Jim Pattison: Meet the Canadian car salesman who built a billionaire empire

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How long has Jim Pattison run his namesake company, a sprawling collection of businesses with billions of dollars in annual sales and tens of thousands of employees?

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One indication of his longevity is the tenure of his administrative assistant, Maureen Chant — nearly 60 years and counting. She was hired in September 1963 as a night switchboard operator, at 25 cents an hour. “She was 23 when she came (to work) with me and now she’s eighty something,” Pattison said in an interview with the Financial Post from his Vancouver office. “She’s still my right-hand ‘man’.”

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Although, he noted teasingly, Chant has cut back her time in the office. “She used to work six days a week and now she only works five, which is disappointing.”

Pattison, meanwhile, says he is still in his office seven days a week, including full hours on Saturdays. On Sundays he attends church in the morning, so doesn’t arrive until 1 p.m. “I like going to work,” he said. “I’ve been going to work all my life.”

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Pattison is 92, a billionaire many times over, and still helms — as chief executive and chairman — the company he founded in 1961, the Jim Pattison Group. It would be difficult to find a Canadian entrepreneur with more diverse business holdings. The Jim Pattison Group, owned 100-per-cent by Pattison himself, is an umbrella company covering businesses in industries spanning agricultural equipment, signs, packaging, groceries, wine, West Coast fishing, and forestry. He even owns the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! franchise and Guinness World Records. According to Pattison, his group of companies recorded total sales of $12.7 billion in 2020, while employing 51,000 workers, and doing business in 95 countries.

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Pattison has been described as Canada’s Warren Buffett, but he dismisses the comparison. “There is nobody in Canada like Warren Buffett or any place else that I’m aware of,” he said. “It’s just inaccurate. Warren Buffett is in a class all by himself.”

The backbone of Pattison’s empire has been the automotive industry. He left the University of British Columbia before graduating and washed used cars at a Vancouver dealership. He moved into sales and ended up working for 10 years at the Bowell McLean GM dealership. “I started in the used car lot, wound up running the company, and they were kind enough to offer me a partnership,” he recalled. “I declined it and struck out on my own.”

In 1961, at age 33, he borrowed $40,000 from the Royal Bank of Canada to take over a small, struggling Vancouver GM franchise that sold Pontiac and Buick vehicles. “We started with a three-pump gas station and a two-car showroom,” he said. “When you don’t have any money and you want to grow, it takes the banks or somebody to loan you the money, and the Canadian banks have been very kind to me.”

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The company’s auto interests now include fleet management, corporate leasing, and heavy-duty truck sales. Its string of car dealerships sells Toyota, Lexus, Subaru, Volkswagen, Volvo, Audi and other brands. “Cars are the basis of our business,” he added.

The Pattison business kingdom has been built, in part, on industries rich in fossil-fuels emissions. Those businesses have made Pattison very wealthy — his net worth is $9.6 billion, according to Forbes — but now represent a problem. He argues that any business harmful to the environment will soon go out of business altogether. On the day he was reached at his Vancouver office, Pattison said he was working on a new acquisition.

We know we have to move out of anything that isn't friendly to the environment

“We’re actually working on five different deals as I speak with you,” he said. “Everything we’re doing today going forward, our first consideration is the environment.” He said he is also attempting to improve the environmental impact of his current businesses, including what is, environmentally speaking, an albatross: his 40-per cent stake in Westshore Terminals, a coal port in Vancouver. Pattison is hoping to “transition” the terminal’s output to potash. The goal, he said, is to “to transition as rapidly as we can” without mass layoffs or destruction of the company’s value. “We’ve got to be practical about it,” he said. “We have employees, and we have contracts and we’ve got to honour our contracts. But we know we have to move out of anything that isn’t friendly to the environment.”

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Pattison was born in 1928 in Saskatoon and moved to Vancouver with his parents during the Great Depression. He played trumpet as a boy and was described as “The Boy Wonder from Vancouver” while headlining gospel revival meetings. He met his future wife, Mary Hudson, when both were 13, at a country bible camp. They’ve been married 70 years.

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Pattison doesn’t play the trumpet much anymore, except when he’s on his 150-footer, Nova Spirit, which in addition to six staterooms, has two pianos, an organ, and other instruments aboard. Out on the water, “there’s nobody around that’s going to object to me playing,” he said before laughing.

He also owns Frank Sinatra’s former compound in Palm Springs, in the California desert, and has maintained it, over two decades, just as Sinatra had it. “We haven’t changed a doorknob,” he said. “Anything that goes wrong with the house, we fix it exactly the way Frank had it.”

During our interview, Pattison offered a tour of Vancouver aboard his boat. “If you ever are coming this way, you phone Maureen,” he said, referring to his long-time assistant. He also offered an invitation to visit and stay at the Sinatra house. “If you ever go to California, be sure and phone Maureen,” he said. “We’d be happy to give it to you for a week or 10 days. There’s 15 bedrooms, so bring lots of friends.”

This September will mark Chant’s 58 ^th year with Pattison. “I love what I do,” she said in an email, “and if I was king, I would turn the clock back 50 years and start all over again!”