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- [00:00]
Shane Parish
Picture this. It's June 1968, and overnight, a killing frost wipes out nearly every wild blueberry. At the time, John Bragg is 28 years old. He's just borrowed everything he could to build a processing plant for those blueberries. And now he's standing in this brand new factory with no crops to process. Bills are coming due, workers are showing up for ships. The whole thing is a disaster. Most people in that situation, they'd call the bank and work out some kind of bankruptcy deal. But John Bragg picks up the phone, but he doesn't call the bank. He calls McCain Foods. And he asked them one question that would change everything. Hello? Hi, it's John Bragg. Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parish. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best what other people have already figured out. Today, we're exploring one of the greatest untold stories in business. John Bragg. John Bragg's story reads like fiction, except it's real. He's founded three companies in three entirely different industries, from blueberries to telecommunications to aviation. Two of the three companies are worth billions, and the third one is well on the way to that. Not only is John Bragg the largest grower and processor of wild blueberries in the world, but he owns North America's largest private telecommunications company. And if that wasn't crazy enough, imagine doing it all from a small town that he's never left with a population of just over 1100 people. But the part of the story I think you'll most like is how he did it. He defied nearly every rule about where and how success is supposed to happen. This isn't our first episode on John. I interviewed him in episode 204, and his story captivated me so completely that I needed to dedicate an entire Outliers episode to better understand how he did it. This episode draws from that conversation and Donald Savoy's masterful biography, the Rule Entrepreneur. As always, it's for entertainment only. It's time to listen and learn. It's 1962 and John Bragg has just graduated with two degrees, commerce and education. And he has one job offer. The offer is to teach high school in Pugwash, nova Scotia for $33,800 a year. He'll get another hundred if he coaches the basketball team. For most 22 year olds in the post war boom, this was the jackpot. A stable government job with generous benefits and a first rate pension. The kind of security their Depression era parents could only dream of. But there's One problem. John Bragg has been an entrepreneur since high school. In the summers, he was making $4,000 picking wild blueberries, more than the teaching salary, doing what everyone else thought was beneath them. So when the school board offered him their position, John Bragg does the unthinkable. He just says no. His friends think he's lost his mind. But John Bragg comes from a different stock. His grandfather Charles opened the local store, became the community hub. And then there was his father, Elmer. If you want to understand why John turned down that teaching job, you have to understand Elmer first. Here was a man who ran a lumber business by day and served on every community board that would have him by night. Anglican church warden, school board trustee, hospital board member. He was quiet by nature, wise with his counsel, John would later write. Tolerant and patient, but quick to challenge foolishness, Elmer had built something unusual in rural Nova Scotia. A business that made money while maintaining absolute integrity. When neighbors needed help, he was there. When someone couldn't pay their bill right away, he carried them. His brand wasn't just lumber. It was fairness itself. John watched all of this growing up. He watched his father juggle multiple ventures while never missing a community meeting. He watched him turn down easy money if it meant compromising his values. He watched him build wealth, not by extracting from the community, but by investing in it. Generation after generation of Braggs, all entrepreneurs, all in the same small corner of Nova Scotia, all building something from nothing. Safe, no risk. Stable employment opportunities are simply not in his DNA. His biographer would later write, john needs to find his own path. While at Mount Allison University has already shown the entrepreneurial itch. He teamed up with a fellow student to build the town's first modern apartment building. He had no money, but that wasn't a problem. They knocked on doors until a local financier backed them. John would own that building for over 40 years. But after university, he tries law school, and three weeks in, he looks around the classroom and everyone else wants to be a lawyer. I didn't want to be a lawyer, he explained later. I wanted to be in business. I realized that I was just putting in time before going into business, and so I decided to leave. He wanted what all the brags before him had. Not just a business, but a way to build something that mattered. And the business he had in mind was blueberries. His friend George Cooper, who would later become one of the country's top lawyers, thought he'd lost his mind. Are you nuts? Cooper told him, leaving law school? Think about what you'll be missing when you're out there growing blueberries. But John had already seen what he'd been missing every day of his childhood. Watching his father. The real question was, what would he miss if he took the teaching job? All the competition is going away, he joked to his friends as they headed for Ontario for careers. I'm going to stay here and do something. Law school wasn't a complete loss. He ended up staying for the entire first year and learned about contracts and dealing with lawyers, two skills that would prove helpful when he started building his empire later. But first, he had to build something. Here's something most people don't know about wild bluebirds. They're genuinely wild. You don't plant them. They just exist. They've been growing in the acidic soils of Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec since the last ice age. In Nova Scotia, where the Bragg family lived, these berries took over the old, abandoned farmland. See, when rural electrification came through in the 1930s, it bypassed a lot of the back roads. Families living out there had to make a choice, and most of them moved closer to town. Nature reclaimed their fields, and that's when the wild blueberries moved in. By 1964, picking them was absolutely brutal work. You're bent over all day with this metal hand rake. Your back is screaming, and the sun is bearing down on you, and your fingers are cramping up. A good picker might have harvested, like 500 pounds on a good day. John Bragg had been picking those berries since he was 15. That first summer, he couldn't even drive, so he had to hire someone to drive the pickup truck. Well, he organized four or five pickers. They harvested 4,000 pounds that summer, and he cleared enough to pay for his entire year at university. By his final years at Mount Allison, he'd really scaled up the operation. He was making $20,000 each summer, which was serious money in the early 1960s, enough to pay his crew, cover all of his expenses, and still have plenty of cash left over. So you can see why he turned down that teaching job. But every summer, John noticed something that drove him absolutely crazy. There were millions of pounds of blueberries just rotting in the fields. And the reason was simple. There wasn't enough freezer capacity, and there weren't enough buyers for fresh blueberries. This created an economic chaos, with prices swinging wildly from 53 cents a kilogram all the way down to 15 cents. Farmers were going broke, while perfectly good blueberries rotted in the fields. John saw what others missed. The people who owned the freezers didn't grow blueberries, and the blueberry growers didn't own the freezers. Nobody controlled the whole chain. So in 1968, at 28 years old, John Bragg decided he was going to build his own freezing plant. The problem was, at the time, he had no money. At least not the type of money he needed. And that wasn't the hardest problem. As he would later admit, I had no idea what I was doing. But he did know his idea was sound. He walked into the bank and sat down across from the manager. He laid out his whole vision. The manager looked at this young farmer, glanced at his balance sheet and smiled. But it wasn't the good kind of smile. You're going to have to take that teaching job, he said. Now, John Bragg walked out of the bank with what he calls no reverse gear. The rejection didn't slow him down, it just redirected him. He would bounce, but he wouldn't break. There was a new government grant available for up to 25% of capital costs for businesses in designated areas. So John applied and won, but that still left 75%. The family lumber business was struggling, bleeding cash just to survive. So there was no help there. So John went to the province of Nova Scotia and asked for a loan. And this is where generations of Bragg integrity really paid off. George Henley, a local conservative politician, heard about John's application. Now, you need to understand something about the maritime politics. The Braggs were hugely liberal. Such a liberal family, all generations. John's father had even run as the liberal candidate. He lost, but he ran. So Henley should have been their political enemy. But instead, Henley stood up in support and said, if we can't lend money to the Bragg family, we can't lend money to anyone. And those 13 words changed everything. John got his loan. He was all in. He hired consultants from Pennsylvania who'd built similar plants in Maine. He used local labor for construction. And by late 1968, his factory could process million pounds of blueberries. He was ready for the next season. And then came the most devastating June ever. For the first time in the recorded history of Nova Scotia's blueberry industry, a killing frost swept through in June. This wasn't a partial loss or just a bad year. This was total destruction and devastation. We had a complete crop failure, John would later tell me. The only one in our history having built a factory geared to run £2 million. We ran maybe 100,000. That's 1 20th of the capacity. John's got bills to pay, employees to support, and a brand new factory sitting empty. Most people would have quit right there. But John Bragg wasn't most people. He heard something different. Adapt or die wasn't easy.
- [10:24]
John Bragg
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.
- [10:33]
Shane Parish
And that was right after all the.
- [10:34]
John Bragg
Factory investment, having built a factory and all and geared it up to run £2 million and we ran, I don't know, 100,000. There just was no crop.
- [10:46]
Shane Parish
And so we got through it, he said. This was no minor setback, though. With no blueberries to process and no money coming in, John became the entire workforce. He was the chief engineer, the boiler operator, the marketing director, the CFO and the janitor all rolled into. He started sleeping on the factory floor because why waste time driving home when there's so much to figure out? And late one night, staring at his empty production line, he picked up the phone and called Wallace McCain. Now, the McCain's were legends. They had built a French fire empire from tiny Florenceville, New Brunswick. When Wallace answered, John had one simple question. What do you need that you don't want to make yourself? So Wallace threw him a file on onion rings. McCain Foods had tried before making battered products, but couldn't make the economics work. In fact, they tried relentlessly to get them to work, but they couldn't figure it out. Maybe this desperate young man with an empty factory could figure it out. When Harris McCain walked into the meeting to close the deal, John started outlining the terms, drawing on a single year of law school. And Harrison cut him off mid sentence and said, now, young man, don't tell me how to negotiate a deal. There would be no lawyers, no complex contracts, just a handshake and a one page agreement that's still in force today, over 50 years later. Now, John had never made an onion ring in his life, but it didn't matter. He had an empty factory and bills to pay, so he had to figure it out. And he did. Shortly after, he was visiting an American carrot processing plant and saw another opportunity. When people asked where he planned to sell frozen carrots, his response was pure bragging. Let's grow carrots and process them, then we'll figure out where to sell them. Today, Oxford Frozen Foods is the second largest frozen carrot producer in North America. So the pattern was set. Bounce, but don't break. See the opportunity and figure it out, then dominate the market. It didn't matter that the bank manager literally laughed him out of the bank. It didn't matter that Mother Nature declared war on him. John Bragg had no reverse gear. The Lesson here is profound. Your biggest disasters often become your greatest opportunities. To be in business is to be in the business of finding and solving problems and attacking them. Each problem solved brings you one step closer to success. That Frost forced John to diversify. The bank rejection taught him to find creative financing. Starting with nothing taught him to waste nothing. Sometimes the universe isn't telling you to quit. It's forcing you to become who you're meant to be. This reminds me of Jimmy Patterson a bit from episode 235. When General Motors blocked him from expanding his car dealerships, he was forced to diversify, ultimately building a $16 billion empire. And the same thing happened to John Bragg. That June Frost didn't just destroy his blueberry crop. It forced him to think beyond blueberries. Sometimes the universe's no is really redirecting you towards something bigger. Okay, back to John Bragg's first love, those blueberries. From the beginning, John knew that if wild blueberries were going to survive as a business, not just a cottage industry, they had to innovate. So he started by leveling the fields so machines could actually work on them. But his real innovations went beyond the obvious. If you visit one of John Bragg's blueberry fields today, you'll see these trees lined, running through them. They're not there by accident. Those trees do three things. First, they stop the snow from blowing off the fields in the winter because the snow insulates the plants from the killing cold. And then they slow the wind across the flatlands, protecting the low growing blueberries. And finally, they shelter the bees. As soon as he had cash flow from his factory, Bragg started pouring money into research. Managing wild blueberry fields is incredibly complex because, as Bill Malley, Oxford's R and D director, explains, no handful is ever the same. You're dealing with what Mother nature put here. But Mother Nature needs help. Forty years ago, Bragg started funding research at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. And he never stopped. They study everything from pollination to fungal diseases to vegetation management and berry composition. But here's the kicker that'll surprise you. They share all their findings with everyone, including competitors. Why? Well, what's good for the industry is good for everyone, us and them included, Bragg explained. We, we all need to grow the industry. And the best way to do that is by helping one another. Like Saul price in episode 241, sharing his warehouse club innovations with competitors, John Bragg understood the fundamental truth. It's better to grow the pie than fight over the slices. By sharing his R and D with everyone, even competitors, he helped the Entire wild blueberry industry expand. When the whole pie grows, everyone's slice gets Ben Bigger. By 1970, John Bragg had a math problem. A good hand raker could harvest maybe 500 or 700 pounds of blueberries a day. Oxford needed 8,000 workers for 25 days just to bring in one season's crop. Where do you find 8,000 workers in rural Nova Scotia for less than four weeks of work? You don't. So you have to invent a machine. The existing harvesters were disasters. They'd rake backwards against the direction of travel, tearing up plants and soil. Most farmers had given up on that. So John turned to his brother Doug, who had a gift for making mechanical things work. The Bragg harvester was brilliantly simple. It mounted on a standard farm tractor, something that every farmer already owned. The 1 meter wide head followed ground contours, stripping berries without destroying plants. Berries traveled up a conveyor while a blower cleared them. One machine could do the work of 30 hand pickers. Doug didn't just build one harvester. He started a whole company and began manufacturing them for the entire, entire industry. They've sold over 700 of these harvesters, now about 100 to Oxford and the rest to competitors and other growers. But here's what separates John Bragg from ordinary businessmen. He didn't patent this invention. He could have kept the technology to himself and his brother and given Oxford a massive advantage. But instead, he made it available to everyone who needed it. He wasn't trying to divide the pie. He was trying to grow it. If wild blueberries were going to survive, the whole industry had to modernize together. John Bragg wasn't trying to be the best competitor in the blueberry industry. He's trying to be the champion of it. Okay, we need to talk about bees for a second. Here's something that'll blow your mind about wild blueberries. Without bees, a field yields maybe about a thousand pounds per acre. But with the proper bee pollination, you can get up to £8,000 on the same acre. Eight times more. No wonder bees are one of John Bragg's biggest single cause. Think about this for a second. Bee pollination in Canada is worth over 2 billion annually. About a third of our food depends on these little insects that aren't even native here. European honeybees arrived 400 years ago, and now we can't live without them. American blueberry growers have all of this figured out. They rent hives that follow the seasons in what John Bragg calls the ABC system. A for almonds in California, B for blueberries And C for cranberries. The hives arrive by truck, they get unloaded and the bees do their work. And then they move on to the next crop. It's simple, it's efficient, and it's proven. But here's where it gets crazy. At the Nova Scotia New Brunswick border, there's a sign that makes John Bragg's blood boil. No honeybee importation. Small scale maritime beekeepers get scared of competition and lobbied for protection. So now the three Maritime Provinces, provinces that are all supposed to be working together, can't even agree on letting bees cross a bor. The result is absolute madness. Oxford has to run three completely separate bee operations. One in Nova Scotia, one in New Brunswick, one in Ontario. Actually four, one in Maine. Here's the kicker. If Nova Scotia bees cross the border to pollinate crops in New Brunswick, I guess they can never come back. They become bee exiles, permanently banished for the crime of doing their job. Think about what this means, though. Oxford is competing against American operations where bees flow freely across thousands of miles. Meanwhile, they can't even move a hive 50ft across a border without losing it forever. So how do you manage bees when the government treats them like prisoners? It turns out very, very carefully. Oxford puts four to 16 hives per acres, depending on the field. The hives arrive on pallets at night, and it's always at night, because if you move them during the day, the foraging bees can't find a home. They're surrounded by electric fences, not to keep the bees in, but to keep the bees bears out. Spring bears wake up hungry and a hive full of honey is like finding a buffet in the woods. Just imagine, Winnie the Pooh. The bees themselves are quite amazing. Each one has to randomly visit at least eight different flowers for proper pollination. And they have a built in gps, so they always return to their exact hive. But they're also incredibly sensitive to weather. So hot days compress their entire pollination window to just five to eight days. Cold weather, they won't fly. Too windy and they're grounded. And if frost hits during the flowering like it did in June 1968, everything dies. This is what drives John Bragg crazy. It's not the complexity of managing bees, not the bears or the weather or the logistics. It's that he's forced to be less efficient than his competitors because three Maritime Provinces can't agree to let bees be bees. It's always irritating, he told me with typical maritime understatement. But you can hear the frustration. Here's a man who's built a Global business from rural Nova Scotia. And he's being held back by a sign at the border that bees can't even read. So at this point in the story, John Bragg has figured out how to grow, harvest, and freeze wild blueberries. And now he has a different problem. How does he sell them all his main competitors had the entire American market. Quebec had Montreal. Nova Scotia. The whole province had fewer people than Boston. Nova Scotians are traders. John Bragg told me, my competitors in Maine still sell. In the United States, they have a big domestic market. But we're Nova Scotians. We're traders by nature. We have the port of Halifax sitting beside us. And that port became his gateway to the world. When local demand couldn't keep up with production, Bragg went global. Europe came first. In the 1970s, Europeans knew bilberries but couldn't harvest them commercially. So Bragg convinced them to switch to wild blueberries. Today, Oxford owns 60% of the European market. Japan was brutal in 1974. Japanese importers had never even seen a Blueberry. Bragg made 17 cold calls before getting his first order. 17. Most people would quit after a few, but Bragg kept dialing and kept pitching and kept believing that eventually someone would say yes. And his persistence paid off. Oxford now dominates Japan's frozen wild blueberry market. Then he went to Korea, and now he's working on China. The brand around the world is Oxford Blueberries. Matthew says, People ask us, do you have Oxford quality? It's like Xerox now. From rural Nova Scotia to the global standard for quality. All because the local market was too small to contain his ambition. When John Bragg started picking blueberries in the 1950s, Canada processed about 40 million pounds annually. Today, the industry produces 10 times that at 400 million pounds. And Canada exports about 240 million doll worth of wild blueberries, with Nova Scotia alone accounting for about 100 million of that. Oxford Frozen Foods, John's company, processes £140 million a year. They've created 500 jobs in tiny Oxford Collingwood and another 400 in New Brunswick. They dominate markets in Canada, Europe, Japan, and Korea. From a teenager with a hand rake to the world's largest wild blueberry producer. From rotting berries in the fields to Oxford quality becoming the global standard. All built from a rural corner of Nova Scotia that most business people would have fled. But here's the thing about John Bragg that nobody saw coming. The same year his blueberry crop failed. That devastating year in 1968 when the frost destroyed everything, he was already looking at something else, something that had absolutely nothing to do with farming or food or anything he or his family had had ever done before. While he was sleeping on the floor of his empty blueberry factory, trying to figure out how to pay the bills, John Bregg quietly applied for a cable television license in Amherst, Nova Scotia. Why would a blueberry farmer want to get into cable tv? The answer to that question would eventually make him a billionaire. Okay, everyone in the Maritimes know how John Bragg got his first cable license. It was 1969. The Liberal government is in charge and they've just swept to power in the country. The Braggs were big time liberals, so John's father had run for them. John had worked for their campaigns. So when a cable license came up, of course John got it. Political connections. That's how business works, right? Here's the embarrassing truth. He was the only one who applied. No one else wanted it. Think about it for a second. The government was literally giving away licenses to print money. At least that's what cable television would eventually become. And nobody wanted them. Not Amherst anyway. It had a population of 9,000 people. It was in the middle of nowhere. Who's going to make money selling cable television to 9,000 people? But here's John Bragg. His blueberry factory is sitting empty from the June frost. He's sleeping on the factory floor trying to figure out how to pay bills. He's making onion rings for the McCain's because he needs the cash. And somehow, in the middle of all this chaos, he decides to get into cable television. Why? Because everyone else saw money pit, But John saw the future. Now, to understand how insane early cable television was, you need to know exactly what John had to do to deliver programming. First, he had to set up antennas near the New Brunswick border. And from there, they'd capture abc, NBC, and CBS signals from the arrow. Then, and this is the part that kills me, they record these signals on tapes, physical tapes. And they put the tapes on a bus, and the bus would drive them to Amherst through whatever maritime weather was happening that day and deliver the tapes. And then John's team would play those tapes through their cable system as the programming. So when the people of Amherst watched the Boston Bruins, they were watching a game from like two weeks ago. Sitcoms. Two weeks. Old news. Ancient history. And this was the business model at the time. This is what John Bragg thought would compete with just putting up an antenna on your roof for free. But it gets a little worse. By 1971, Bragg Communications was losing $11,000 every single month. That's about $90,000 in today's money every month. This was money he didn't have. So John called a family meeting. His father Elmer and brother Doug sat down to face facts. Should they pull the plug and stop the bleeding? Should they get out while they still could? Other cable pioneers across the Maritimes were already selling. They'd gotten their licenses, built basic cable systems and then they'd flip them to the big companies for a quick profit, take the money and run. It made sense. But then John's dad Elmer said something that changed everything. This has been an expensive education for you, he told his son. Are we going to throw this education away? And it turns out that was exactly what John needed to hear. He wasn't looking at his feet like everyone else. He wasn't seeing tapes on buses and monthly losses. He was looking at the horizon. And on that horizon, he saw that this would change everything. He saw rural communities desperate for connection to the wider world. He saw recurring monthly revenue utility like revenue from every household. He saw a world getting smaller and people getting more connected. Everyone else saw a money losing cable company in small town Nova Scotia. But John Bragg saw the foundation of what would become North America's largest private telecommunications empire. The lesson here is timing. Sometimes being early looks exactly like being wrong. Those tapes on buses would eventually become fiber optic networks. Those 9,000 customers in Amherst would eventually become millions across Canada. That $11,000 monthly loss would eventually become billions of dollars in revenue. But first you have to survive the bus rides. What happened next turned John Bragg into the Pac man of Canadian cable television. Starting in the late 70s, he swallowing up cable companies across the Maritimes. Year after year, another system joined the growing empire. While everyone else was squeezing sellers for every last dollar, John Bragg did something different. He decided to pay more. Intentionally. The one thing I never wanted to do is nickel and dime the owners, Bragg explained. I knew we were paying a bit more than the others wanted to pay, but I also knew that we could make it work in the end. This sounds crazy, right? In business you're supposed to buy low. But Bragg understood something deeper. Every acquisition is really two acquisitions. The company you're buying today and the companies that might sell tomorrow. But there was another reason too. When I asked John why he paid more for some of these assets, sometimes as high as two times what they were worth, he said. Something that is said stuck with me ever since. It's only available once, it's not always available. Word spread fast in the tight knit community. If you wanted to sell your cable system, call John Bragg. He'll give you a Fair price. Close quickly and he won't jerk you around. And one story captures this perfectly. A seller was in serious financial trouble, which became obvious during negotiations, and Bragg could have crushed him. He could have used his advantage and renegotiated. He could have taken advantage of this guy. Instead, he stuck to the original deal. That seller became his biggest evangelist, telling everyone the same thing. There's no better person to deal with than John Bragg. This wasn't charity, though. It was strategy. While competitors fought over the last dollar on one deal, Bragg had already moved on to the next. His reputation meant that he got first crack at every cable system coming to market. The process was methodical. Buy a system, integrate it, grow it, digest for a few years, and then hunt for the next one. Today, over 75% of Eastlink's earnings come from organic growth systems. Breg bought and then made better. But here's the thing. Breg never really understood deep technology. I mean, he couldn't explain how cable systems worked or diagram a network. What he had was something more valuable because he could see where the industry was going. A perfect example is wireless. In the 1990s, lots of people thought wireless was a fad that would fade away. It's hard to believe now, but that's true. Bragg saw it differently. If you're in the communications business, he said, you have to be in wireless. That's the difference between looking at your feet and looking at the horizon. Bragg was already thinking about mobile phones and the Internet. While other people were still figuring out how to deliver cable. By paying fair prices and building trust, he'd assembled the pieces for something bigger than anyone imagined. A collection of small town cable systems was about to become a telecommunications giant. In 1985, everything changed. John and another businessman named stu Rath bought 55% of Halifax Cablevision. This wasn't another small town. This was Halifax, Atlantic Canada's biggest city. Going from Amherst to Halifax was like jumping from the minors to the big leagues. The partnership was perfect. Rath ran the operations while Bragg focused on his blueberries. But 10 years later, Bragg saw something bigger. He proposed a mega $45 million deal with Maritime Telephone and Telegraph. He had spotted broadband coming. MT&T had the resources together and they could own the Atlantic, Canadian communications, Bell Canada. MT's parents killed the deal. If you're an entrepreneur, you know this moment. Now Bragg had to go alone. First, he bought out his partner, stu Rath in 1995. Then came the big move. In 2001, Shaw Communications was selling all of their Nova Scotia assets. The price tag? 265 million. This wasn't another acquisition. This would give Bragg 80,000 new subscribers overnight. It would make Eastlink the fifth largest cable company in Canada, and it would give him virtually all of nova Scotia. But 265 million for a private family company in 2001 that refused to sell equity to anyone else. It took 20 years to make the deal work. 20. The banks begged him to go public, sell some equity, share the risk. But he refused. He sold everything he could to finance this. He sold his BC Blueberry farms. He sold his apartment buildings. He borrowed, until, as he put it, we were stretched. We were levered to the hilt. This was the bet of a lifetime. A quarter billion dollars on a cable television in Atlantic Canada. But here's the thing. Bell's rejection turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Eastlink. If Bell had said yes to the partnership, every decision would have needed their approval. There would be committees and studies and months of bureaucracy. Instead, Bragg kept full control so he could move like a startup, while his competitors moved like, well, Bell. But being forced to go alone had an unexpected advantage. Speed. Here's a perfect example. When Eastlink engineers visited Atlanta to see telephone over cable technology, they came back with one recommendation. We should implement it at the big telecommunications companies. Those recommendations would have triggered months of studies, committees, reports. At Eastlink, Bragg gave them $10 million and 30 people and said, go. This was the advantage of staying private, staying independent. While Bell was still debating, Eastlink had already taken action. So Bell said no to the partnership. John Bragg borrows 265 million and built a big competitor. In step, Eastlink became the first cable company in Canada to offer telephone service over cable. First in North America to bundle Internet, phone and TV into one package. The first to let customers add or drop channels in real time. And this pattern has never changed. Bragg would spot a technology shift coming. His team would find the best implementation anywhere in the world. They'd move fast while larger companies were still scheduling their first meeting. The telephone over cable breakthrough shows exactly how this worked. Big Canadian Telecoms had already burned millions trying to make it work. They gave up. Eastlink succeeded by doing something simple. They adapted existing telephone technology instead of trying to reinvent something new. When John's son, Lee Bragg made that first call in 1999 and said, dad, I'm calling you over our telephone system, it changed telecommunications forever. But the decision that really reveals John's character happened around the same time. His company was now a collection of local brands. He had Halifax Cablevision, Dartmouth Cable, New Glasgow Cable. But they needed one name. The obvious choice was Bragg Communications. But John said something quite profound. You should never let your ego run your business. Bragg said. They picked Eastlink instead. The name stuck. The philosophy behind it mattered more. No ego, just execution. After the shaw deal closed, 20 banks owned more of Eastlink than John Bragg did, at least on paper. They all sang the same song. Go public. Sell equity, Reduce the risk. But John Bragg kept saying no. He'd watched The Irvings and McCains maintain family control through generations. He knew what public ownership meant. It meant quarterly earnings. Obsession, short term thinking, dividend demands. Imagine owning and growing a business for 50 years and taking nothing out of it. As partner David Hoffman would later say, just reinvesting to fund the growth. Compare that to our competitors who pay out most of their earnings as dividends. Brad kept saying no to going public, but he had no problem with that. Massive debt.
- [36:11]
John Bragg
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 and Ontario. But the cash flow was pretty consistent. You could budget it and see where you're going. So I wasn't afraid of debt. And I think that separated me from, you know, the original cable owners. There were lots of them. 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. 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 Helvax 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.
- [37:35]
Shane Parish
In 2007, he did his biggest deal to date. They bought Persona communications for 775 million. This gave them a presence in every Canadian province. The same year, they added more Ontario customers with another deal for 120 million. But Bragg had learned something fundamental from his blueberry business. In consolidating industries, you either own the market or you're at its mercy. There's no comfortable middle ground. He looked at the Horizon and saw cable and Internet converging into something massive. He was determined not to watch from the sidelines. By staying private, by refusing to blink, John Bragg had turned a money losing cable system into North America's largest private telecommunications company. And we haven't even gotten into all the fiber that he owns. And he did all of this without going public. If you walk through Eastlink's headquarters today in Halifax, you'll find floors of ordinary offices in a rather ordinary building. The boardroom hasn't been touched since the previous tenant left. There's no executive dining room, there's no marble lobby, and there's no corner office with a view. It's better to invest in growing the business than spend on luxurious offices. Brag explains this isn't just about cheap furniture. The Entire company has four management levels. CEO, vice presidents, directors, managers. That's it. Government has 12, but big telecoms have seven or eight. A former executive from a major telecom tells the this story at his old job. Any real decision needed a 30 page proposal and weeks of meetings. At Eastlink, it's one page, a couple of days max. He once bought a multimillion dollar fiber asset with one phone call. The philosophy was quite simple. It's better to beg for forgiveness than permission. Just don't beg very often. The speed advantage shows up everywhere. When the government auctioned wireless spectrum in 2008, the big telecoms brought their consultants and committees. Eastlink brought a simple strategy. Run mock auctions, develop fake out tactics and know exactly what you need. And they won licenses that covered 85% of their cable footprint and spent a fraction of what the giants paid. Here's what makes Eastlink impossible to replicate today. It's just patient money. John Bragg poured cash into fiber optic cable when nobody understood why. He built infrastructure between small towns. When everyone else focused on cities. He lost money for years on bets that wouldn't pay off for decades. He could do this because he never took a dividend, he never cashed out, he never went public. For 50 years, every dollar of profit went back into growth. So while the bigger companies like Bell and Rogers paid billions of dividends to keep shareholders happy, John Bragg kept building. By 2020, that money losing cable system in Amherst had become the largest private telecommunications company in North America. From Newfoundland to British Columbia, including US assets, Eastlink was going toe to toe with companies 50 times its size. Someone asked John Bragg about selling, the company was well into the billions and he was in his 80s. It's the perfect time to cash out. No, John Answered immediately. Why would I think about that? Most entrepreneurs live for the exit, the validation, the I told you so moment. But John Bragg, he's building something his great grandchildren could run. The kid who turned down a teaching job to pick Blueberries had built $2 billion businesses without ever selling a share. And he wasn't done yet. By the 2000s, John Bragg was 80 years old and worth well over a billion dollars. Most people would be on a beach. Instead, he bought another company that recycled airplane de icing fluid. It was called Inland Technologies. And it wasn't sexy. The company collected the toxic glycol runoff from airport tarmacs. But when environmental regulations hit, every airport needed this service. The owner wanted to sell to an out of province buyer. That's when John Bragg called. Where others saw dirty work, Bragg saw his favorite setup. It's a fragmented industry. There's high regulatory barriers, there's recurring revenue and owners who don't think big enough. Owners who aren't looking at the horizon about where things are going. He bought Inland and immediately went shopping, acquiring two other companies right away. Each acquisition followed the Bragg playbook. Pay fair, integrate fast, reinvest everything. Today, Inland serves 50 airports across five countries. They've recycled over a billion liters of de icing fluid. The company has grown tenfold under Bragg's ownership. But you have to ask yourself, why would an 80 year old billionaire care so much about airplane de icing fluid? Well, it's for the same reason he cared about cable television. 1969, he saw where the world was going. Stricter environmental rules, more air travel, airports. Desperate for compliance solutions. Everyone else saw dirty work. But John Bragg saw recurring revenue. In 2012, when Nova Scotia needed wind farms to hit renewable energy targets, a strange partnership emerged. A frozen food company would help build them. Why would Oxford Frozen Foods get involved in wind power? Because when Minus Energy needed a local partner with deep pockets and credibility. Of course, they called John Bragg. And Bragg never said no to an infrastructure deal with a 20 year guaranteed return. This South Canoe Wind project wasn't small either. It was 34 turbines generating power for 32,000 homes. But for John Bragg, the numbers weren't the point. I'm an environmentalist, he says, and he means it. And this is a man who plants trees he'll never see mature. Speaking of trees, the Bragg family still owns the 40,000 hectares of Nova Scotia woodland through the Bragg Lumber Company that was incorporated all the way back in 1951. But John Bragg doesn't even cut those trees. He just grows them in 2020 alone, he planted 350,000 trees, not to harvest, not to sell, but is so his grandchildren can watch them grow. He's determined to leave the forest in better condition than he found it, says one associate. Wind farms with 20 year horizons, trees that won't mature for 50 years. While other billionaires buy yachts, John Bragg plants for us. This is patient capital taken to the logical extreme, investing in things you'll never live to see pay off. Most CEOs send their executives to business school, but John Bragg gave them $10 million and told them to invest it. This unusual education started when Bragg finally listened to his friend Purdy Crawford, the legendary maritime lawyer who kept pushing him to build an investment portfolio. For years, Bragg had resisted. He was too busy building his companies to buy stocks. But when interest rates dropped to near zero, Bragg saw an opportunity. He was borrowing at 2% and he'd invest in dividend paying stocks paying 5%. Even he couldn't ignore the math. He didn't just invest, though. He turned it into a teaching tool. He created six teams from Oxford and Eastlink executives and gave them $10 million of company money and told them to pick stocks and manage a real portfolio. There's no bonuses for good performance and no penalties for losses. This wasn't about making money, it was about educating them. I wanted them to see how strong companies operate, Bragg explained, and more importantly, how weak companies fail. When you have real money at stake, you pay attention differently. You read the annual reports, you study the management decisions. You learn what works and what doesn't. One team nearly tripled their stake, while others learned harder, less lessons. Greg himself became a student and started attending Berkshire Hathaway meetings, often bringing his maritime friends along. His favorite Buffett quote became a bit of a mantra for him. I am a better investor because I'm a businessman and a better businessman because I'm an investor. The executives took those lessons. They learned investing back to their day jobs. They ran tighter operations, they made better capital allocation decisions, and they understood their competition better. A great learning curve for everyone involved, Bragg called it. Only John Bragg would turn portfolio management into employee training. And I want to tell you a little bit about how John leads the company too. So every month at 6am John leaves Oxford and drives to Halifax. And you know, I've made the drive. It's not far, but there's not a lot to look at either. And by 8am sharp, he's sitting with his Eastlink executives. After lunch, he's back to Oxford for company meetings and then to Trove for inland. He goes to all of his companies, not the other way around. The executives know the drill. There's seven updates. Sales, operations, quality, complaints, shipments, financials. But Bragg rarely tells anyone what to do. John will suggest something we should consider and leave it at that, says Eastlink CEO Deborah Schaffner. He wants us to lead. This drives some people crazy. David Hoffman tells one story of Burley Crane, who ran John Bragg's main blueberry operations with methods from the 1970s. He was still harvesting by hand when machines were available and outperforming them. So every visit, John would suggest modernizing, and Crane would nod, agree, and then go right back to his old ways. The head office begged John to force the change, and John just simply said, he'll get there. And Crane did, eventually, on his own schedule, of course, the main operations became one of their most efficient. This is part of John Bragg's genius. He understood that forcing change might create compliance, but letting people find their own way creates leaders. But don't mistake patience for softness. When beekeeper Jack Hamilton insisted that 2,500 hives was the maximum that one person could manage, John pushed back. I have full confidence you can look after more. Think about how it could be done. Hamilton went away, redesigned the entire process, and came back with a plan. And Today he manages 12,000 hives, five times what he thought was possible. The difference? Bragg didn't tell him how to manage more hives. He just made it clear that the old limit wasn't acceptable. This is what makes all of our outliers amazing. They don't accept the limitations that society puts on things, that people have these preconceived notions about what can and can't be done. And if you look at all the outliers, one of the commonalities so far between all of these people is that they don't accept these limitations. When you tell managers what to do and how to do it, Bragg says, you make them weak leaders. Think about this for a second. John Bragg has three companies on Canada's best managed list. He owns North America's largest telecommunications company. They have billions of dollars in revenue, thousands of employees, and it's all run by suggestion, not command. Most CEOs build companies, but John builds leaders who build companies. Before we go on, I need to tell you something about John Bragg that the numbers don't capture. I want to tell you about the person. When the author of his biography, Donald Savoie, was playing golf with him in 2020, he noticed that Bragg was using these old scuffed up golf balls. And so the biographer asked John Bragg, why are you playing with those? Well, Bragg replied, I find they go as far as the new ones. This is a billionaire who still looks for lost golf balls and water hazards. He uses a ball retriever to fish them out. He doesn't do this because he can't afford new ones, but because waste defends him at a fundamental level. His office tells the same story. And I was fortunate enough to get to visit him in his office. It's so modest that a visiting academic was embarrassed to admit that his university office was nicer. And John Bragg had a great response. He said, that's okay, I find it very functional. I've always felt it was better to reinvest in the business than have a big new office. This wasn't false modesty. It's a single minded purpose. John Bragg focuses on exactly three things. His family, his business and his community's well being. Everything else is a distraction. Social events in the city. Sorry, can't make it. Industry conferences in Toronto. Send someone else. Award ceremonies, please. No, he doesn't just avoid attention. He actively flees from it. When he walks into a room, he doesn't want to stand out. He wants to observe, to listen, to learn. And that's why his companies are called Oxford and Eastlink and Inland, not Bragg Industries. I have no reverse gear, he likes to say. But he has no ego gear either. What he does have are the attributes that every entrepreneur needs. He's a self starter, he's disciplined, he's open minded, he's competitive, he's passionate, he's got a strong work ethic, he's willing to take risks and and absolutely unwilling to give up. But most importantly, perhaps he keeps his eye on cost like a hawk. Competitors with better access to blueberries went bankrupt, but John Bragg survived. He kept management to a minimum for years. He was the CEO, he was the head of marketing, he was the CFO and the HR director all rolled into one. He worked 18 hour days. There was no such thing as work life balance. He never stopped watching the spending. He never stopped living in the business business. Forty years after Bragg started business, researchers documented four principles of enduring success. It turns out that Bragg has been following them all along. First, exploit existing assets before exploring new ones. He did this with wild blueberries on abandoned farmland. Second, diversify your portfolio. Eastlink Inland wind farms. Third, remember your mistakes. That June Frost taught him never to depend on one product. Fourth, manage change carefully. He knows exactly when to move fast and when to wait. But here's what the researchers miss. It's not just about following these principles. It's about who you are when nobody's watching. It's about using scuff golf balls when you could buy the pro shop. It's about sleeping on the factory floor when you could be home in bed. It's about treating the seller who's going bankrupt with the same respect as the one who survives driving. It's about building companies that will outlast you in communities that others have long abandoned, using money you borrowed when everyone said you were crazy. This is who John Bragg is, a man so focused on what matters that he doesn't have time for what doesn't. Okay, here's a bit of an epilogue, then we're going to get into the reflections and the lessons that I take away from this. Donald Sobey, who built one of Canada's greatest retail empires, called John Bragg one of the very best managers he's ever seen. Why? Bragg is the antithesis of a bully, sobey explained. He shows tremendous respect for everybody at all times. I think it's the farmer in him. At 85, John Bragg is now starting to finally step back. The new CEO will work from Oxford, with a population of 1100. Not from Toronto, not from New York. From Oxford, Nova Scotia. The message is clear. You don't need to leave home to build something extraordinary. His four children have all worked the blueberry fields. They all started at the bottom. They're not being trained as managers, they're being trained as owners. If they're good owners, Bragg says, they can hire good management. The business will stay private. They'll stay family held, and they'll stay anchored in the communities that built them. Think about what John Bragg actually did. A young man turns down a secure teaching job to pick blueberries, and 60 years later, he's built three of Canada's best managed companies. He's built North America's largest private telecommunications company. He employs thousands of people. He dominates global markets, and he's worth billions of dollars. And he did this from a small town. When Bragg's biographer asked who the book should be dedicated to, Bragg didn't hesitate. To all the future entrepreneurs. Not to his family. Not to his employees. To kids in small maritime towns who haven't even started their business yet. That tells you everything you need to know about John Bragg. At 85, he doesn't talk about his billions or his global reach. He talks about the next generation from small towns who will stay home and build something extraordinary. While others looked at rural Canada and saw a Decline. John Bragg saw opportunity while others chase quick exits. He built for generations, while others managed through commands. He led through suggestion and. And respect. If you look after your company, Bragg says, it will look after you. From Oxford, Nova Scotia, John Bragg looked after a lot of companies and in turn saved an entire region that others had long written off. That's not just success. That's legacy. Okay, I want to get into my reflections from doing this extra research and listening to the podcast I did with him again. And then I want to get into some of the lessons that you can learn from John Bragg and take away from this episode. So I want to tell you a story that I've never told publicly, but this is interesting. So I'm going to interview John Bragg. So I travel to Oxford, Nova Scotia, because there's no way he's going to fly to Ottawa. And I get there and I get into his office and he's like, the guy is so nice. He spent the whole morning with me. We start chatting, and he's like, do you want a coffee? And I'm like, oh, I would love a coffee. So we go to the little cafeteria, and he's like, it's a dollar. And I was like, what? And he's like, we charge for the coffee here. He's like, but I'll spot you this time. And it was just such an incredible moment. He's like, we used to give away the coffee for free, but we found it's better if people pay for it, so the executives have to pay for it, too. And I thought that that was just such maritime common sense, the principles that he expounds. I think I still own that dollar for coffee, by the way. I'll have to make good on that. And I'll send him a little note with the dollar in it. And I just want to say that I'm from the Maritimes. There's definitely a maritime sensibility and no nonsense with him. There's a saying in the Maritimes that if your business is worth 10 million, you kind of pretend it's worth one. And on the flip side, if you're from Toronto or New York and your business is worth 1 million, you pretend it's worth 10. And that sort of explains a lot about the region that John grew up in, a lot about the region that I grew up in. John Bragg, one of the legends of Canada in terms of building and, you know, we didn't get into a lot of the details of it, the fiber optic network he owns, but he's been at the forefront of buying up North American fiber optic as it becomes for sale. One of the things that really sticks with me, and this ties into the fiber optics a little bit, is that it's okay to overpay for assets. This is such a profound concept. I've been thinking about this since my interview with him, that these assets only come up once. If you overpay for them, it doesn't really matter. You're not going to get another shot to buy it. You can think about this with a lot of different types of assets. You know, maybe there's a lake near your house, and there's one or two properties that they'll just come up once every 30, 40, 50 years, and you're going to overpay for those, and that's okay. You can think about that with fiber optic networks. They're not going to be making a lot more fiber optic networks. The cost to make those networks is huge. So when they come up and you overpay 20, 30%, it doesn't really matter. Now he can get away with that a little more because he's private. It doesn't have to pay off as quickly for him. Him just has to pay off eventually. The other thing I'd be remiss if I don't mention here is the role that his wife played. You know, when you talk to him, it's so evident and obvious that she played a huge role in his success and the success of Oxford, and they're still happily married. You know, this is from a different era. He's obviously older generation. His wife stayed home, took after the kids, but that enabled him to do all these things that he wanted to do. So they were a team as far as he's concerned. And she doesn't get enough credit. And a lot of women of that era and that generation don't get enough credit for the role that they played enabling other people. And if you think of partnerships as teamwork, which I do, I think that that's incredibly powerful. And I think that she deserves a lot of credit and recognition for that. Okay, I want to get into 11 lessons you can take away from this episode that I reflected on a little bit and took away. So here we go. Number one, bounce. Don't break. In 1968, John Bragg borrowed everything to build his first processing plant. To say he was all in is an understatement. And then the frost killed his entire crop. It was a disaster. He had nearly an empty factory, barely any revenue, and a lot of bills to pay. Most people would have declared bankruptcy. Instead, he called Wallace McCain at midnight. What do you need that you don't want to make yourself? McCain threw him a file that was too hard for the McCain family. Onion rings. And John Bragg had never made an onion ring. But he had an empty factory and he had no choice. That frost forced him to diversify. And Today he processes £140 million annually. When you're staring at complete ruin, the question isn't why me? It's what now? What can I do to Reputation is currency. The bank manager literally laughed him out of the office when he needed his first loan. Think about that. The guy laughed at a young man trying to build something. But a conservative politician stood up for the liberal family. I wish we could go back to these days again in politics. If we can't lend money to the Bragg family, we can't lend money to anyone. And later, Bragg intentionally overpaid for acquisition. Word spreads fast. If you want to sell, call John Bragg. He'll give you a fair price. Quick close with no games. While competitors fought over pennies on the deal, Bragg was already closing three more. You can't buy reputation. You can only earn it one interaction at a time. And three. This is one of my personal favorites that I use all the time. Now look to the horizon. In 1969, nobody wanted a cable TV license for Amherst, Nova Scotia, with its population of 9,000, Bragg was the only applicant. Early cable meant recording shows on tape, putting them on buses and playing two week old programming. And while others saw losses, Bragg saw rural communities desperate for connection. Recurring revenue in a shrinking world. Listen to this quote, okay, this is so profound. We're big, big believers in looking at the horizon. He says only those who look at the horizon find the right road. If you look at your feet, you will stumble. How profound is that quote? That license that nobody wanted was the first brick in what would become North America's largest private telecommunications empire. Number four, Grow the pie. Bragg's brother invented a blueberry harvester that did the work of 30 hand pickers. Instead of keeping it secret, they sold them to competitors. What's good for the industry is good for everyone. Bragg said he wasn't competing against other blueberry growers. He was competing against every other fruit. This drives people crazy. Even today, Oxford funds research on growing and cultivating and shares everything with everyone freely. While other people want to divide the pie, John Bragg wants to grow it for everyone. 5. Overpay for what's only available once. Bragg routinely paid more than competitors for acquisitions, sometimes double. His reasoning was simple. It's only available once. While others squeeze, sellers, brag, close deals quickly. Every acquisition is really two acquisitions. It's the company you're buying today and the companies that might sell tomorrow. When opportunities are scarce, pay what it takes to get the asset you want. The people who nickel and dime their way out of great deals spend years regretting it. 6 no reverse gear At 22, Bragg turned down a secure teaching job to pick while bluebirds everyone thought he lost his mind when his business nearly failed, he kept going. When banks rejected him, he found another way. When Bell killed his partnership, he borrowed 265 million and built a competitor instead. I have no reverse gear, bragg says. The world is full of people who almost started something, almost took the risk, almost bet on themselves. Don't be one of those people. Number seven Outcome over ego. Greg could have named his companies after himself, but instead he called them Oxford and Eastlink. Never let your ego run your business. I love that quote. Never let your ego run your business, he says. At 85, worth billions, he still uses scuffed golf balls. They go as far as the new ones. His headquarters looks like a community college. Every dollar that doesn't feed your ego feeds your growth. Most people would rather look successful than actually be successful. And that's why most people aren't as successful as they could be. Number eight Lead by suggestion. Every month, Bragg drives to his executives instead of summoning them to the headquarters. He rarely gives orders. When A beekeeper said 2,500 hives was his limit, Bragg didn't bark commands. He simply said, I have confidence that you can handle more. Think about how the beekeeper redesigned everything and now manages 12,000 hives. Strong leaders help people discover what. What they're capable of. Number nine never stop learning. At 70, when he was a billionaire, Brett gave six teams of executives $10 million each. Not for bonuses, but for investment portfolios. Real money, real stakes. I wanted them to see how strong companies operate and how weak ones fail, he said. There's no penalties for losses and no bonuses for gains. It was pure education. Bragg himself became a student, attending Berkshire Hathaway meetings, studying other businesses. And today he manages his own multi billion dollar portfolio. His favorite Buffet quote is, I am a better investor because I'm a businessman and a better businessman because I'm an investor. Most people stop learning once they get successful. But outliers never stop being students. Number 10 Stay private, stay nimble. For 50 years, Banks begged him to go public. He refused when he bought AM Telecom, which was a public company, one of the few public companies he actually bought. He immediately eliminated 4 million in overhead. That was all the cost just to be public. It's costly to be public, and it slows you down, he says. Public companies need board approvals, regulatory filings, quarterly guidance. When Bragg engineers recommended a new technology, he gave them $10 million the same day. Private companies can take hits today to win tomorrow. Public companies can't afford to miss a quarter. And finally, number 11, patient capital wins. For 50 years, Bragg never took a dividend. Every dollar went back into growth. While competitors paid shareholders, Bragg kept building. He invested in fiber when nobody understood why. He built infrastructure between small towns when everyone chased cities. Bragg thought in terms of generational and in a world of quick flips and fast exit, the person willing to wait 20 years has no competition. Thank you for listening and learning with us. I hope you enjoy this Outlier series. We're trying to get better at these, so if you have any feedback, send me an email. Shanes Blog thanks for listening and learning with us. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Be sure to sign up for my free weekly newsletter at fsg. 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