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[Music] jerry conner thank you so much for joining us it it really is a pleasure and a privilege to have you uh on today just as a quick background jerry is the founding partner at cumberland wealth management uh which which offers a variety of wealth management portfolio management services one of the biggest firms that we deal with it's great opportunity to work with you and your team an amazing team uh and uh it's really it's really great to have you on here i know you've had a ton of experience in this industry your name and your reputation is absolutely stellar everyone that i've ever talked to who knows you always speaks extremely highly of you so i'm very eager to learn about your story and how you came into the industry and some of the lessons you've learned so i'd love to get started with hearing your story better about your background and go from there okay so um i mean i was born and raised just outside of chicagoland little town and then i was educated at a small private university in kind of central indiana and after graduating i had intended to go to graduate school i got married my last year in university wow i'm going to go to graduate school after after graduation and uh that summer between graduating and going off to graduate school um rather than just taking a normal job in a factory or something i went down and knocked down the door of a local stock brokerage firm and asked them if they were hiring summer students not to make much much money but really just to find out what the business was like and you know i'd heard about it and but didn't really know anything it's unfortunate when you get out of university they don't prepare you particularly well uh to um you know in career planning i mean you have a degree but you really know what to do with it right so this was my attempt to get some experience and um so i went down and they told me no they didn't hire any summer students and sent me away and i went back a couple more times and the manager of the office finally relented and just gave me kind of a joe job of um you know just a kind of an office boy and um then in august that year uh for some reason he had taken a liking to me and he was transferred from aurora illinois to toronto to take over the um the operation there and toronto was interesting because it was a separate entity from the the main office in new york and in the firm i was working was a company called francis said dupont which is the second largest brokerage firm in in north america and for some reason he said to me why don't you give up on graduate school come to canada and work in the operations and help me out with these problems i have and if you would do that for two years you'll be 24 years old old enough to get a training program and we will put you in the training program then and you can come back to the united states and go wherever you want and they had 121 different offices so i talked to my wife about it and and um you know we had deposit on a house or a apartment in uh at graduate school and everything and gave it all up packed our bags and uh moved to canada and um that was an interesting experience i mean i got my mba in operations and that with that firm because the manager really didn't know what the hell he was doing and so every time somebody would leave or he had a problem he'd ask me if i could do the job and of course i said sure i can and so i got promoted very quickly so by the time i was 23 and a half i actually was running the operations i had a hundred and some other people reporting to me and i'd only been there maybe a year and a half and um then he left uh it took another job and i was stranded and um one of the people that was at his retirement party in aurora illinois was a guy named peter dupont he was the dupont and so i called him and i said you'll remember me but here was a deal i had he said yeah i remember you and so he put me in the training program and saw was about eight months in new york city going through training what have you and at the end of that program um and i couldn't afford to keep my my wife in toronto with a kid uh so and we didn't think we were coming back to toronto so we pack up our bags and put everything in storage my wife moved to florida and i went to new york and i remember it was a july 4th weekend uh 1970 i went down and and walking the beach after dinner and said where we going to go back to chicago or you know you know we should probably be in a big city rather than a small city if you're going to do well in this business you can always go back to a small town we knew chicago we didn't really know any of the others um if you live in chicago then it was a commute um we liked the living style and standard in toronto and so we elected to come back to toronto so that was an important uh decision and i continued to work with that firm then a guy named ross perot acquired it kind of changed the ethics of the organization i left them in 1972 and joined a company called baker weeks which was a very good institutional research firm and our stick then was to use the institutional research that was too detailed and too voluminous for most individuals to really use themselves and we would use it and handle the money on a discretionary basis and so that's how we kind of got into the discretionary money management game then they were so that was 1972 and then they were going to be acquired in 1976 or so one of the other chaps there was got him john clark who had also been with me at dupont and so we elected to go out and start conor clark and that was 1976 and we had i don't know maybe we made 15 million dollars between us yeah my money under management uh so you know we can barely scrape by on that but there's also a lesson uh learned in that whole exercise because uh you had to put up a certain amount of capital we didn't have any money and so i just bought a house and so i had to pledge the house to the bank to get the money to put up for uh the the firm and i can still remember my wife had to get independent legal advice to sign off on the house so she went down and saw this lawyer and he said don't do it you know mostly don't don't make it you're going to lose your house she said well i'll either lose my house or lose my husband so and do this but she was very good good sport you know she moved from the united states with a kid to canada and and she was alone for the ride uh good bad or whatever and so we started connor clark and then in 1982 we set her conor clark and lawn which was an institutional business so we managed more pension plans there and at connor clark mostly managed individuals money for individuals and then in 1987 we started another company called 2020 which was a mutual fund company and it all accommodated kind of a 1997. so we started from 15 million million and had about i think we had about 16 or 18 billion when wow and i left in 97 and started uh cumberland so we started cumberland with you know kind of my book of business of maybe 500 million and four major partners and um today cumberland's about you know three and a half billion and along the way uh is part of our money management style we're kind of contrarian value type guys if you remember back in 1999 or 2000 all the tech stocks were doing very well it was a new economy and all this dot com stuff it was kind of crazy and so we started taking money out of the stock market and buying real estate and so we bought about i think about about a million and a half square feet of real estate over at king and spadina all along both sides of king street and they're all old garment factories and warehouses they're pretty run down and we would renovate them we literally empty them uh sandblast the walls take the floors back down to you know big wooden floors and all posts and they were quite pretty inside and started leasing those out and that turned to be quite a successful real estate operation wow and we set up a series of limited partners for their cumberland clients that owned all of those buildings the limited partnerships had a sunset on it and so in 2003 or 2002 sunsets came up and instead of trying to sell the buildings we took the the package of buildings public and it's now called allied properties reit and now that property says i think it's about 9 billion in in properties and about 14 million square feet of property wow that was another venture that that we got into so uh the cumberland story's been kind of interesting i probably would not have gotten into the real estate had i stayed with with conor clark connor clark eventually got uh acquired by royal bank and has disappeared conor clark and lon is still around although none of us none of the original partners are still working there but uh counterclockwise probably this it's it could be very well the largest it's about 100 billion management so it could be the largest independent on the street now wow so it's been a good ride this is why i've been so interested in this conversation that is one hell of a resume jerry that's not a normal ride that is incredible but what i sorry please go ahead oh sorry i i really enjoyed the way you told the story too i mean i a lot of times when we go through these conversations i have to keep trying oh how did you go from here to here but just the way you lined that story up was was perfect there were no gaps so uh that that was really really awesome um one of the things that that you mentioned that that always uh i'm interested in you started calling conor clark with with john clark and the the partnership concept is always one that interests me because there's always you know it could go both ways it's awesome to have someone like like even with your wife like you said to have someone who's there for the ride and who's supportive but sometimes partnerships can also go the other way so what what gave you the comfort in knowing that you can start the firm with john at that point well i probably it was probably a bit naive in in not really having tested you know our values and we we're just two guys that uh were working hard and were two of the more successful salesmen at baker weeks uh the the opportunity we had at baker weeks was going to go away and you know we were both um eager to you know do something else we had lots of offers from you know joining the wood gundies and other firms on the street but you know we both wanted to be independent and so we'd like to just kind of strike out on our on ourselves on our own uh you know that said i mean there was probably less forethought put into the whole thing than we probably should have put into it and so uh it just seemed like a good idea we could afford it and if it didn't work you know we could always go back and get jobs at the big firms uh so you know the the downside was you lose some money and you can lose your house probably but you know you can recover i was only 30 years old so it wasn't going to be the end of the end of the world and then as this partnership evolved i mean it was just the two of us for quite a while it was and and we were not particularly successful initially we built our business uh but the you know the ramp up was was was pretty slow and it was it was only maybe five years in that i wanted to start uh building the business uh john didn't really have any interest in being involved in managing a business and so he said look if you want if you want to do that go ahead i'll i'll support you but just don't ask me to do anything that's a good deal so i didn't have to you know he was never in the way and you know we never had a compromise really on on decisions and we started building building the firm in the end we had a conflict and that's what broke it up uh but you know for 20 years it was pretty good pretty good pretty good ride that's incredible um in in in what you said there were a few things that sort of stood out that i want to kind of go back to one is one of the big focuses of these conversations to me are always about uh core characteristics that make someone uh you know helps help someone on their way of achieving success and one of those things obviously circumstances come into fact come into play but like for me right off the bat that decision you made in the summer between going to grad school um to to go and knock on the door that to me is a big thing like obviously that that sets you on the path and for you to have the vision to do that but then also uh in in your uh in your focus in terms of within the industry pursuing with the education saying yes to the operational work that was thrown your way all of these things to me are uh characteristics that need to be highlighted because regardless of what people do what kind of path or what career they're in these core characteristics are are important so i am interested though what got you what got you curious enough to go and knock on the on the the brokerages uh for a door and did you always have an interest in the financial markets or yeah so it's interesting you would highlight that because it's probably uh one of the more important things that um you know i reference when i'm speaking to young guys and what happens with with most guys coming out of university today is that they have a degree they're not too sure what they want there's not a lot of good career counseling that's going on uh there are organizations that come to the campuses uh recruiting and what guys do is they they they put their applications in and uh whoever gives them the nod and and hires them uh it kind of determines their their career path so the group has many cases is determined by fate who gave me the job and that's the direction they end up going and you know that happened to lots of my friends while i was in university the plum job when i was getting out of school i was to get a job with um uh procter gamble in in marketing that was the job you wanted so i went through the process and procter gamble offered me a job and it was they only offered two people on the campus a job i was one of them and um thought about it and i went i don't know if i really want to work for procter and gamble i think i'd rather go to graduate school and think about a little bit so turn the job down everybody said you're crazy i mean that's you know that's that's the direction you want to go in but i didn't know that that was the direction i wanted to go in and it heard about the stock market it seemed kind of glamorous uh you know my father had invested a bit of of money and uh so you'd hear about you know what was going on and so i just thought why not go down and and learn a little bit about it but that's awesome what's important is if i had not been proactive in trying to choose my job fate would have chosen it for me you know you know i've probably been a middle management guy with procter gamble or something and who knows what well that's exactly why it was interesting to me because sometimes it's it's that it like we always talk about it's it everything always starts small right and some of the steps that seemed like a small step but like to me that was the key that is what sets you off on the right path because you decided to go and knock on that door and plus you also had the courage like um a lot of times people are a little bit too concerned about what happens if they hear the no and it's like nothing happens you know it's fine you move on and you knock on the next door you know but but go for it um i appreciate you sharing that that that's really cool now i am i'm curious to know this is a commerce i really kind of know because i've had this conversation with you before but i i want to bring it up again one of the most awesome moments that i've had in my my my 20 years of this my own my own business here was one quick conversation i had with you at an event and i asked you did you envision all of this and you've obviously had tremendous success like there's success and then there's next level success there's jerry connor level success you've had like you know a high level of success and i asked you hey did you envision this and i've asked this of a lot of people and a lot of times they're like yeah i had this plan i had this that and the other and like you said you know a lot of times you don't know what's going to happen there's t is so i asked you and you said no i know i just started somewhere and and and i kind of went along and that was such a humble way of of saying it even though you've had such great success so i do want to sort of take you back to those early days when you started and if you had a vision and then at one point did you thought man this this this can be that dream case scenario it could be that enormous home run yeah so when you start i mean you're just trying to make a living you have certain skill sets and you're just trying to find the vehicle that'll allow you to best leverage those skill sets and so john and i starting out uh was was a way of doing that and even if we were operating at the level we were operating it we'd make more money than if we work for wood gundy or something like this but then once you got into it and you saw how you could leverage the business the leverage is very simple i mean we were managing money we're doing a good job for if i can hire other people to uh go out and sell that track record to other people you know all i want to do is just keep a little bit of what they were making and i could get lots of leverage on their time and talent so it was easy then to say let's let's hire a few people and see if in fact uh you know we can uh leverage what we're doing and that worked and uh so then you kind of go to the next step and then the next step and then the next step was we'll start our own operations so we became then a full clearing member which meant we had to put up a lot of capital millions of dollars in capital that was a big commitment but it was all incremental and uh you know as you have more success uh and you do understand the business yeah then for sure uh your vision becomes a little more far-reaching and you start to think you know what what is in the realm of possible here but when you're starting out it's little baby steps you know you're just trying to put one foot in front of the other and prove out the the business plan that that you've got and as you get comfortable with it uh and gain confidence in it you know then become a little more adventurous some and a little more brave about what you might do so i mean that's all all that happened we certainly didn't go in and say let's you know run this thing up to you know 16 17 billion dollars um that would have been a a dream too far and it's unrealistic you know in the reality is when you're when you're in business it's nice to have a a great vision but the reality is you got to have a reachable goal and you got to make sure that it's realistic right and then the only way that you can achieve this without driving yourself nuts is you take that goal you say let's break it down what do you have to do literally almost every day and so you know i knew that if i did certain things every day there was a certain success from doing those things and that test was cumulative and i would get to my goal so regardless what was happening in the market you know i never went home all stressed out things aren't working up at all i just knew that if i didn't i executed my plan every day it worked it would work i love i love that discipline i love that that mindset because you know we live in a world right now where everyone's flooded with this social media like oh dream big in private jets and this like perfect reflection of life whereas like you don't really know hey if it's real or not because you know this is just all through the lens of the social media account the other thing is you're still skipping all the steps and that's some of the things that we always talk about is like embrace those steps embrace the discipline go you can't just go from step one to step a million and i love that and i appreciate that you said that it's nice to have the dream that's big but if you don't have the you know individual reachable goals in between you don't have the incremental steps in between you're not you're never going to get it so i i really appreciate you saying that now in that you're talking about a certain discipline in terms of like sticking to here this here's what i'm doing market goes up market goes down i'm sticking to it where do you think that discipline came from do you think that's something that that was just innate in you or did you have to nurture it in yourself well i mean as far as an investment philosophy investment philosophy but also sticking to the business and and and you know enduring the various ups and downs that come along with it but just just sticking to the discipline of here's the vision here's my next realistic goal here's what i'm going for and and not to waver yeah so we were pretty we were pretty fortunate when we started in the business um and other people might look at it as misfortune so the market peaked in 1968 that's the year i started in the business even though it was in the operations end and it went into a bear market and it didn't come out of that bear market until 1982 it went dead for 14 years and the business itself was not particularly sought after from guys getting out of school wanting to go to wall street and so when i went through training in 1970 those classes put on by merrill lynch bash dupont graduated the most new registered reps in any one year ever that was the peak the year i went through by 1974 you entered this terrible market um half of the registered reps were wiped out the industry shrank by hand so the only guys that were left were some old guys that had a book of business who could survive it all the young guys that had given up a decent job they had a house had a mortgage they had you know kids to take care of but they had a level of expenses it was certainly greater than nine couldn't sustain themselves and they had to get out and find work elsewhere they got washed out right it was only knuckleheads like us that didn't really realize was that bad market and didn't have much of a standard of living that made it through right so you talk about timing in life you come out the other end 14 years now you're looking at a kid that's you know he's in his early 30s he's got almost 15 years experience and i'm calling people the old guys aren't calling anybody right you guys getting in the business are just green rookies there's this this is no competition so john clark and i starting and we were the first ones to start a high net worth consulting business um we had the game pretty well to ourselves and it's because we survived that wash out in in in the market fortunate timing good demographics and everything and and so it it it wasn't so much genius good planning terrific vision we're in the right place at the right time we survived that's beautiful took advantage of that once you recognized it then he went now i now i i've got a better vision as to what's going on here otherwise i've just got my head down trying to hang in there markets take off in 82 you start making people a fair bit of money they're telling their friends the business is rolling in things looking good you go hmm how can i leverage this now the vision part comes in but you know we had to hang in there for five years as i said not particularly successful there's a lot of common themes that keep coming out of this conversation like hey you're not afraid to put yourself out there which is something that i think everybody should should be able to use in their lives whether it's knocking on the stock brokerage before grad school whether it's calling up uh you know dupont and saying hey you know do you remember the deal if it's going and not and then making calls to get people to join you and after you know uh starting john and conor clark um so putting yourself out there is is a big part of that and uh if you don't put yourself out there none of this stuff is going to come to you so you got to take that risk a little bit what were some of the big lessons that you learned along the way that maybe some of the biggest challenges that you faced that's a good question i mean the challenges we faced were um you know some of the uh the difficult periods we had in the in the markets and um you know you have you have clients that get upset you have employees that get rattled and uh you know you have to um you know be able to keep everybody focused on really what's going on so you have to have certain clarity uh in your in your messages and you have to be able to come through it with some authority so i mean when the market crashed in 1987 for instance um you know everybody thought it was the start of that it was 1929 america dropped over 20 that day so i can remember calling a meeting um of all my employees not just the sales guys but the secretaries and everything else i said i'm going to tell you in the next hour the history of 1929 what happened and and and why it is different today right and we're going to stay here tonight and call every client back if it takes to midnight uh to answer their calls and so and we had you know everybody was calling and panic and we stayed there everybody stayed there but even the secretaries knew the story and you know i had done my homework so i was able to tell them what the story was and you you know we were unified and what it was and said here's where things happening this is going to pass and you know but we're very affirmative in in what our game plan was what was going on and you know how we were how we were going to deal with things so nobody panic wasn't you know a lot of waffling around don't know what's happening the stuffing is in in my business it can be very emotional and you better get a grip on it and so you're you're always having to be uh prepared so we got through 1987 without any difficulty scared the hell out of us but less you know recovered and we've had other episodes um like that but um you know you find that you have two dimensions one is i got to deal with the markets you know what the hell is happening in these in these markets and you got to be right and second uh you have all of your employees some handling emotions will stress better than others uh that you have to um settle down get focused and get them to do their do their do their job so um you know that that can take its toll on you because you know the reality is you you you sound pretty convinced and pretty absolute but you really don't know if you are right i guess that's life though um what uh i mean this is a bit of a cliched question so i apologize in advance but the way you've set things up has been um so perfect for this question for for people who are now at that you know 80 20 stage and if you had any uh any you know advice if anything that you think would be critical for them to keep top of mind what would those keys be well they're getting out of school i mean today it's difficult uh really knowing um you know what the opportunities are how they match up with you know your particular skill sets and uh i feel for them so i've had my all my sons now my grandsons and um you know i've caused them all to take aptitude tests not that they have to do tests really come up with an answer but they will present questions that you have to answer that will cause you to think about things that otherwise you had not considered right so um and then you can start matching up these industries require these kind of skill sets uh this kind of aptitude you know what are your skill sets does it match up does it not and you can start sorting things out but for the young guys you've got it you've got to seek out some help to allow you to be proactive in making a choice as to which direction you want to head off in as opposed to well here's a job offer i guess i'll take that and now you get five years down the road and you you've got expenses and it's hard to you know change pack at that point and now you're locked in and face determine where you're gonna go this is why you know two guys can come out of school they have the same interests the same likes the same grades everything else one goes here and one goes there and it's because you know they didn't take charge of that first decision that's a very important decision so until you know i told my grandsons the same thing you know you better get some help and let's walk through this thing and then you go out and determine what you want to do you choose don't let the market or say choose white [Music] that's that's awesome one of my my favorite books it was it was a book called principles by ray dalio and he talks about that with he's got one of the you know you you might yeah uh and he talks about that within his firm that he they did a lot of that doing the various testing to see how people's brains work what their strong suits are and the aptitude tests and whatnot and trying to um put his teams together in such a way that they were complimentary but but 100 you're right i think it would be really helpful for people to do some of that and be presented with those questions that force them to think about things that they wouldn't have otherwise thought about what about in terms of characteristics what do you think like in in me hearing your stories there's a few key characteristics in you that stick out to me like i i think you're you're tenacious like you go after things and that's it that's a big part of it um i feel like you're very disciplined and i think these are all core stuff and just having worked with you you're obviously you know honest and hard working and you know very very gracious um but uh what what would you say are some key characteristics that people can really focus on in themselves to strengthen well you've touched on some of them i mean i think uh you know grit being tenacious uh is every bit as important as being smart or any any other attributes so uh you know i find a lot of the young people coming out today are willing to work uh pretty hard in our in our tenacious but uh you know there's another level of being tenacious that uh you know it's kind of the second of the third gear that maybe they don't truly appreciate so you know i'd get up you know seven o'clock in the morning be down at the office and you know i'm working all day talking to my clients and then i would deal handle the the books and all the back office stuff when it was john clark myself so i won't get home until maybe nine nine at night or so then i have dinner and then i'd stop until midnight or one o'clock reading my research so i knew how to do a stock market so you know that was my day for probably six seven years right but a long time so when you talk about being tenacious it's uh and discipline i mean you if you're not disciplined you're just too inefficient but the other the other attributes that you know are probably important um when you think about it is uh i mean you have to have your own assessment of what is successful what is success um if you let other people establish that for you then you you probably are never going to be a a happy guy because you're just going to be kind of lost bouncing around chasing people that give you a pat on the back and all the time until you're successful so you're always going to be you know bound to their agenda and not your own if you want to be independent and i think the only way you can be truly independent uh is you have to have your own a lot of self-respect for you for yourself what i mean about that is i mean um you know we all have kind of a little inner voice uh that tells you what the right thing to do is and you know when you're faced with the situation you go that doesn't really what i want to do you know i'd rather go to this party than have to go to a funeral or something you know yeah nonetheless the more you do the right thing rather than what you want to do or what the most convenient thing is to do the more self-respect you build for yourself the more self-respect you have for yourself the easier it is to give yourself a pat on the back and what's important about that is when i do a good job and i know it i feel good about it you don't have to tell me it's nice that somebody does but they don't have to and when i'm in that position um now i can kind of you know drop my own agenda if you need a pack on the back from somebody else then you have to kind of cow to their agenda you're gonna do what they want to do in order to get that pat on the back and i 's probably one of the most i'm digressing here but it's probably one of the most powerful things that everybody has that they don't appreciate and that is paying somebody a compliment it's like dopamine i mean people don't get a lot of compliments and right relationships break down because somebody in the relationship is trying hard and the other person refuses to recognize it or is you know just not with it enough to recognize it but paying somebody a compliment uh is a very powerful tool that we all have and then the next important most powerful tool is to be able to grant authority you can't grant yourself authority unless you want to start your own business but otherwise authority has to be granted he can also be taken away so he who grants authority is a very powerful person for anybody is the recipient of that but it all comes back to you know you've got to have the self-confidence and self-respect uh to be able to be in a position to to do these things and that self-respect comes from my opinion you know that little inner voice is you know what's the right thing to do and it allows you to do the right thing and it's a message everybody else is the kind of guy that does the right thing that they will trust you and they will work for you because they know you're a stand-up guy and so you know i don't think people pay enough attention to the ethics i mean it's all about how much money am i gonna make and i gotta make the decisions to cut through a business something else that's you know you'll get away with that for a little while but at the end you don't be there long term in my opinion uh running the business um on those kinds of values so there's this there's a small start but um you know that's kind of the way you know i've conducted myself and it's worked and it's the way i feel about the people who work with us suppliers like you i know you're working hard i got a lot of time and respect for that and so why would i want to beat up again you know i'm gonna i'm gonna pay you a compliment and try to help you make it my friend and i think that's a better business proposition than trying to be this tough guy in this you see on television and that stuff man that was not you digressing that was the best like that was awesome that was amazing the whole point of this conversation thank you for sharing that i loved i love how you you broke that down jerry thank you for doing that that you and i 100 agreeing that uh self-respect comes from doing all the right things and building this reputation with yourself and i also love what you said about paying compliments and granting authority and making other people feel good about themselves i can tell you firsthand when we started working with you guys and you guys know what a big deal it was for guys to be given that opportunity to work with you and the first year you guys sent us a christmas card and i saw you and giron and you know michelle and everyone signed it it meant so much to us and then exactly like you said it motivated us to do more and be like wow these guys recognize it and and the opposite of it is when you don't get not only when you don't get that recognition but the other approach is taken where they're trying to be this like you said the tough guy kind of a thing it's just it becomes off-putting and you're less motivated but that was beautifully said sir i appreciate you sharing that right um you've given us a ton i can have this conversation with you i think for hours and hours but i'm also trying to be mindful and respectful of your time i know you're you're busy man um if you don't mind i've taken a ton of notes here i'm just going to do a little bit of a recap of some of the you know golden nuggets if you will you know that's the name of the podcast that i've taken away from this but the way you you you sort of this final speech on on self respect and the steps and getting it was just perfect and and i'm not going to try and repeat that because it's there it's recorded i'm just going to listen to it a bunch of times but uh i i appreciate everything you said i appreciate that the tenacity you think you need the grit um to to have uh to treat people really well empower them give them authority to do a good job pay them a compliment when you can befriend them instead of coming down and then obviously working very very hard defining your own success and chasing after faith in a sense that you don't want to completely leave it open you want to take certain steps on your own and think about it and pursue certain avenues one quick thing that i do want to pick your brain on because it's something that that's very near and dear to my heart is you said when you started the business and you in the office at seven in the morning work until nine go home have dinner and then you know do more work this was something that that i can relate to and you know we we did that quite a bit and we still do quite quite a bit uh in in you know working around the clock and this idea of balance i always talk about you know i find like balance is also one of those things that you have to define for yourself balance doesn't mean you have to have eight hours of sleep eight hours of work eight hours of fun i think balance is based on your life and your goals what you define as success what you define for yourself so for me for long periods of my life balance has been work work work work get some sleep exercise whatever for me balance wasn't to put in eight hours of going out just not wasn't for me and for some people might have been but sometimes i get into these debates where people just push that no no you have to you have to you have to take it you know a bunch of the hours of the day to yourself and i just don't feel like that's necessary if you're on a path you have a certain goal you want to reach and if that means you work 15 hours a day you work 15 hours a day you know it's okay so i'm glad you said that and i just uh you know i i i just want to get your quick thoughts on that if you have a minute left people are different i mean some guys can kind of have balance throughout the day and they take time to do things and certainly i did too i mean you can't sit there and look at your computer screen without going cross-eyed all day long so you need a break every once in a while and so you know i'd play squash or something in in in the afternoon a couple times a week whatever balance in the context of what your family needs is different and i found that i couldn't really quite do that throughout the day and so what i had to do was kind of compartmentalize that my wife literally just came to me you know 35 years or so at least then almost 40 years ago and said look your kids are going to grow up and you're not going to know who they are and they're not going to know who you are and you're going to have to find a better way of spending time with them so we ended up buying a place in the um in the country and uh initially we thought well we'll go up and you know buy a place up in the muskokas and uh you know that's where everybody likes to be and i thought about it and went if i go to the muskokas what i'm going to do is i'm going to get up there friday night we're going to go to a cocktail parties and that the kids will be going in a different direction all day saturday it's not going to accomplish what we want and so we bought a place out in the middle of the country and the kids couldn't go anyplace they'd bring friends up and so they were captured so was i and so friday night through sunday night you know i spend time with my family and then monday morning and uh in each night during the week don't count and that's how that's how we we dealt with it it actually worked very well because in the time i dedicated with the kids they would have friends up in the country and as they got a little older you let them have a beer or something and you know we have dinner and instead of them going off and doing something which there wasn't anything to do and we'd still be at the dinner table talking about whatever at 12 o'clock or one o'clock in the morning and some of those friends of my sons still come around and talk about that and that's something they never did with their appearance never did and so it was an interesting way of how you know we dealt with the balance in life if you want and it's a question what's important to you and you you kind of take it on like you take on your business i'm focused on this how am i going to do it and make it a project and you execute it yeah so i mean that's that's that's what we did that's awesome i love it when you're at work you're focused on it when you're with the family you're focused on them yeah i mean that's that's that was the only way i could i could operate and you know i just compartmentalize everything you know i've got to work i can work hard still work hard and play hard and that's that's what we did so beautiful this was awesome jerry i really can't thank you enough for sharing so openly honestly i learned so much and the story was beautiful uh it's super inspiring and to see someone as honest and ethical as yourself work so hard and accomplish the success you have had and it's just it's just awesome to look up to so thank you very much thank you for the uh for for sharing yeah thank you i mean it's been it's been a fun ride for me and and it's always fun right it works out you know but that'll work out so i'll give you a give you a cute story if you want one about oh jeez yeah yeah and there's a book called uh grit and in this book called grit the author talks about a study that was done at harvard university and what they did is say this was done years ago and they put everybody on on a treadmill and basically give them almost an impossible goal on the on the treadmill right and just see who would stick at it and you know some guys you know get it for a while and then this is stupid i'm not gonna do and they drop off and then there are other guys you know they were still at some guys would drop off and they'd come back the next day and get back at it again so they took those results and then for the next 30 years or something they measured those results against the guys success in business and their careers wow success the guys that stayed on the treadmill the longest were the most successful so will smith the actor knew this study and he said you know i'm not a particularly good actor but i'll work harder than everybody else and if you and i get on a treadmill one or two things in a contest one of two things will happen either i will win or i'll die on the treadmill right and so i in my family you know we get into something and you know the cuda asks so you willing to die on the treadmill for this that's funny i didn't even know that study but i've always referenced i didn't know the background of it that's amazing i didn't know that that whole study and they followed these guys to their 30 years that's super cool somebody like that yes such a cool study yeah and then the other the other cute story is like i had a double major in in universities economics and psychology which turned out to be very synergetic and um one of the psychology courses in abnormal psychology or something and then at the end of the year the prof said you know if there's one thing i want you guys to have learned in this course and that is once you figure out how somebody's wired that's how they're wired they'll never change and in my house again it's you know that's how the guy's wired so it's you know in business it's been so true when you find out a guy is not a straight shooter or something like that he ain't gonna change his stripes and so you know i've used that um piece of advice uh repeatedly you know once i sort somebody out and i i've got a handle on them that's it it's locked in right yeah that's so true in in business today again it comes back to you know are you listening to a little voice inside it or you guy that doesn't and you know collect all the guys who listen that little voice because they're pretty straight shooters so i love that that you yeah because i appreciate that sometimes i've been faulted for being a little bit too honest and too blunt i suppose uh but i feel like it makes life easier to go through the than just say what you want to say but it's it's nice to hear that uh being a straight shooter in in your book is a good thing so i think it is in every business i mean people don't like work for people that don't tell them the truth or mislead them or whatever they they want to know where they stand they don't necessarily want to be in your shoes but they want to do well they want to do well in their own context and if you're there to help them do that instead of taking advantage of them they'll work very hard for you and you have to respect you know what their ambitions are so how do you approach when you need to provide someone with some critique do you depending on their personality do you tailor it in different ways like if someone responds to positive reinforcement versus someone who responds to being challenged or however do you take that into account yeah you try to i mean it's very difficult nobody likes uh being critical of somebody so you know you try to do as gently as you can some people take it pretty well some people i mean i i know i used to go to my boss and ask him for criticism and you know tell me what i can do better because i want to get i don't want to sit here and and repeating the same job over and over and over and i need to move on so tell me what i can do what is it that's holding you back in other guys either they don't want to believe you or they're they don't believe you but criticism um just doesn't go down with them they just can't handle it so you have to kind of know the the cat you're dealing with and obviously those that take criticism well that look at it constructively um are probably the people that are you know going to be more important to your organization as you go forward but nobody likes you know nobody likes criticizing people i mean you know even your own kids you don't like to have to sit them down and give them a lecture just for the record anytime you want to criticize me i'm open to it you've done a pretty good job and we know where you're where you come from so uh it's you know you've got the right stuff and uh you know as i say i know how you're wired so that's the way it works thank you it means a lot that that it really does thank you so much i can sit and speak to you for hours i mean we're in no rush here we're just trying to be mindful of your time and you've already been so generous with it and i really enjoyed the conversation and and for you to join us from from uh i know you're you're not in toronto but uh i i appreciate you taking the time i appreciate you joining us and i appreciate you sharing so often it has been awesome sir thank you well thanks for inviting me it's it's been kind of fun next time hopefully we can do it in person and have a glass of wine between us that would be awesome i was going to say that i didn't know if it would be a name position but i will definitely take you up on that i would love to sit down with you next time in person well right now i'm in florida and they won't let me back until may so so maybe this summer maybe for sure thank you so much thank you very much thank you so much