory investment?

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Having built a factory and all geared it up to run 2 million pounds. And we ran, I don't know, 100,000. There just was no crop. People could understand that. Our bankers, they knew it wasn't something we did wrong. It was Mother Nature. And so we got through it.

• 9:10Shane Parrish?

  How do you handle inventory? Do you save some when the pricing is bad so that you can release it when the pricing's better?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Sometimes you think that that's what we should do. But when there's an opportunity to sell and get the cash, I guess you take it. And that's what we do. No, that's not to say we don't carry inventory over strategically. You know, if the market's too weak, we might carry some over, hoping the market will firm.

• 9:40Shane Parrish?

  At what point did you realize the blueberry business could be as big as it's become?

• 9:45Speaker 00

  I don't think I ever really understood that we could grow to what it is and that it would be a base to grow other things and other companies and other businesses. You know, we've had good years and bad years, but we've made it work. When I started in the industry, the wild blueberry industry was 40 million pounds in total, and I hoped to do two of that. And today, the industry is over 300 million, getting closer to four, and we do half of it. We couldn't see the growth, but of course, you know, we made a major acquisition in 1983 in Maine. We bought one of the two largest operations in Maine. And then more recently, we're developing a lot of land in the Acadian Peninsula,

• 10:30Speaker 00

  but it's probably pretty mature now.

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• 11:34Shane Parrish?

  So why did you buy more land? The 82 acquisition, you've bought more land as it's come up around Oxford. Is that to control supply?

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we have a lot of money invested in the factories. Our ideal position would be to grow half them on our own farms and buy half from farmers. If you took the extreme and bought them all from the farmers, then you could be pretty vulnerable to competition running the price up too much or the growers ganging up on you. I mean, they're all great guys, but you don't want to be 100% in there when you have all the money tied up in the factories. And the other side is, we don't want to have 100% of the industry. That wouldn't be good politics. You know, we need a good farming community and we enjoy working with the farm community. And we've got friends we've had for 50, 60 years.

• 12:25Shane Parrish?

  Well, talk to me about that a little. You do a ton of research and you make it available to your competitors. You make it available to farmers.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  We do. We, we developed quite a while ago, a philosophy that says, if it's good for us, why don't we share it with the farmers? A lot of them deal with us and bring us their fruit. If we can make them more efficient, that keeps us in business. And we're continually saying to our own farm people and to the farm community, we have to be more efficient. We have to compete in the world. We're competing with all fruits and all foods. So if you're going to do that, you have to grow more pounds per acre and do it more efficiently. So that's the way you stay in business.

• 13:08Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little of what's the agri culture of wild blueberries? My understanding is they're not planted.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  You're right. There's different bases. In Nova Scotia, it's on abandoned farmland on the back roads where people moved out. I say in the 30s, when rural electricity went through, didn't go to every back road. Now, when we're talking about wireless and internet, we have to be in every back road. It doesn't matter whether there's just a camp there, they, they want internet. You compare that with rural electrification, which did the back roads, but not the real back roads. And so a lot of people, when electricity went through, moved off the, the back road farms. And those farms eventually became blueberry fields. They revert to nature. Spruce trees grow on them.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Blueberry plants grow on them, usually 30 years after they were farmed by a farmer. And so they're not planted, they're there naturally. And in many cases, some of these farms had already been taken over by spruce trees, whether quite thick or scattered. And we would then cut the spruce trees down and we had a blueberry field. Now, the industry in Maine. Which is the mother of the industry, had about a 50 50 ratio between old farms, which tended to be smaller than they were here. But then they had the blueberry barrens, which were big fields that were a pine forest originally. And then through forest fires,

• 14:41Speaker 00

  they became, you know, there's history written about them picking blueberries in the 1700s on these barrens. They'd been burnt over the years. And so that's a different industry. And now in New Brunswick, on the south side of New Brunswick, again, it's old farmland. But on the north shore, it's a pine forest that we're clearing. We're really excited about the potential in New Brunswick. We're going to have more acres in blueberries than New Brunswick has in potatoes. So it's going to change the Canadian potential on the economy there.

• 15:18Shane Parrish?

  What is it about, my understanding is Quebec, Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, those are basically the only places wild blueberries really grow?

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Not quite right. Nova Scotia, Maine is the mother of the wild blueberry industry. But Lake St. John is also quite a big production area.

• 15:36Shane Parrish?

  In 83, when you did the Cherryfield acquisition in Maine, was that the big step up for Oxford?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say 83 was kind of a transformative year. It's also the year that we bought control with Stuart Rath of Halifax Cable. It took us from being, operating small rural towns to having the major city. And so those were bases that we've built on. We weren't that well financed, so lots of borrowing and lots of convincing banks we could do it. So 83 was a big year.

• 16:12Shane Parrish?

  You've never shied away from using debt?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  We haven't shied away from using debt. Although today our balance sheets are in great shape, but through the years, we've always been what I would say almost fully levered. The food business, we were levered, but we had good assets. The cash flow wasn't as consistent as you'd like, but in the cable business, we were buying cable companies all over Atlantic Canada and out west in Ontario. But the cash flow was pretty consistent. You could budget it and see where you were going. So I wasn't afraid of that. And I think that separated me from, you know, the original cable owners. There were lots of them.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  As the industry developed and fiber came along, we started tying them together and there was a lot more capital involved. Lots of the small town operators just decided that it was time to move on, that they didn't want to lever themselves the way it was required. So we started buying small systems and tying them together. And then we had the opportunity to get Halifax and eventually Dartmouth, basically all of Nova Scotia, except Glace Bay and a little bit in Cape Breton. We just kept levering and levering and buying and buying some more. And it was hardly a year that we didn't have an acquisition.

• 17:38Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to East Link in a second because you own one of the largest, I mean, the largest private telecommunications company.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  I think it's largest private, yes, by far.

• 17:47Shane Parrish?

  What are the input costs to blueberries? I think one of the big ones is bees.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  The biggest single cost are the rental of honeybees for pollination. You know, these berries, they're 1,500 blueberries a pound. Every blossom has to be visited by a bee to get a blueberry. So we require a lot of hives. And I was reading an article this morning on the Canadian economy and where Scotia Bank had put out a report that said if we would eliminate the borders within our provinces, that it was something like $2 to $7 billion of efficiencies that would come to Canadians. So in our bee business, we're stuck with restrictions. We can bring bees from. The Okanagan Valley all the way to New Brunswick.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  And we have to get permission through each province. And we get the permits, we bring. But when it comes to the Nova Scotia border, no. So Nova Scotia and PEI are the only jurisdictions in North America that have restrictions. It's historically, it was about protectionism. Some local beekeepers got together and lobbied the government and said, we don't want others coming in here. This is our market. But that's a small business compared to the blueberry business. So we're held hostage by, by a lack of pollinators in Nova Scotia.

• 19:12Shane Parrish?

  My understanding is like, there's a, almost like a team of moving pollinators in the US. They start on the west coast and they

• 19:20Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 19:21Shane Parrish?

  Sort of like go across the country to Florida and then up to northeast.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I asked one of the guys about their business model and they said ABC almonds, blueberries, cranberries. Then they go to Florida for the winter. And then they go back to California and the almonds and they do the route over again. And it makes them quite efficient. Where in Nova Scotia, what can you do? You just have to stay within the borders. We have a great junior hockey team in Halifax, the Mooseheads. And it's like saying, you can play in the queue, but you have to use only Nova Scotia inputs.

• 19:56Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  And you can't bring anybody in. It's not only bees, there's just restrictions all over the place on, on border crossing. And there's been panels and people studying at Harper had a study group. And everybody finds the same thing. It's kind of ridiculous. But that's the country we live in and, and, but there's always hope.

• 20:20Shane Parrish?

  Do you have a professional beekeeper on staff?

• 20:23Speaker 00

  We do. We, we're the largest beekeeper in Nova Scotia by far. And one of the largest in Canada. Because we couldn't get the bees, so we had to start our own apiary. We still don't have enough. And the farmers don't have enough.

• 20:38Shane Parrish?

  And what difference does the bee make in yield? Like the pollination process?

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Four or five times. I think if you had no honeybees imported and relied on, on

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Local pollinators, you might get a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds. If we use four to five hives, which is considered high, but we can grow eight thousand or nine thousand pounds. So it's tremendous difference. And with our research, we've been sponsoring research with Dr. Percival at the Agricultural College. And he's really taught us how to to grow plants that are more productive and with fungicides and fertilizers. And we do have the basic crop there, but then you have to get it pollinated. It's a real problem. And this year was particularly bad.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  The farmers lost, in many cases, fifty percent of their bees over winter. See, we should be taking those bees to Florida maybe in the wintertime.

• 21:42Shane Parrish?

  Because it was too cold, is that why?

• 21:44Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. There's always lots of reasons. Our beekeepers say they went into the winter in poor condition, so then they didn't survive well. It does mean that if you want to raise bees in Nova Scotia, you know, there's a second market in New Brunswick. The Canadian Peninsula is ten days later than Nova Scotia in a microclimate. So we could pollinate here and then take them to New Brunswick, but we can't do that. So our biggest input cost are bees. If the total is two thousand dollars, a thousand of it's in bees. So it's a big, big factor and a big issue and a big disadvantage to Nova Scotia farmers, tremendous disadvantage.

• 22:26Shane Parrish?

  And when you started, you were picking blueberries with rakes manually?

• 22:29Speaker 00

  That's right. Yep.

• 22:31Shane Parrish?

  And how has that process evolved to today?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  There've been all kinds of people trying to develop a mechanical harvester. And my brother and a mechanic looked at some of these efforts that were done in Maine and other places, and they said, we can do this and we can do it better. So it took them quite a while because we really weren't focused. It would be something that we'd say in July, oh, we should get that old machine out and see if we can pick blueberries with it. So the only thing I brought to the table was I got them a dedicated tractor and said, we're going to start working on this in January. And they did, and they solved the problem. It took a couple of years maybe, but very talented.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  And the same basic principles being used today that they developed back in the eighties. So it was a big effort and it cost some money, but again, we made it available to the farmers. But it's still the standard. There are some other harvesters that are made by local farmers or a mechanic, but but the one that my brother and Lloyd weather me developed is it's kind of the standard.

• 23:48Shane Parrish?

  It was nice that you made it available to everybody, too. That could have given you such a competitive advantage because labor is obviously expensive.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  We not only have to have our own farm sufficient, we need the farmer's efficient.

• 23:59Shane Parrish?

  I like how you think in in terms of the ecosystem. A lot of your competitors have sort of come and gone over the years. Why has Oxford survived?

• 24:08Speaker 00

  It was a cottage industry when I started. People were were operating like a cottage industry and it's the requirement for more capital and more capital and and bigger operations came. Most of the existing people really weren't up to mortgaging what they had and and they were a different generation. And so I'm a young guy that says, I want to do this the rest of my life and I want to grow the industry. So it was more of an attitude, I think. I just fell into an industry that needed to be developed. And so in some ways, we provided the leadership for that.

• 24:50Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that that long term sort of approach to it helped you?

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're big, big.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Believers and looking at the horizon. There's a famous quote by, I think it was Dick Hammersholm, who said that, that only those who look at the horizon find the right road. If you look at your, at your feet, you'll stumble. So we're big lookers at the horizon, saying, how can we do this? And a private business allows you to do that.

• 25:20Shane Parrish?

  One of the interesting things about Oxford from my point of view is you never got into formulated sort of products, which would be naturally pretty easy in the frozen food market and probably have higher margins. Why not?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Lots of people have suggested we should have our own branded products. My great friend and mentor, Prudy Crawford, used to say, John, you'll spend $10 million on a factory, but nothing on marketing. But our real business was business to business, as we call it, to selling to jam manufacturers in Europe and pie manufacturers. And if you're a pie manufacturer, you're going to go where the apples are because they're 50% of the pies are apple. Or if you're in the jam business, you, you know, you have to have a whole variety. So Oxford didn't have anything to offer. Blueberry jam in North America would be maybe five or six

• 26:16Speaker 00

  on the popularity list. We're a provider to manufacturers and whether it's smoothies or whatever. So there was no economies of scale. I remember, you know, we have this great golf course at Cabot down in Cape Breton. And the Industrial Commission of Inverness, before Ben built Cabot, came to see me, see if I would make blueberry jam in Inverness. Well, you know, their intentions were great, but it made no economic sense to try and like blueberries to Cape Breton, make jam and then bring everything else, whether it's raspberries or whatever, strawberries and from other areas.

• 27:00Shane Parrish?

  So many people chase these higher margin products and they lose focus.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  That's exactly right, that a lot of people do that. Why we succeeded is we tried to find a product we could run and run the hell out of it, as we would say. We're by far the largest wild blueberry producer. As we sit here today, we're processing carrots. We're the largest carrot. Certainly carrot processor in Canada, maybe in North America. So we learn how to do it and do it well. And then just run it as much as we can. And then we do battered products and, and we try to do the same thing there. So stick to your knitting, do what you can do and do more of it and try and grow it. Don't try and do everything.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  So many people fail by getting successful in one and then think they can do everything.

• 27:54Shane Parrish?

  Was the rationale for carrots to sort of use the factory more? Because my understanding is like blueberry season ends sort of mid September and then carrot season starts.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  And we said, what can we do in the fall? Extend the season. Because we start the first of August running 24 hours, seven days. And, and the minute blueberries are done, we move to carrots. It's taken us quite a while to learn how to do it and do it really well. And which we're doing now. But that was exactly it. And then we wanted to have a core of people in the winter time. And so we started making battered products for McCain Foods.

• 28:36Shane Parrish?

  That was the onion rings?

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Onion rings and cheese sticks and cauliflower and, but onion rings primarily.

• 28:43Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about that deal with the McCains for the onion rings.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Well, very interesting. I would say a typical maritime deal. I went to see Wallace McCain, this is over 50 years ago. And said, look, I need something to keep my people busy. And have you any ideas? And he threw me a file on onion rings that they had looked at, but it didn't fit because they were doing french fries year round. And he says, well, maybe you can do it. So needing, needing something to do in the winter time and off season. We took the file and, and we had a one page agreement, which I still have, which gave

• 29:29Speaker 00

  us the exclusive right to make onion rings under the McCain label in Canada. And we've been doing that for over 50 years. And I would say only in the maritime, you know? And, and of course we've had our ups and downs.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  But in all those years, I never once went back to Wallace or Harrison and said, I need help. Your guys are giving me... I always worked it out behind the scenes because I thought I could go to them once and I was going to save that. But if I became a nuisance to them, then the relationship would disappear. So we've worked all these years and I never had to ask a favor. We've done it on a PR commercial basis. And I think it's worked well for both of us.

• 30:15Shane Parrish?

  I like the fact that it's a simple one-page agreement over a handshake.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:20Shane Parrish?

  But at the time you entered that, you had no idea how to make onion rings?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Didn't know how to make onion rings. The deal we made is still going, still one page, but it's altered in many ways, of course, over time with investments and so on. Yeah, we didn't know how to do it, but we didn't know how to do blueberries either or carrots.

• 30:40Shane Parrish?

  What gave you the confidence to figure that out?

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Other people in the world are doing it. There must be some way you can learn how to do it. It can't be that complicated.

• 30:49Shane Parrish?

  But this is back in the day before Google or anything, right?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 30:52Shane Parrish?

  You're not like searching how to make onion rings.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Suppliers love to talk. So you talk to the people who make batter and say, well, you know, what kind of batter should we use? And what... So they'll tell you more than they should sometimes. It was difficult. But and and our objective wasn't to make good onion rings. It was to make onion rings exactly the same as the competition because then it's an easy sell. You don't have to have something unique. And that was not as easy as you would think. And we could make better tasting ones. We could put them in a blind test and ours would win, but they were a little different. And the objective was to make the same as the other guy.

• 31:34Shane Parrish?

  What's necessary to be successful in a commodity business? If you're making the same product in a very similar way that other people are making it, what gives you an advantage? How do you create an advantage?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  You have to be the low-cost producer and you have to be top quality. And blueberries and carrots, there's...

• 31:54Speaker 00

  There are established grades and so on, so battered onions is a little different because there was only one major competitor and we were trying to compete with that. By and large, you have to be a low-cost producer and have top quality. And top quality doesn't necessarily cost. In fact, quite often, it's cheaper because you have less product on the floor and less shrinkage and you're doing it all right and the end product becomes better. Top quality, low cost is a pretty good motto.

• 32:30Shane Parrish?

  There seems to be a natural entropy in business. As you become successful, you start spending more money, you start doing things that are different or, you know, getting a fancy office or doing these things. But how do you maintain that low cost over 50 years?

• 32:46Speaker 00

  I'd like to think that we're low cost. Hopefully, we are, but we strive every day and we have a culture of every year trying to do it better. There's always changes we can make in the manufacturing line or on the farm. And so, we have a real culture of being open to doing it better tomorrow. I could list five or six things that I know we're going to do better next year and from some of the things we learned this year. And, you know, improving the mechanical harvester, improving how we unload the product and how

• 33:30Speaker 00

  we deal with the farmers. There's always steps that you can do and you can't be satisfied with the status quo. You know, we could sell 40 million pounds of blueberries, wild blueberries, kind of as a specialty item. But when you want to sell three or 400 million pounds, now you've got to compete with cultivated blueberries and with strawberries and marmalade, raspberries. We're always trying to be. To be better and to get our costs down.

• 34:02Shane Parrish?

  What's the difference between wild blueberries and cultivated blueberries from a pragmatic?

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Oh, tremendous difference. First of all, the the health benefits, the antioxidants are double in wild blueberries. The flavor is much better. The cultivated blueberries, they're a fine product, but but if you have them side by each, anybody will choose the wild for flavor. And that's a big, a big help. We have like jam manufacturers that one of the biggest in the world is Andros in France. And they'll only use European blueberries, which are a different species again, or our wild blueberries. And Europeans can't compete with us because there's still a cottage industry. So they're gradually disappearing.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  But there are lots of people who will will change the recipe and maybe use 50% cultivated. So so it's big competition.

• 35:02Shane Parrish?

  Because it's more expensive. Wild blueberries are more expensive.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Historically more expensive, and we could get a premium. But it's becoming more difficult. So our objective is to be the low-cost producer, even against cultivated.

• 35:16Shane Parrish?

  What are the key sort of performance indicators or metrics that you look at to judge the business?

• 35:22Speaker 00

  The food business is is very difficult to put down on paper. You know, you're fighting the weather and and all kinds of weathered conditions. Currency is a big issue. Labor supply is is because we're seasonal. Really, in the food business, the blueberry business in particular, we just have to put all the inputs in, do it all at the right time, the exact day for the sprays and so on, and then hope that Mother Nature gives you a break and doesn't take it away from you.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Like, for instance, this year, we think the Acadian Peninsula has great potential for wild blueberries, and it catches showers because it sticks out in the water and the bay shores on one side and and and.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Either Merrimashie Bay or whatever's in the other. But they normally catch good showers and it would rain. This year they didn't get any rain and we had a tremendous crop. And you go to see it the day before it harvests and they're just little wee blueberries that hardly weigh anything. And as a result, we had less than half a crop. And so we did everything right. All the conditions were right. So it's very difficult to project. But, but what you need as a farmer is somebody else to be in trouble with their crop and your crop work out well. But you're always looking, so what's, what's the cottage industry and what's the crop

• 37:06Speaker 00

  in Lake St. John? What's the crop in Maine? What's the cultivated crop? So you're always looking for somebody else to have trouble. All you can do is farm through the cycles. Keep putting the inputs in, do it everything on time professionally and hope you, hope you get the break. Our advantage is that we are in three, three different microclimates. Like I mentioned that we had a poor crop in the peninsula, but we had a very good crop in Maine. And so just a different microclimate. Most businesses you can kind of project and do a business plan, but in the food business, weather plays a big part.

• 37:47Shane Parrish?

  Let's switch gears a little bit to Bright Communications, which became EastLink, but it started way back in 1968. Right after you just had a crop failure, you just invested all this money into the factory that you can't use.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:04Shane Parrish?

  And then you bought your first, was it a television license?

• 38:08Speaker 00

  It was a cable television license and we didn't really buy it. The licenses were owned by the federal government. And so they accepted applications for different towns. And their philosophy at the time was to have local entrepreneurs do local television. But that got taken over by technology with fiber and where you could tie 10 small systems together and have a good sized one and a lot more capital. And when we started, you know, we had two American channels that we were offering. And I remember when we were upgrading Halifax from six channels to 12, our engineer at

• 38:50Speaker 00

  the time said, nobody will ever watch 12 channels. And that's all of my time. So we built 12 channels. And of course, with their short time, that was outdated. We had to rebuild. So we didn't pay for the license, the license we applied for, and nobody else applied. And this is sort of Amherst, Nova Scotia. We built a system and with coax cable and put up a big master antenna to get the signals out of Halifax. And then we got microwave American channels in. But it was tough. It was really tough. I mean, again, we didn't know what we were doing.

• 39:28Shane Parrish?

  Is it true you used to bus in tapes from New Brunswick?

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's it. I wasn't going to mention that. It was so terrible. We built a tower down at Mount Shamcook on the US border. And we received the Bangor channels there, taped them, put them on the bus. And of course Halifax got them first. The time we got them in Amherst, they were two weeks old. But the sitcoms were okay. But the Boston Bruins two weeks later were not quite so good. There was not a lot of entertainment. So we were selling these US channels, two weeks old.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  And then eventually we got a microwave system that brought them in directly. And it's still off mountain shamp cooked. And now, of course, all this stuff comes by fiber. And so tremendous changes in that business.

• 40:20Shane Parrish?

  Was it capital intensive back in 68 as you're building this out? So where did the capital come from to build that out?

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• 41:27Speaker 00

  Well, it was a small town. And so, you know, it didn't take a lot of capital, but, but we borrowed the money from the bank in Nova Scotia, or most of it. And we worked hard. It's amazing how it's developed. But then we could see that you could tie them together with fiber and we kept, and they kept, more capital was required. So a lot of the other towns, the guys just decided they didn't want to put more capital in. So for sale. And my corporate lawyer at the time, George Kane, said, John, there's something interesting here. All these towns come up, there's six buyers, but you always get them. And it was basically, we became easy to deal with.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  And we always lived by our word and we always paid top price. And so we just kept picking them off one at a time and, and made it easy and didn't over, over negotiate. We gradually picked up a lot of towns and, and then, you know, we bought a company out of Newfoundland that had.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Systems in Sudbury and Bridge Columbia in Alberta. We just gradually bought them, but there's nothing to buy anymore. I think about this, we have both our cable and food business that were both quite rapid growth businesses from really small cottage industries to professional companies. We've played that game and they're both good businesses, but I don't see the next big step.

• 43:02Shane Parrish?

  They're kind of mature businesses.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and all the bigger companies have, you know, are public companies and they're not going to sell.

• 43:11Shane Parrish?

  At one point, you were losing a lot of money every month.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:16Shane Parrish?

  And you went to see your father and your brother.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  That's right. I guess maybe it was 11,000, these numbers, you know, grow or shrink over 50 years. I think it was 11,000 a month we were losing.

• 43:30Shane Parrish?

  But that's on, that's like hundreds of thousands today.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Thought we should have a little family meeting on it. That, look, we're losing it and I'm cutting costs everywhere. We did cut costs, took all the extra people out. I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I'm not really sure where we're going. I think we could sell to some of our neighbors or maybe we could buy one or two because they were, everybody was struggling. My father said, well, we spent a lot of money on your education. We shouldn't throw it away. Pretty wise advice. And I said, geez, I don't know whether we'll ever get it back or not, but it turned out it was right.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  We had an expensive education and we learned how to go on it. Sometimes you get a little wisdom, it takes you a long way.

• 44:25Shane Parrish?

  How important was scale?

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Well, scale ended up being very important in that business. And that's why in 83, when we got Halifax and were able to tie, we couldn't really afford to have professional engineers. We were relying on suppliers to give us the technical advice. But scale is absolutely important.

• 44:49Shane Parrish?

  And so as you expanded this, you've done, I think, hundreds of acquisitions effectively in East Link. Why the reputation for paying the most?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  I don't think we paid too much, but we were prepared to pay at the top of the cycle. Again, we were looking at the horizon. If you paid a little too much and you're a private company, you just have to live a little longer to make it work. My brother used to say about buying a woodlot, well, maybe we're paying too much, but if we live long enough, it'll be a good deal. So this is the same with cable. It just meant that instead of a 10-year payback, you took 12 and you worked for nothing for two years. In the big scheme, that was the right thing to do.

• 45:36Shane Parrish?

  Is that something private companies can do easier than public companies?

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're still doing all kinds of land development and this development we have in the food business on the peninsula. It's all 20-year horizon types to get the land cleared and developed and get it productive. But it's unique and nobody else is going to have it. So there's lots of projects like that.

• 46:06Shane Parrish?

  What are some of the other projects you have going on that you could do privately that you couldn't do publicly, or advantages of just being private versus public?

• 46:15Speaker 00

  I think there's tremendous advantages to, if you have good management, and we'd like to think we have good management, we work hard at that. But there's just all kinds of decisions that we're making that, of course, if it's efficiencies in the factory, we want to have a two or a three-year payback. But sometimes you have to make motherhood statements. You have to say, well, like we built a $150 million factory in the Acadia Peninsula. That's a motherhood statement. I mean, you couldn't say, well, it's going to be a three-year payback. It's not going to be, but it's a good long-term asset for the area. It's

• 46:59Speaker 00

  a good long-term asset for us. But so there are some, what I call, motherhood decisions you make to keep yourself efficient and going.

• 47:10Shane Parrish?

  Are there other ones that come to mind?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  The land development we're doing up there is the same thing. We bought

• 47:21Speaker 00

  About 3,000 acres of carrot land in the Annapolis Valley at premium prices. Why would you pay premium? We need to secure the base. That's where we grow our carrots and we were, you know, doubling the production of carrots. So we need the land base, in some cases paying twice what the market was. But it's only available once, you know, if you don't.

• 47:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  It's not always available.

• 47:48Shane Parrish?

  Buffett talks about, well, I want all my managers to run their businesses as if they own 100% of it.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:55Shane Parrish?

  And then you would do these things where it's like, well, this might not make economic sense for 10 years, but it makes economic sense over 50 or 100 years.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  And I'm not sure Buffett would agree. I mean, he buys going companies with existing revenues and he, I don't think he's done much startup and, and, you know, he gave up on Berkshire, which was the right thing. But he, he's, he's buying companies all over the world that are already cash flow positive and making money and he can measure that. My business of food and cable and even inland, we're buying kind of startups and growing them. And maybe we're just lucky, but we've made that work. But, you know, we could see that we, we could do that. So it's a little different than Buffett.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Now that we have mature businesses, we'd like to find something that fits Buffett's model, find something that already has good cash and good management. And we're looking every day and we almost closed on a significant one, but, but at the end of the day, we've said, no, we've reached our limit. We can't pay that price and we could have, could have quite easily, but we'd rather buy more Buffett stock than, than pay too much for an operating company.

• 49:18Shane Parrish?

  You, you did, we were talking about this earlier, you took one public company private in 2007, 2008, which was AM Telecom?

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, AM Telecom in, in Southern Ontario. We got some real efficiencies by taking it private and it.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  You know, became a branch plant as compared with a separate head office, separate accounting, separate. I don't know how much it wasn't that big a company, but we probably took three or four million dollars of overhead out of it.

• 49:50Shane Parrish?

  Which is part of the cost, sort of, of being public in a way.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  It's costly to be public and it slows you down and you're

• 49:59Speaker 00

  and you're a target for everybody. Public companies attract government. You know, I've been a director of one of the major banks in Canada and I've been a director of many other companies that were public, but it seems to me that, you know, living in Oxford and running a private company, you're under the radar a lot compared with public and public filings and and regulations. And we have them all and we like our food business. We run top quality and I used to have this discussion with Donald Sobey, who encouraged me to go public because it gave liquidity for the shareholders. But

• 50:43Speaker 00

  I'd like to think we could solve that problem without going public. But it's really cumbersome. There's no question. And very hard to make long-term, 20-year decisions.

• 50:54Shane Parrish?

  One of the things that you never got into with

• 50:59Shane Parrish?

  East Link, to my understanding, was really buying programming, which seems to be the whole nature of the last 10 or 15 years of the business where you have, you know, the Bells and the Comcast and everybody's sort of like trying to buy up the programming.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:15Shane Parrish?

  Why did you guys never get into that?

• 51:18Speaker 00

  I think it was probably a gut feeling. They were paying a lot for this programming. And do you think Bell are happy that they spent a lot of money buying programming now? I don't think so. It really hasn't worked out well. Were we lucky? We thought a lot about it and there were programming we could have bought. I guess, you know, we felt we had limited resources. We'd rather buy another company than than by programming.

• 51:45Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about something like Starlink now with rural internet access? You have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in physical assets delivering internet.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  When it comes to the technology business, I'm the wrong one to try and answer that. It's very difficult to be better than a good fiber system in rural Nova Scotia or rural areas because you have so many options with it. In fact, we're doing business with Starlink because when they get down, they want to have fiber that they can feed people. Are they a competitor? Are they a customer? I'm not sure where that's going. And there's limited capacity in these satellites, too. Certainly, there's going to be competition. But I take a little different view. We've got the customers.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  And so our job is to be efficient, provide good service, make it easy. And can we do that? I mean, are we going to carry Starlink? Are we... We're a distributor of other people's products. So I think having the fiber, the fiber network in our office in Halifax, on the wall, we have a picture of our fiber network. It's really amazing. And I think it's an asset that's not recognized by the financial advisers and so on of the big companies. But if you look at our map,

• 53:24Speaker 00

  we have fiber from Ireland to Bermuda to the east coast. And then we have fiber going west through Chicago and Detroit, through Toronto and up north, and all the way to British Columbia. And a lot of this we own. Some of it we trade. We might have 48 fibers in an area and somebody wants 12 of them. We'll say, sure, we'll give you 12 in a rural area, but we need two to Detroit or to Chicago. So we either own or have trades. The fiber network, that's really amazing when you see it on the wall. I remember I went to lunch in Stockholm with the Ericsson guys

• 54:08Speaker 00

  when we were first getting in. Cell business. And I said, will you put us out of business? Will you put my cable business out of business eventually? He said, look, we've got to get off those towers and into fiber as fast as we can. So you know, you think of it's all cell, but it's really coming to you from fiber. And wherever the cell is, there's fiber to another node and, and you're picking it up. I think the cell network is a big asset for a lot of years. But voice is changing all the time.

• 54:39Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little bit more about the fiber and the asset nature of it. Is it more valuable than people think because it's harder to get permits to put new fiber in? Is it more valuable because it's super expensive to put new fiber in?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  I think it just gets more expensive all the time. And by now, there's a lot of fiber networks built. So who's going to build another one? You know, there's a lot of competition, but we've got this. It's plowed in capital that's there. That's going to be a big asset for a number of years, I think.

• 55:09Shane Parrish?

  Why did the name change from Bragg Communications to Eastland?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Originally, we called it Central Cable in Amherst. And that was to keep our name off it. But then we had a holding company and somebody's named it Bragg Communications. Holding company that was, was not in the public at all. Some way, as we bought companies, the Bragg name became a little more. But in most cases, we still ran under the original name, whether it was in Sydney or Summerside or Shroud Town for finance reasons and so on, had to put them together. The holding company named Bragg Communications sort of got out there. But it was never on, on the walls of any of our buildings because they were all run

• 55:57Speaker 00

  as Halifax scale or whatever. It was truly a holding company. And then, and then we moved it on from there. But those were kind of decisions I, I wasn't paying much attention to or didn't care much about. We, we were always. Rejigging the financial structure.

• 56:16Shane Parrish?

  You said something interesting there, which was you didn't want your name on there. Most people, I think, would almost be the opposite. They do from an ego perspective.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we don't have our name on the food business. Oxford's a good classical name around the world. One of the best marketing tools you're gonna have is use your own name. People catch on. McCain's would be a great example. Everybody knows McCain french fries. But I was determined that from a family point of view, and if my grandson or granddaughter wanna have just a normal job in the business or outside of the business, they don't need the burdens of the name being everywhere. So I was quite determined to keep our name off. It's more so today, but security, you don't need it. High profile in these small towns.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  And I think it just makes a better family situation if you don't have your name plastered over everything. But I can understand why people do it. But in my case, I prefer not to do it.

• 57:23Shane Parrish?

  You like the low profile?

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like the low profile. No question about that. My son Matthew and I were looking at a cottage that he was looking to buy. It was the former cottage of Alex Koval, who is the famous artist from Mount Allison, my university. And it was for sale, and we thought it would be nice, so the Koval Cottage. And we were there, and there were some other people showed up looking at it on a Sunday afternoon. And I said, oh, we understand it's for sale. We understand there's people interested. But Matthew and I were there, they had no idea who we were. And they were talking this as if, you know, maybe we'd know who might be buying it. And it's just nice to.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Have a nice low profile and be able to get around and not have the burdens of people. And not as much for me as for my children and grandchildren.

• 58:22Shane Parrish?

  When you were acquiring all these companies, whether through Oxford or through Eastlink, did anybody ever ask for equity?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've had, from time to time, there's been that discussion and I face it head on and say, "Look, family companies are great to work for and we're going to pay you well and you're going to feel very comfortable here, but there's no equity available." And too complicated with the finance structures if you start giving it away and then if they want out. And I just didn't need that complication in my life. I think historically, there's a lot of good family companies and especially in Europe, there's tremendous generations and people are comfortable.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  I tell the story about a young guy that was a basketball player and he was recruited to run the athletic department at Saint of X University. The president of the university said, "I'm probably only going to pay you half of what you're earning today, but I'm going to give you a job with twice the satisfaction." And that's the most important thing in life. He took the job and he's got great job satisfaction. And, you know, there's more to life than just the pay envelope. Having a good civil place to go to work and good fellow workers and a sense of working

• 59:52Speaker 00

  together is trying to get ahead of the other guy all the time. It's worked for us. We've had great employees, just tremendous employee, dedicated. That's what we are.

• 1:00:04Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little bit more about the culture inside the companies and how you shape it.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  Probably the best thing we've done on the culture side is...

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Everybody is dedicated to doing it better next year and open to that. Now, we always have some people who have to respond with a new idea with a negative comment to start with. That's human nature, but they get through that within a day. And then they're the great team leader. Having a culture that you can just bring up ideas and there's really no room for naysayers around the table. You've got to just say, "Look, we've got to do this. Don't tell me why it's difficult to do it. You agree it has to be done. We should be better than we are. So, well, let's get together." And I always say to my team, I say, "You're as smart as anybody else.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Why can't you figure out how to do it?" And that's a good challenge. But they're as smart as anybody else, you know? You don't have to bring people from Toronto or Ottawa to decide how to solve problems at Oxford. There's a culture of hard work and all of those basics and civility and respect. I think it runs highly through the business. And we say to people, "Look, if you can't be respectful or if you're not happy, please, you know, find a place where you can be happy."

• 1:01:35Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about incentivizing sort of the leaders of the company?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's always quite a challenge. And we have incentive programs and they seem to work. If I had my druthers, I'd rather pay you a million dollars and just expect you to work hard than to pay you 500 with a 500 bonus. Incentives seem to be a way of life, but a lot of people will perform without incentives. Certainly, we have incentive programs and they do seem to motivate people.

• 1:02:08Shane Parrish?

  Well, John, if you want to hire me for a million bucks a year, I'm available starting tomorrow.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  There you go. See? Without a bonus.

• 1:02:17Shane Parrish?

  No bonus necessary. How do you manage it all?

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  We're recording this in my so-called head office, which is only 200 yards from our food processing plant. But it's an effort for me to get away from the food business and let the professionals run it. We have a very small head office and we're running several operating companies. And a few years ago, we started a portfolio, which is, I think, quite significant today. I read where so-and-so is running $2 billion and $3 billion and we're doing more than that. And so we've got a big portfolio that's done very well for us. So we try to streamline it and keep it simple and let the operators run the business.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  And they have to deal with the people problems. We work at it.

• 1:03:10Shane Parrish?

  Who makes the investment decisions for the public companies?

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  We have a very small team here in our head office. I'd say three of us.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  And we're not traders. We're not trading all the time. We're trying to, we own like a lot of Buffett and we're just hanging on to it. And probably it'll have it 10 years. Although I read an article on the weekend, a contrarian view, but Buffett's maybe. Berkshire's not doing so well, but they compare it with Apple and Microsoft and some iFlyers that have done extremely well. We're buying Buffett for a 10% or 11% or 12% return. We're not looking for 20% or 25%. We just like to buy good, solid investments and let them grow.

• 1:03:59Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about that when they're so liquid? Like if they got overvalued, would you sell them or would you just sort of like hold on?

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Basically, we'd just hang on. You know, you wonder whether Berkshire is overvalued today or not. He says he buys the stock when it's 1.2 type book, but he's actually buying it at 1.5 times and buying it consistently. So he knows something that we don't know. So maybe you should sell the stock, but they're going to grow. If you have good stocks, some will be up, some will be down. But we don't really.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Pretend to be able to pick the high flyers, that's not really our objective. We've always had a modest portfolio, but when interest rates were down to where we could borrow money for 1% or 2%, we said, look, this is an opportunity. We should get at this. And so we did. Borrowed lots of money to buy good stocks, and it's been the right thing to do.

• 1:05:04Shane Parrish?

  You used to go to the Berkshire Hathaway meetings. What are some of the lessons you took away from Munger and Buffett?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  I don't know. There's so many, so many basic lessons. I say to my kids every once in a while, would Buffett do that? And they think, well, I guess he wouldn't. So that's the answer. We don't have to have a big discussion. We're looking at a company recently, and my son said, I think I'd rather have more Berkshire. And so it's a good test. And so he just brings value to our everyday life, all the time.

• 1:05:43Shane Parrish?

  What would Warren do?

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  What would Warren do? Or Charlie?

• 1:05:48Shane Parrish?

  What are some of the lessons you've learned from investing in public companies?

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  Buffett would say that, that if you're a businessman and investing in your business, you're probably a better stock picker, because you use the same principles. But if, if you're an investor, it will help you in your business, because you're using the same principles in your business. So just like I said, my son, this company we're looking at, not, not a very big company, but it would kind of fit. And my son says, well, I'd rather buy Buffett. That's a pretty good benchmark. So you use that every day. And he grew this business by buying other companies, but he hadn't charged money to do that. You know, he's,

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  he always says he doesn't, doesn't borrow money, but, but some way he's borrowing the insurance money. So he's had cash available to buy them. In my case, I've built businesses from scratch, and that's different. And you have to have some different philosophies than, than he would agree with. That, you know, he wouldn't have levered the way I did. He would have. Would abuse his insurance money, but he doesn't call that leverage.

• 1:07:02Shane Parrish?

  It's one of the differences that strikes me from your past and his, and they both obviously worked out exceptionally well, is that after the sixties, he basically seemed positioned for success no matter what happened, different businesses, right?

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:17Shane Parrish?

  But like, look at today, they have 300 billion in cash on the balance sheet.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:21Shane Parrish?

  If the economy crashes, he's gonna win. If the economy keeps performing, he's gonna win. And if it stays the same, he's gonna win. It sounds like he's almost positioned not predicting the future.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:33Shane Parrish?

  Whereas when you're levering up, you're making a prediction. It might be reliable because your revenues are constant and you're borrowing against that.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  It is different because he's relying on the market. If the market crashes, my cable business doesn't change. People still watch cable or still use cellphone. It might go down some, but it's basically if the market crashes, people are still gonna eat blueberries. Now, it might be, it might be tough going, but they're not gonna stop eating. And you might have to take a year or two when you don't make any money. But, but you know, back in, was it 78 when interest rates were 18 and 20%? I had a cable business and financed, and the interest rates were killing me. But we just hung in there and cut the cost.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  And I remember saying, well, if we can survive in this situation, we'll be in pretty good shape going forward. I understand Buffett, but I don't always agree with him. That money, and see, as a long-term investor, having that money sit in cash, I don't know, he's got a crystal ball that nobody else has. I'd be investing it in good stocks because if the stocks go down, it doesn't matter. But I guess he's waiting for the opportunity to buy them cheap.

• 1:08:58Shane Parrish?

  We'll find out, I guess.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he's creating cash, so he obviously anticipating quite a correction.

• 1:09:06Shane Parrish?

  Like, he does lever up some businesses there, like, not to the point of a lot of people, but like, the railroad business has that, especially with the predictable revenues. What are the key indicators you look at for your businesses on a regular basis to gauge how well they're doing?

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Condorator Buffett wore a big EBITDA believer.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  The cash they generate. If it's through depreciation, that's all right. How much cash are we generating? And how can we service the debt? And what can we buy with that cash? And as a private company, that's worked for us. You know, when we were building the cable business, there was lots of depreciation, but the cash flow was good and still is. And the same in the food business as we invest in factories and so on. And we also, you know, try to work the angles on the tax situation and use our depreciation. Warner said in the past, he's not a believer in EBITDA, but we are.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  We think it's the cash that the business generates. And so we're always saying, well, what's the multiple on EBITDA? And so we know what cash is coming because you can usually cut back on your capital if you need to. We're always trying to measure how much free cash the business are generating and what do we have to either pay down debt or to buy more Buffett stock or something similar.

• 1:10:38Shane Parrish?

  How would you classify your management style?

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Historically, a lot of hands-on. I really don't find the day-to-day operations as much fun as I do the investment of the funds. And so I'm enjoying moving to a head office role as compared with. But I still like to monitor. We still have monthly meetings with all of our major investments. So probably a little, people would say a little too much detail and so on, but God, when you're signing the checks and the notes, you want to know what's going on. And so I would rather be well-informed upfront.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  So that I can help if there's a problem than come to the problem late. Operating without surprises is pretty important to me.

• 1:11:30Shane Parrish?

  There's a trend in business, sort of like getting away from the details as you move up in the organization.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  A friend of mine one time said, you can run any company with five points on the back of a cigarette package. That was years ago. But that's really basic, you know, just what are the key items? Is it revenue, is it sales, is it margin and costs? I'm a big believer in being a low-cost producer. Doesn't matter what you're doing. There's no excuse to waste money. If you're low cost, you're gonna stay in business in the tough times. The key points are different in every business. So I would say, for instance, in the food business, all about costs because you know what the revenue's going to be. Because we don't know whether we're gonna have a frost or whether the currency's gonna change

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  or whether somebody else got a big crop or a poor crop. But if we keep our costs in good shape, we'll be all right in the long run. And I would say in cable, you know, you always have to look at costs, but capital is probably the biggest thing in the cable business. Because you can make big mistakes and, you know, spending, I'll say a billion dollars to get into programming and that just didn't work out. Every company, I would say, every business has, you know, the five points might be different.

• 1:12:54Shane Parrish?

  You're 84 now?

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  Eighty-four.

• 1:12:58Shane Parrish?

  And you're still working full days?

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  I try to. Yeah, I do. I do. I enjoy it. And I work a little every night. I'm always reading about stocks or reading business stuff. Yeah, I guess I'm not working quite as much as I used to. But I could share with you, I've given some money to an entrepreneurial school at University of Prince Edward Island. Catherine Colbeck, who was a former premier there and the business school's named after. And she was a friend of mine at university. And a great person. And so we gave some money to the, to an entrepreneurial school. And I said, on the condition that you put 7 O on the wall. What 7 O?

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week.

• 1:13:48Shane Parrish?

  I love it.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Not 50, but 70. And entrepreneurs do work 70.

• 1:13:53Shane Parrish?

  What role did Judy play in all of this?

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  I'd say she's a great mother. She's been a full-time mother. We have four children. I don't know whether she didn't have any interest in the business or I didn't want to share it. But I do like going home and not talking about the business. You know, we have four great children and we have eight grandchildren. She's been just a very supportive mother. I traveled the world for years and she brought up our children. Her role is a supportive role, but not directly in the business.

• 1:14:24Shane Parrish?

  Is there anything, looking back, that you would have done differently?

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  Probably if you said, should I have done differently? Maybe. But on the other hand, I was very comfortable doing what I did. And I worked hard, but you know, we bought our first cottage. And the theory was that Judy could be at the cottage with the kids and I could work, which worked out well. Basically, our, our philosophy of life and so on, I wouldn't change. We've lived a low profile, a rural community and, and at the same time had the ability to do whatever we wanted to.

• 1:15:07Shane Parrish?

  What role did focus play?

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  Focus in business is a big deal. When it comes to business principles, there isn't one A bigger than focus. Just stay at it and work at it. And it's amazing how hard work brings you good luck after a while. Focus is absolutely critical. Probably the biggest, maybe the biggest single principle you can have in business.

• 1:15:33Shane Parrish?

  Is there anything about decision-making that you've learned that you think most people miss or would benefit from your knowledge?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Stick to your knitting. And I've seen.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  A number of friends or associates who made the first million and then thought they knew how to make the second with ease and they would get off focus, go buy another company that they didn't know anything about and just, just not focused on, on what they knew. I think it's fine to, to diversify, but you have to be careful how you do that. Frank Solby, when I was in university, reading a Financial Times, I don't know which one, and, and I read a quote where he says, "Always keep the back door open."

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  So, so although we were levering through these formative years, the real debt load was in cable where the cash flow was quite consistent. The mistake many people make is, is they have a business, they make the first million dollars, and now they get into things they know nothing about in too big a way. I mean, if you want to test the waters, that's one thing. I'm a, a great believer in, in, in not having all the answers. I always say, "The guy that asks the question looks better than the guy that has the answers." And so I'd like to have the questions and, but people get to have the answers, you know?

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  We've all been around associates that, once they make a little money, they, they know more than the next guy.

• 1:17:16Shane Parrish?

  In your experience, how often have those people self-corrected after they've started to go down that path?

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  I, I haven't seen much self-correction. A guy that's really doing well, when he speaks up, you listen to him. When he goes broke, nobody listens to what he is saying more. So making a million didn't make you smarter and losing it didn't make you stupider.

• 1:17:39Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about the role of patience and long-term thinking in terms of your success, looking back over the last 50, 60 years.

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  Patience is a real virtue. I don't know whether I have enough, but, but I've had to have a lot because we, we've...

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  Built her team. We have lots of imports now, but in the early days, we built her team on locals that, you know, didn't have as much experience as people from away. And some have turned out to be great entrepreneurs, but you had to have patience, bring them along and get them exposed. One guy said to me, because I was trying to point out the way I wanted to report, and the guy says, "Yeah, but John, you're outside and seeing all these boards and reports. We don't see that." Although you're smart, just didn't have the imagination.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  But today, tremendous executive, but it does take a little time. And patience, respect, civility, those words are big in our culture.

• 1:18:50Shane Parrish?

  One of the things that you said that I was most intrigued about that gives me a lot of hope is that most fortunes are made after 50.

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  I was a member of YPO, like lots of other entrepreneurs, and you get rocked out at 50. And I remember saying, you know, for me, this is just the beginning, because I built a base now. I haven't really made any money, but I built quite a base. And now I've got to take that base and move on. Most of my real equity, the way you would measure it, has come after 60. But before that, I was building land bases and factories and people, but it didn't show up on the bottom line. But I was building a real base of assets. And then I could say that after 70, we've done a lot better still, because we've got

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  the base going. And like the portfolio we have, I didn't really get started until 75, maybe. And we played, I shouldn't say played around, we had maybe a significant portfolio in some people's mind, but not one that you would see written up in the New York Times or something. But when I decided, when these interest rates were so cheap, that you didn't have to be a genius to borrow at 1% or 2% and invest in dividends at 5%, so we did it. Could have sat back and done nothing. And not everybody was doing that. We have a board, and I was explaining to them what my...

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  You know, thoughts were and how I thought it would work and what the downside was. Well, we've just plugged away at it and we've got a couple billion of equity or more now in the portfolio. But all that came late in life. What role does the board play? I don't want to downplay the board, but one of the great things the board does is bring discipline to our management team. The team loved to have the board come and like to present, but they also have to be professional about it. So it's forced our team to be more professional. Now, we get lots of wise comments too, but the discipline that they bring by the board,

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  the different leaders coming before the board, presenting what they're doing, answering the questions, that's great discipline. I use the board, different people on the board at different times as listening posts. I wouldn't go without, I'm a big fan of private company boards. I don't think they slow us down in decision making, but we won't make a big decision. We don't like to surprise the board. There might be, you know, smaller decisions we just make and move on, but if it's significant, we like the board to be primed in advance as to what we're thinking about, what we might do. So we kind of try to operate without surprises.

• 1:21:52Shane Parrish?

  You've mentioned interest rates a few times. As somebody who's lived through basically the highest interest rates and the lowest interest rates we've ever seen, how do you think about interest rates and how they should or shouldn't be?

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  Well, they've been a big, big factor. I mean, I was paying 18 or 20% at one stage for loans. Didn't have as many loans, thank God. And then when they're cheap, cheap, you know, these rates.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  Have been exceptionally cheap. And then when they get to be 6%, everybody says, oh, it's too expensive. Geez, I never dreamt that I'd ever see 6%. Certainly, I didn't allow that to slow me down because, you know, it's kind of normal. But now we're coming back. It does allow leverage and it affects the portfolio some. You might buy a few more dividend stocks if the money's cheap. If the dividend's twice what the cost of funds are. Yeah. Pretty, you can get a return without too much risk pretty easily. It's obviously, it's my cost of funds. How have you learned to deal with success?

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  I don't know. My lifestyle's not much different now than. How have you kept it that way? There's no yachts, no mansions? Naturally. Well, we have a few too many homes. We don't abuse that and certainly no yachts. You know, hate to admit it, but we have a plane, but that keeps me working. I couldn't be traveling around the way the airports are, my age and my health. One beauty of living in a small town, we're an hour and a half from downtown Halifax. I could be going to dinner every night in Halifax. But the beauty of living here is I just put on the invitation story and my son, my executive assistant sends it on.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  The low profile helps, but the wear and tear of going to dinner and going to receptions and, you know, it takes time away. That goes back to focus. That's exactly right. I don't feel any different about myself now than I did 30 years ago because we have a place in Hawaii and so on, and we're next door to the Americans. I always say that the business community in the US.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  If they make ten million, they spend like they have a hundred. And Canadians make ten, they hide it.

• 1:24:27Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  It seems to me the culture of the US is making money to spend it. I'd never thought of it that way. I'd rather, you know, we have a significant foundation.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  The typical estate freeze, but I kept a portion of for myself that is going to the foundation for public good. And so that's one of the reasons I keep working is to, is to be able to really, really leave a foundation. And at the same time, the children are more than they need or more than they should have probably, but, but we're going to have a significant foundation and, and to work for that as compared to work for a big yacht. I don't know how you measure those things, but, but it'll give me satisfaction anyway.

• 1:25:19Shane Parrish?

  Are there any policy changes you would make to encourage more entrepreneurship and business in Canada?

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  There's so many roadblocks at every turn.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  My friend Wallace McCain, one of his sayings, well, don't let the bastards get you down. Well, I don't know who the bastards are, but there's somebody out there trying to slow you down every day.

• 1:25:41Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  And it's quite a statement. So you have to work through that. Tax policies in Canada aren't bad. Jurisdictional holdups at the border, you know, with all these border deals is terrible. I'm an environmentalist. We have big woodlots and, and I'm really an environmentalist, but, but if you're not careful, they'll take it over. You know, we had a woodlot.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  When you, this particular case, it was a thousand acre woodlot. And we were building roads through it to do silviculture work, great for the future.

• 1:26:21Speaker 00

  And I went to see where they put a bridge in, and it wasn't a bridge, but it was half bridge and a half rock. It ended up costing seventy five thousand dollars. And when I was there, there was no water in it. And there was only water in it maybe in the month of April when it came down off the hill. So there's no fish in it.

• 1:26:40Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Speaker 00

  But they make it, they could do things that are absolutely.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  No common sense too. And we could have had a nice rock way that you just traveled through. But, you know, so there's just things like that. That's a minor issue, but it's irritating.

• 1:27:01Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:27:02Shane Parrish?

  There does seem to be a general lack of common sense in most regulations around the world at this point. It's like sediment, right? It started out with good, but it keeps adding and adding and adding. And nobody would have chosen to get to the place where we're at. And yet here we are and we keep sort of adding sediment.

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  And we add to it. And the most irritating comment that you get from the civil servants is, but this is the regulation. Don't talk to me about common sense. This is the regulation. You know, when the people wrote the regulations, they couldn't envision everything. But then the regulation covers everything, just bypasses common sense. And I've heard that, well, this is the regulation. You know, we're just going by the regulation. Drives you crazy.

• 1:27:49Shane Parrish?

  John, I really appreciate the time today for this conversation. We always end on the same question, which is, what is success for you?

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  Success for me is, is the development of a great team. And in many cases, we have people that worked in this factory through high school and university, came back to work with us and are now running the company. That's to me, real success. We have the same thing in our other businesses where we develop. At East Link, we have homegrown leaders that are competing with, with the world and doing it very well. And so real success is, is developing people so that they can add value. My, my philosophy is always, how can we add value today?

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  Well, if you can develop good people, they can add value and add value to society or any way you want to judge that.

• 1:28:56Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview. I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of The Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog/membership, check out the show notes for a link, and you can sign up today. And my reflections will just be available

• 1:29:37Shane Parrish?

  in your private podcast feed. You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The Farnham Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.