Month: January 2021

While our restaurants were a failure, Marca continues to hold a very special place at harry james enterprises. We owned a beautiful commercial location overlooking the Cobourg Harbour. My wife and I always thought it would be a great place for a wine bar or boutique restaurant. We were real estate investors not restauranteurs so when builder / developer / restauranteur Joe Ferrara walked into our lives and saw our vision we were happy to have him sign a lease. He however had other plans, he wanted us to partner with him. “Partner with you? we don’t even know you and we are not in the habit of marrying people we don’t know. If you like the space lease it but no thanks to the partnership”.  Well Joe, who’s personality is best described as a combination of red bull and double espresso, wouldn’t let up. “Just come and visit my Mara restaurant in Whitby, we are different” I was thinking you are different all right. Regardless we visited Whitby, got to know each other, opened Cobourg and two other restaurants and proceeded to lose a lot of money over the next 6 years.

How could I let that happen? It’s much easier than you think, somehow you always convince yourself next week is going to be different; this Chef is going to be different; we just need to persevere and build a loyal clientele. Finally, you break out of your delusion and start to make some sane business decisions. The reality is however as we were losing money in the restaurants, we were making money in our true sweet spot, real estate. We were building, renovating and innovating left, right and center. Maybe we had to be successful at real estate to feed our cash hungry restaurants but regardless the partnership worked.

With Joe’s incredible talent and creativity in building, my pretty good skills at finding value and negotiating deals and my wife’s incredible gift of decorating and design we literally built a real estate dream team on top of three sinking restaurants. Marca was eventually changed to harry james enterprises and the rest as they say is history.

 

I took a step of faith and bought out a client’s business because he said he wanted to retire. As time went on I noticed the clients were leaving, apparently retirement didn’t agree with him so he got a cheque from me as well as the clients I bought that continued to do business with him. It was a small deal and I simply put it down as bad judgement on my part. I didn’t sue him or make a big deal about it because it would have taken too much time and energy from my main gig. Everything doesn’t always work out and sometimes people take advantage but it shouldn’t you stop from doing deals. Also for those of you thinking well you should have had everything in writing, you can’t legislate or mandate character and integrity. When trust is involved, If someone wants to rip you off, they’ll find a way.

Many years ago a very successful executive shared his dream with me to own his own sports store, he was passionate and sincere. I jumped in and suggested a partnership to make it happen. At the time it wasn’t clear to me that the skills to be very successful in the corporate world didn’t necessarily give you what you needed to excel in the very ambiguous and unstructured entrepreneurial world. He tried to tell me numerous times but I didn’t listen and paid the ultimate price of having to shut it all down. By the time I tuned into the real problem and what was needed it was simply too late. Always be aware that employees and entrepreneurs exist in two different worlds. Two very different skill sets in my humble opinion. One path isn’t better or superior than the other, they are simply vastly different. Both can offer incredible rewards but assuming one skill set can be seamlessly transferred from one side to the other can be a financially fatal mistake.

When I sold Harry James Financial I didn’t think that any of my kids would want to come into the business. Regardless I was a big believer in letting them create their path and their own success before they would entertain coming into anything that I started. I think if the perception is kids are handed something it ultimately becomes a burden for them. My son Justin ended up going into and focussing on an aspect of the business that wasn’t my main forte, employee benefits. He worked in the west end of the city where nobody knew me, my reputation or practice. His work ethic and single minded focus on becoming an expert in this area attracted a lot of attention and it wasn’t long before some of the top brokers in the city were seeking him out to join their team.

We met for lunch one day as I was helping him analyze the exciting opportunities laid before him when he casually asked me “why don’t I build my business under the HJ Group banner instead?” To say I was honoured would be an understatement but I quickly warned him the perception would be that I brought him into my business other than the reality that he was bringing me into his. Thankfully that didn’t deter his vision to bring HJ Group to a new level.

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