Small Town Billionaire: John Bragg’s 3 Empires

0:00:07 Picture this. It’s June 1968, and overnight, a killing frost wipes out nearly every wild blueberry.
0:00:14 At the time, John Bragg is 28 years old. He’s just borrowed everything he could to build a
0:00:20 processing plant for those blueberries. And now he’s standing in this brand new factory with no
0:00:26 crops to process. Bills are coming due, workers are showing up for shifts, the whole thing is a
0:00:31 disaster. Most people in that situation, they’d call the bank and work out some kind of bankruptcy
0:00:38 deal. But John Bragg picks up the phone, but he doesn’t call the bank. He calls McCain Foods,
0:00:43 and he asks them one question that would change everything. Hello? Hi, it’s John Bragg.
0:00:51 Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I’m your host, Shane Parrish. In a world where knowledge is power,
0:00:55 this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.
0:01:03 Today, we’re exploring one of the greatest untold stories in business, John Bragg. John Bragg’s story
0:01:10 reads like fiction, except it’s real. He’s founded three companies in three entirely different industries
0:01:15 from blueberries to telecommunications to aviation. Two of the three companies are worth billions,
0:01:21 and the third one is well on the way to that. Not only is John Bragg the largest grower and processor
0:01:26 of wild blueberries in the world, but he owns North America’s largest private telecommunications company.
0:01:32 And if that wasn’t crazy enough, imagine doing it all from a small town that he’s never left
0:01:38 with a population of just over 1,100 people. But the part of the story I think you’ll most like is how
0:01:43 he did it. He defied nearly every rule about where and how success is supposed to happen.
0:01:48 This isn’t our first episode on John. I interviewed him in episode 204,
0:01:54 and his story captivated me so completely that I needed to dedicate an entire Outliers episode
0:01:59 to better understand how he did it. This episode draws from that conversation
0:02:02 and Don Savoie’s masterful biography, The Rule Entrepreneur.
0:02:07 As always, it’s for entertainment only. It’s time to listen and learn.
0:02:16 It’s 1962 and John Bragg has just graduated with two degrees, commerce and education,
0:02:24 and he has one job offer. The offer is to teach high school in Pugwash, Nova Scotia for $3,800 a year.
0:02:29 He’ll get another $100 if he coaches the basketball team. For most 22-year-olds in the post-war boom,
0:02:36 this was the jackpot, a stable government job with generous benefits and a first-rate pension,
0:02:40 the kind of security their Depression-era parents could only dream of.
0:02:45 But there’s one problem. John Bragg has been an entrepreneur since high school.
0:02:51 In the summers, he was making $4,000 picking wild blueberries, more than the teaching salary,
0:02:53 doing what everyone else thought was beneath them.
0:02:58 So when the school board offered him their position, John Bragg does the unthinkable.
0:03:04 He just says no. His friends think he’s lost his mind, but John Bragg comes from a different stock.
0:03:10 His grandfather, Charles, opened the local store, became the community hub, and then there was his father, Elmer.
0:03:15 If you want to understand why John turned down that teaching job, you have to understand Elmer first.
0:03:22 Here was a man who ran a lumber business by day and served on every community board that would have him by night.
0:03:34 He was quiet by nature, wise with his counsel, John would later write, tolerant and patient, but quick to challenge foolishness.
0:03:42 Elmer had built something unusual in rural Nova Scotia, a business that made money while maintaining absolute integrity.
0:03:44 When neighbors needed help, he was there.
0:03:47 When someone couldn’t pay their bill right away, he carried them.
0:03:50 His brand wasn’t just lumber, it was fairness itself.
0:03:52 John watched all of this growing up.
0:03:56 He watched his father juggle multiple ventures while never missing a community meeting.
0:04:00 He watched him turn down easy money if it meant compromising his values.
0:04:05 He watched him build wealth not by extracting from the community, but by investing in it.
0:04:11 Generation after generation of Braggs, all entrepreneurs, all in the same small corner of Nova Scotia,
0:04:13 all building something from nothing.
0:04:19 Safe, no risk, stable employment opportunities are simply not in his DNA, his biographer would later write.
0:04:22 John needs to find his own path.
0:04:26 While at Mount Allison University, he’s already shown the entrepreneurial itch.
0:04:30 He teamed up with a fellow student to build the town’s first modern apartment building.
0:04:32 He had no money, but that wasn’t a problem.
0:04:35 They knocked on doors until a local financier backed them.
0:04:39 John would own that building for over 40 years.
0:04:41 But after university, he tries law school.
0:04:45 And three weeks in, he looks around the classroom and everyone else wants to be a lawyer.
0:04:48 I didn’t want to be a lawyer, he explained later.
0:04:49 I wanted to be in business.
0:04:53 I realized that I was just putting in time before going into business.
0:04:55 And so I decided to leave.
0:05:00 He wanted what all the Braggs before him had, not just a business, but a way to build something that mattered.
0:05:03 And the business he had in mind was blueberries.
0:05:09 His friend, George Cooper, who had later become one of the country’s top lawyers, thought he’d lost his mind.
0:05:12 Are you nuts, Cooper told him, leaving law school?
0:05:15 Think about what you’ll be missing when you’re out there growing blueberries.
0:05:18 But John had already seen what he’d been missing.
0:05:20 Every day of his childhood, watching his father.
0:05:24 The real question was, what would he miss if he took the teaching job?
0:05:30 All the competition is going away, he joked to his friends as they headed for Ontario for careers.
0:05:32 I’m going to stay here and do something.
0:05:34 Law school wasn’t a complete loss.
0:05:38 He ended up staying for the entire first year and learned about contracts and dealing with lawyers.
0:05:42 Two skills that would prove helpful when he started building his empire later.
0:05:44 But first, he had to build something.
0:05:48 Here’s something most people don’t know about wild blueberries.
0:05:49 They’re genuinely wild.
0:05:50 You don’t plant them.
0:05:51 They just exist.
0:05:57 They’ve been growing in the acidic soils of Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec since the last Ice Age.
0:06:02 In Nova Scotia, where the Bragg family lived, these berries took over the old abandoned farmland.
0:06:08 See, when rural electrification came through in the 1930s, it bypassed a lot of the back roads.
0:06:11 Families living out there had to make a choice.
0:06:13 And most of them moved closer to town.
0:06:17 Nature reclaimed their fields, and that’s when the wild blueberries moved in.
0:06:22 By 1964, picking them was absolutely brutal work.
0:06:25 You’re bent over all day with this metal handrake.
0:06:31 Your back is screaming, and the sun is bearing down on you, and your fingers are cramping up.
0:06:35 A good picker might have harvested like 500 pounds on a good day.
0:06:38 John Bragg had been picking those berries since he was 15.
0:06:46 That first summer, he couldn’t even drive, so he had to hire someone to drive the pickup truck while he organized four or five pickers.
0:06:52 They harvested 4,000 pounds that summer, and he cleared enough to pay for his entire year at university.
0:06:56 By his final years at Mount Allison, he’d really scaled up the operation.
0:07:02 He was making $20,000 each summer, which was serious money in the early 1960s.
0:07:07 Enough to pay his crew, cover all of his expenses, and still have plenty of cash left over.
0:07:10 So you can see why he turned down that teaching job.
0:07:14 But every summer, John noticed something that drove him absolutely crazy.
0:07:18 There were millions of pounds of blueberries just rotting in the fields.
0:07:20 And the reason was simple.
0:07:24 There wasn’t enough freezer capacity, and there weren’t enough buyers for fresh blueberries.
0:07:33 This created an economic chaos, with prices swinging wildly from 53 cents a kilogram all the way down to 15 cents.
0:07:37 Farmers were going broke while perfectly good blueberries rotted in the fields.
0:07:39 John saw what others missed.
0:07:44 The people who owned the freezers didn’t grow blueberries, and the blueberry growers didn’t own the freezers.
0:07:46 Nobody controlled the whole chain.
0:07:52 So in 1968, at 28 years old, John Bragg decided he was going to build his own freezing plant.
0:07:54 The problem was, at the time, he had no money.
0:07:56 At least not the type of money he needed.
0:07:58 And that wasn’t the hardest problem.
0:08:01 As he would later admit, I had no idea what I was doing.
0:08:03 But he did know his idea was sound.
0:08:07 He walked into the bank and sat down across from the manager.
0:08:08 He laid out his whole vision.
0:08:12 The manager looked at this young farmer, glanced at his balance sheet, and smiled.
0:08:14 But it wasn’t a good kind of smile.
0:08:17 You’re going to have to take that teaching job, he said.
0:08:22 Now, John Bragg walked out of the bank with what he calls no reverse gear.
0:08:25 The rejection didn’t slow him down.
0:08:26 It just redirected him.
0:08:28 He would bounce, but he wouldn’t break.
0:08:35 There was a new government grant available for up to 25% of capital costs for businesses in designated areas.
0:08:37 So John applied and won.
0:08:39 But that still left 75%.
0:08:43 The family lumber business was struggling, bleeding cash just to survive.
0:08:44 So there was no help there.
0:08:47 So John went to the province of Nova Scotia and asked for a loan.
0:08:51 And this is where generations of Bragg integrity really paid off.
0:08:56 George Henley, a local conservative politician, heard about John’s application.
0:09:00 Now, you need to understand something about the maritime politics.
0:09:02 The Braggs were hugely liberal.
0:09:03 Such a liberal family.
0:09:04 All generations.
0:09:07 John’s father had even run as the liberal candidate.
0:09:09 He lost, but he ran.
0:09:12 So Henley should have been their political enemy.
0:09:15 But instead, Henley stood up in support and said,
0:09:18 If we can’t lend money to the Bragg family, we can’t lend money to anyone.
0:09:21 And those 13 words changed everything.
0:09:23 John got his loan.
0:09:24 He was all in.
0:09:28 He hired consultants from Pennsylvania who’d built similar plants in Maine.
0:09:30 He used local labor for construction.
0:09:35 And by late 1968, his factory could process 2 million pounds of blueberries.
0:09:38 He was ready for the next season.
0:09:42 And then came the most devastating June ever.
0:09:46 For the first time in the recorded history of Nova Scotia’s blueberry industry,
0:09:49 a killing frost swept through in June.
0:09:53 This wasn’t a partial loss or just a bad year.
0:09:55 This was total destruction and devastation.
0:09:58 We had a complete crop failure, John would later tell me.
0:10:00 The only one in our history.
0:10:03 Having built a factory geared to run 2 million pounds,
0:10:06 we ran maybe 100,000.
0:10:09 That’s one twentieth of the capacity.
0:10:12 John’s got bills to pay, employees to support,
0:10:15 and a brand new factory sitting empty.
0:10:17 Most people would have quit right there.
0:10:19 But John Bragg wasn’t most people.
0:10:21 He heard something different.
0:10:22 Adapt or die.
0:10:24 Wasn’t easy.
0:10:26 The first year, we had a complete crop failure.
0:10:28 The only one in the history.
0:10:30 We’ve had poor crops and good crops.
0:10:32 But that year, we had a disaster.
0:10:34 And that was right after all the factory investment.
0:10:41 Having built a factory and all geared it up to run 2 million pounds,
0:10:44 and we ran, I don’t know, 100,000.
0:10:45 There just was no crop.
0:10:47 And so we get through it, he said.
0:10:48 This was no minor setback, though.
0:10:51 With no blueberries to process and no money coming in,
0:10:53 John became the entire workforce.
0:10:56 He was the chief engineer, the boiler operator,
0:11:00 the marketing director, the CFO, and the janitor all rolled into one.
0:11:02 He started sleeping on the factory floor
0:11:06 because why waste time driving home when there’s so much to figure out?
0:11:09 And late one night, staring at his empty production line,
0:11:11 he picked up the phone and called Wallace McCain.
0:11:13 Now, the McCains were legends.
0:11:17 They had built a French fire empire from tiny Florenceville, New Brunswick.
0:11:20 When Wallace answered, John had one simple question.
0:11:23 What do you need that you don’t want to make yourself?
0:11:26 So Wallace threw him a file on onion rings.
0:11:30 McCain Foods had tried before making battered products,
0:11:32 but couldn’t make the economics work.
0:11:35 In fact, they tried relentlessly to get them to work,
0:11:37 but they couldn’t figure it out.
0:11:41 Maybe this desperate young man with an empty factory could figure it out.
0:11:44 When Harris McCain walked into the meeting to close the deal,
0:11:48 John started outlining the terms, drawing on a single year of law school.
0:11:51 And Harrison cut him off mid-sentence and said,
0:11:53 Now, young man, don’t tell me how to negotiate a deal.
0:11:56 There would be no lawyers, no complex contracts,
0:12:00 just a handshake and a one-page agreement that’s still enforced today.
0:12:02 Over 50 years later.
0:12:05 Now, John had never made an onion ring in his life, but it didn’t matter.
0:12:08 He had an empty factory and bills to pay, so he had to figure it out.
0:12:09 And he did.
0:12:15 Shortly after, he was visiting an American carrot processing plant and saw another opportunity.
0:12:18 When people asked where he planned to sell frozen carrots,
0:12:20 his response was pure brag.
0:12:22 Let’s grow carrots and process them.
0:12:24 Then we’ll figure out where to sell them.
0:12:30 Today, Oxford Frozen Foods is the second largest frozen carrot producer in North America.
0:12:32 So the pattern was set.
0:12:33 Bounce, but don’t break.
0:12:36 See the opportunity and figure it out.
0:12:37 Then dominate the market.
0:12:41 It didn’t matter that the bank manager literally laughed him out of the bank.
0:12:44 It didn’t matter that Mother Nature declared war on him.
0:12:46 John Bragg had no reverse gear.
0:12:48 The lesson here is profound.
0:12:51 Your biggest disasters often become your greatest opportunities.
0:12:58 To be in business is to be in the business of finding and solving problems and attacking them.
0:13:01 Each problem solved brings you one step closer to success.
0:13:05 That frost forced John to diversify.
0:13:08 The bank rejection taught him to find creative financing.
0:13:11 Starting with nothing taught him to waste nothing.
0:13:14 Sometimes the universe isn’t telling you to quit.
0:13:17 It’s forcing you to become who you’re meant to be.
0:13:21 This reminds me of Jimmy Patterson a bit from episode 235.
0:13:25 When General Motors blocked him from expanding his car dealerships,
0:13:30 he was forced to diversify, ultimately building a $16 billion empire.
0:13:33 And the same thing happened to John Bragg.
0:13:36 That June Frost didn’t just destroy his blueberry crop.
0:13:39 It forced him to think beyond blueberries.
0:13:44 Sometimes the universe’s no is really redirecting you towards something bigger.
0:13:47 Okay, back to John Bragg’s first love.
0:13:52 From the beginning, John knew that if wild blueberries were going to survive as a business,
0:13:56 not just a cottage industry, they had to innovate.
0:14:00 So he started by leveling the fields so machines could actually work on them.
0:14:02 But his real innovations went beyond the obvious.
0:14:06 If you visit one of John Bragg’s blueberry fields today,
0:14:09 you’ll see these trees lined running through them.
0:14:10 They’re not there by accident.
0:14:12 Those trees do three things.
0:14:15 First, they stop the snow from blowing off the fields in the winter,
0:14:18 because the snow insulates the plants from the killing cold.
0:14:23 And then they slow the wind across the flatlands, protecting the low-growing blueberries.
0:14:26 And finally, they sheltered the bees.
0:14:31 As soon as he had cash flow from his factory, Bragg started pouring money into research.
0:14:34 Managing wild blueberry fields is incredibly complex,
0:14:37 because as Bill Malley, Oxford’s R&D director, explains,
0:14:39 no handful is ever the same.
0:14:41 You’re dealing with what Mother Nature put here.
0:14:43 But Mother Nature needs help.
0:14:47 Forty years ago, Bragg started funding research at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College,
0:14:48 and he never stopped.
0:14:55 They study everything from pollination to fungal diseases to vegetation management and berry composition.
0:14:57 But here’s the kicker that’ll surprise you.
0:15:00 They share all their findings with everyone, including competitors.
0:15:01 Why?
0:15:05 Well, what’s good for the industry is good for everyone.
0:15:07 Us and them included, Bragg explained.
0:15:11 We all need to grow the industry, and the best way to do that is by helping one another.
0:15:16 Like Saul Price in episode 241, sharing his warehouse club innovations with competitors,
0:15:19 John Bragg understood the fundamental truth.
0:15:23 It’s better to grow the pie than fight over the slices.
0:15:26 By sharing his R&D with everyone, even competitors,
0:15:30 he helped the entire wild blueberry industry expand.
0:15:34 When the whole pie grows, everyone’s slice gets bigger.
0:15:37 By 1970, John Bragg had a math problem.
0:15:42 A good hand raker could harvest maybe 500 or 700 pounds of blueberries a day.
0:15:48 Oxford needed 8,000 workers for 25 days just to bring in one season’s crop.
0:15:53 Where do you find 8,000 workers in rural Nova Scotia for less than four weeks of work?
0:15:54 You don’t.
0:15:56 So you have to invent a machine.
0:15:59 The existing harvesters were disasters.
0:16:04 They’d rake backwards against the direction of travel, tearing up plants and soil.
0:16:06 Most farmers had given up on them.
0:16:10 So John turned to his brother, Doug, who had a gift for making mechanical things work.
0:16:13 The Bragg harvester was brilliantly simple.
0:16:17 It mounted on a standard farm tractor, something that every farmer already owned.
0:16:23 The one meter wide head followed ground contours, stripping berries without destroying plants.
0:16:26 Berries traveled up a conveyor while a blower cleared them.
0:16:30 One machine could do the work of 30 hand pickers.
0:16:32 Doug didn’t just build one harvester.
0:16:36 He started a whole company and began manufacturing them for the entire industry.
0:16:43 They’ve sold over 700 of these harvesters now, about 100 to Oxford, and the rest to competitors and other growers.
0:16:47 But here’s what separates John Bragg from ordinary businessmen.
0:16:49 He didn’t patent this invention.
0:16:55 He could have kept the technology to himself and his brother and given Oxford a massive advantage.
0:16:58 But instead, he made it available to everyone who needed it.
0:17:01 He wasn’t trying to divide the pie.
0:17:02 He was trying to grow it.
0:17:07 If wild blueberries were going to survive, the whole industry had to modernize together.
0:17:11 John Bragg wasn’t trying to be the best competitor in the blueberry industry.
0:17:13 He’s trying to be the champion of it.
0:17:29 Okay, we need to talk about bees for a second.
0:17:33 Here’s something that will blow your mind about wild blueberries.
0:17:37 Without bees, a field yields maybe about 1,000 pounds per acre.
0:17:42 But with the proper bee pollination, you can get up to 8,000 pounds on the same acre.
0:17:43 Eight times more.
0:17:48 No wonder bees are one of John Bragg’s biggest single cause.
0:17:49 Think about this for a second.
0:17:53 Bee pollination in Canada is worth over $2 billion annually.
0:17:58 About a third of our food depends on these little insects that aren’t even native here.
0:18:04 European honeybees arrived 400 years ago, and now we can’t live without them.
0:18:07 American blueberry growers have all of this figured out.
0:18:13 They rent hives that follow the seasons in what John Bragg calls the ABC system.
0:18:17 A for almonds in California, B for blueberries, and C for cranberries.
0:18:24 The hives arrive by truck, and then they move on to the next crop.
0:18:27 It’s simple, it’s efficient, and it’s proven.
0:18:29 But here’s where it gets crazy.
0:18:34 At the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border, there’s a sign that makes John Bragg’s blood boil.
0:18:36 No honeybee importation.
0:18:41 Small-scale maritime beekeepers get scared of competition and lobbied for protection.
0:18:47 So now the three maritime provinces, provinces that are all supposed to be working together,
0:18:49 can’t even agree on letting bees cross a border.
0:18:52 The result is absolute madness.
0:18:55 Oxford has to run three completely separate bee operations.
0:19:01 One in Nova Scotia, one in New Brunswick, one in Ontario, actually four, one in Maine.
0:19:02 Here’s the kicker.
0:19:06 If Nova Scotia bees cross the border to pollinate crops in New Brunswick,
0:19:08 I guess they can never come back?
0:19:12 They become bee exiles, permanently banished for the crime of doing their job.
0:19:14 Think about what this means, though.
0:19:19 Oxford is competing against American operations where bees flow freely across thousands of miles.
0:19:24 Meanwhile, they can’t even move a hive 50 feet across a border without losing it forever.
0:19:27 So how do you manage bees when the government treats them like prisoners?
0:19:31 It turns out very, very carefully.
0:19:35 Oxford puts four 16 hives per acres depending on the field.
0:19:39 The hives arrive on pallets at night, and it’s always at night,
0:19:43 because if you move them during the day, the foraging bees can’t find a home.
0:19:48 They’re surrounded by electric fences, not to keep the bees in, but to keep the bears out.
0:19:54 Spring bears wake up hungry, and a hive full of honey is like finding a buffet in the woods.
0:19:56 Just imagine Winnie the Pooh.
0:19:58 The bees themselves are quite amazing.
0:20:03 Each one has to randomly visit at least eight different flowers for proper pollination.
0:20:08 And they have a built-in GPF, so they always return to their exact hive.
0:20:14 But they’re also incredibly sensitive to weather, so hot days compress their entire pollination window
0:20:16 to just five to eight days.
0:20:18 Cold weather, they won’t fly.
0:20:20 Too windy, and they’re grounded.
0:20:26 And if frost hits during the flowering like it did in June 1968, everything dies.
0:20:29 This is what drives John Bride crazy.
0:20:31 It’s not the complexity of managing bees.
0:20:34 Not the bears or the weather or the logistics.
0:20:39 It’s that he’s forced to be less efficient than his competitors because three maritime provinces
0:20:41 can’t agree to let bees be bees.
0:20:45 It’s always irritating, he told me, with typical maritime understatement.
0:20:47 But you can hear the frustration.
0:20:52 Here’s a man who’s built a global business from rural Nova Scotia, and he’s being held back
0:20:54 by a sign at the border that bees can’t even read.
0:21:00 So, at this point in the story, John Bragg has figured out how to grow, harvest, and freeze
0:21:00 well blueberries.
0:21:02 And now he has a different problem.
0:21:03 How does he sell them all?
0:21:07 His main competitors had the entire American market.
0:21:08 Quebec had Montreal.
0:21:10 Nova Scotia.
0:21:12 The whole province had fewer people than Boston.
0:21:15 Nova Scotians are traders, John Bragg told me.
0:21:18 My competitors in Maine still sell in the United States.
0:21:19 They have a big domestic market.
0:21:21 But we’re Nova Scotians.
0:21:22 We’re traders by nature.
0:21:25 We have the port of Halifax sitting beside us.
0:21:27 And that port became his gateway to the world.
0:21:31 When local demand couldn’t keep up with production, Bragg went global.
0:21:34 Europe came first in the 1970s.
0:21:37 Europeans knew bilberries, but couldn’t harvest them commercially.
0:21:41 So, Bragg convinced them to switch to wild blueberries.
0:21:44 Today, Oxford owns 60% of the European market.
0:21:45 Japan was brutal.
0:21:49 In 1974, Japanese importers had never even seen a blueberry.
0:21:53 Bragg made 17 cold calls before getting his first order.
0:21:54 17.
0:21:56 Most people would quit after a few.
0:22:01 But Bragg kept dialing and kept pitching and kept believing that eventually someone would
0:22:02 say yes.
0:22:04 And his persistence paid off.
0:22:08 Oxford now dominates Japan’s frozen wild blueberry market.
0:22:10 And then he went to Korea.
0:22:12 And now he’s working on China.
0:22:15 The brand around the world is Oxford blueberries, Matthew says.
0:22:18 People ask us, do you have Oxford quality?
0:22:19 It’s like Xerox now.
0:22:23 From rural Nova Scotia to the global standard for quality.
0:22:26 All because the local market was too small to contain his ambition.
0:22:32 When John Bragg started picking blueberries in the 1950s, Canada processed about 40 million
0:22:33 pounds annually.
0:22:38 Today, the industry produces 10 times that at 400 million pounds.
0:22:45 And Canada exports about $240 million worth of wild blueberries, with Nova Scotia alone accounting
0:22:47 for about 100 million of that.
0:22:53 Oxford Frozen Foods, John’s Company’s processes 140 million pounds a year.
0:22:59 They’ve created 500 jobs in tiny Oxford, Collingwood, and another 400 in Tracade, New Brunswick.
0:23:03 They dominate markets in Canada, Europe, Japan, and Korea.
0:23:08 From a teenager with a handrake to the world’s largest wild blueberry producer.
0:23:14 From rotting berries in the fields to Oxford quality becoming the global standard.
0:23:18 All built from a rural corner of Nova Scotia that most business people would have fled.
0:23:22 But here’s the thing about John Bragg that nobody saw coming.
0:23:29 The same year his blueberry crop failed, that devastating year in 1968 when the frost destroyed
0:23:32 everything, he was already looking at something else.
0:23:39 Something that had absolutely nothing to do with farming or food or anything he or his family
0:23:40 had ever done before.
0:23:45 While he was sleeping on the floor of his empty blueberry factory, trying to figure out how
0:23:51 to pay the bills, John Bragg quietly applied for a cable television license in Amherst, Nova
0:23:55 Scotia, why would a blueberry farmer want to get into cable TV?
0:23:59 The answer to that question would eventually make him a billionaire.
0:24:07 Okay, everyone in the Maritimes know how John Bragg got his first cable license.
0:24:08 It was 1969.
0:24:13 The liberal government is in charge and they’ve just swept to power in the country.
0:24:15 The Braggs were big time liberals.
0:24:17 So John’s father had run for them.
0:24:18 John had worked for their campaign.
0:24:22 So when a cable license came up, of course John got it.
0:24:23 Political connections.
0:24:25 That’s how business works, right?
0:24:27 Here’s the embarrassing truth.
0:24:29 He was the only one who applied.
0:24:31 No one else wanted it.
0:24:32 Think about it for a second.
0:24:37 The government was literally giving away licenses to print money.
0:24:40 At least that’s what cable television would eventually become.
0:24:41 And nobody wanted them.
0:24:43 Not in Amherst, anyway.
0:24:46 It had a population of 9,000 people.
0:24:48 It was in the middle of nowhere.
0:24:52 Who’s going to make money selling cable television to 9,000 people?
0:24:54 But here’s John Bragg.
0:24:57 His blueberry factory is sitting empty from the June frost.
0:25:01 He’s sleeping on the factory floor trying to figure out how to pay bills.
0:25:05 He’s making onion rings for the McCains because he needs the cash.
0:25:10 And somehow in the middle of all this chaos, he decides to get into cable television.
0:25:11 Why?
0:25:14 Because everyone else saw Money Pit, but John saw the future.
0:25:23 Now to understand how insane early cable television was, you need to know exactly what John had to do to deliver programming.
0:25:28 First, he had to set up antennas near the New Brunswick border.
0:25:33 And from there, they’d capture ABC, NBC, and CBS signals from the air.
0:25:39 Then, and this is the part that kills me, they record these signals on tapes, physical tapes.
0:25:41 And they’d put the tapes on a bus.
0:25:48 And the bus would drive them to Amherst through whatever maritime weather was happening that day and deliver the tapes.
0:25:53 And then John’s team would play those tapes through their cable system as the programming.
0:26:00 So when the people of Amherst watched the Boston Bruins, they were watching a game from like two weeks ago.
0:26:02 Sitcoms, two weeks old.
0:26:04 News, ancient history.
0:26:06 And this was the business model at the time.
0:26:09 This is what John Bragg thought would compete with.
0:26:11 Just putting up an antenna on your roof for free.
0:26:12 But it gets a little worse.
0:26:18 By 1971, Bragg Communications was losing $11,000 every single month.
0:26:22 That’s about $90,000 in today’s money.
0:26:23 Every month.
0:26:25 This was money he didn’t have.
0:26:27 So John called a family meeting.
0:26:31 His father Elmer and brother Doug sat down to face facts.
0:26:33 Should they pull the plug and stop the bleeding?
0:26:36 Should they get out while they still could?
0:26:40 Other cable pioneers across the Maritimes were already selling.
0:26:47 They’d gotten their licenses, built basic cable systems, and then they’d flip them to the big companies for a quick profit.
0:26:49 Take the money and run.
0:26:50 It made sense.
0:26:54 But then John’s dad Elmer said something that changed everything.
0:26:58 This has been an expensive education for you, he told his son.
0:27:00 Are we going to throw this education away?
0:27:04 And it turns out, that was exactly what John needed to hear.
0:27:07 He wasn’t looking at his feet like everyone else.
0:27:10 He wasn’t seeing tapes on buses and monthly losses.
0:27:11 He was looking at the horizon.
0:27:16 And on that horizon, he saw that this would change everything.
0:27:20 He saw rural communities desperate for connection to the wider world.
0:27:25 He saw recurring monthly revenue, utility-like revenue from every household.
0:27:30 He saw a world getting smaller and people getting more connected.
0:27:34 Everyone else saw a money-losing cable company in small town Nova Scotia.
0:27:41 But John Bragg saw the foundation of what would become North America’s largest private telecommunications empire.
0:27:42 The lesson here is timing.
0:27:47 Sometimes being early looks exactly like being wrong.
0:27:51 Those tapes on buses would eventually become fiber-optic networks.
0:27:56 Those 9,000 customers in Amherst would eventually become millions across Canada.
0:28:03 That $11,000 monthly loss would eventually become billions of dollars in revenue.
0:28:06 But first, you have to survive the bus rides.
0:28:12 What happened next turned John Bragg into the Pac-Man of Canadian cable television.
0:28:18 Starting in the late 70s, he began swallowing up cable companies across the Maritimes.
0:28:22 Year after year, another system joined the growing empire.
0:28:26 While everyone else was squeezing sellers for every last dollar,
0:28:28 John Bragg did something different.
0:28:31 He decided to pay more intentionally.
0:28:35 The one thing I never wanted to do is nickel and dime the owners, Bragg explained.
0:28:39 I knew we were paying a bit more than the others wanted to pay,
0:28:42 but I also knew that we could make it work in the end.
0:28:44 This sounds crazy, right?
0:28:46 In business, you’re supposed to buy low.
0:28:48 But Bragg understood something deeper.
0:28:51 Every acquisition is really two acquisitions.
0:28:56 The company you’re buying today and the companies that might sell tomorrow.
0:28:58 But there was another reason too.
0:29:03 When I asked John why he paid more for some of these assets,
0:29:05 sometimes as high as two times what they were worth,
0:29:09 he said something that has stuck with me ever since.
0:29:11 It’s only available once.
0:29:13 It’s not always available.
0:29:16 Word spread fast in the tight-knit community.
0:29:19 If you wanted to sell your cable system, call John Bragg.
0:29:24 He’ll give you a fair price, close quickly, and he won’t jerk you around.
0:29:26 And one story captures this perfectly.
0:29:32 A seller was in serious financial trouble, which became obvious during negotiations.
0:29:34 And Bragg could have crushed him.
0:29:38 He could have used his advantage and renegotiated.
0:29:40 He could have taken advantage of this guy.
0:29:42 Instead, he stuck to the original deal.
0:29:47 That seller became his biggest evangelist, telling everyone the same thing.
0:29:50 There’s no better person to deal with than John Bragg.
0:29:52 This wasn’t charity, though.
0:29:53 It was strategy.
0:29:56 While competitors fought over the last dollar on one deal,
0:29:59 Bragg had already moved on to the next.
0:30:05 His reputation meant that he got first crack at every cable system coming to market.
0:30:07 The process was methodical.
0:30:09 Buy a system, integrate it, grow it.
0:30:12 Digest for a few years, and then hunt for the next one.
0:30:17 Today, over 75% of Eastlink’s earnings come from organic growth,
0:30:20 systems Bragg bought and then made better.
0:30:21 But here’s the thing.
0:30:24 Bragg never really understood deep technology.
0:30:28 I mean, he couldn’t explain how cable systems worked or diagram a network.
0:30:30 What he had was something more valuable,
0:30:32 because he could see where the industry was going.
0:30:35 A perfect example is wireless.
0:30:39 In the 1990s, lots of people thought wireless was a fad that would fade away.
0:30:42 It’s hard to believe now, but that’s true.
0:30:43 Bragg saw it differently.
0:30:48 If you’re in the communications business, he said, you have to be in wireless.
0:30:52 That’s the difference between looking at your feet and looking at the horizon.
0:30:56 Bragg was already thinking about mobile phones and the internet,
0:31:00 while other people were still figuring out how to deliver cable.
0:31:05 By paying fair prices and building trust, he’d assembled the pieces for something bigger than
0:31:07 anyone imagined.
0:31:12 A collection of small-town cable systems was about to become a telecommunications giant.
0:31:15 In 1985, everything changed.
0:31:21 John and another businessman named Stu Rath bought 55% of Halifax Cablevision.
0:31:24 This wasn’t another small town.
0:31:27 This was Halifax, Atlantic, Canada’s biggest city.
0:31:31 Going from Amherst to Halifax was like jumping from the minors to the big leagues.
0:31:34 The partnership was perfect.
0:31:37 Rath ran the operations while Bragg focused on his blueberries.
0:31:40 But 10 years later, Bragg saw something bigger.
0:31:45 He proposed a mega $45 million deal with Maritime Telephone and Telegraph.
0:31:47 He had spotted broadband coming.
0:31:53 MT&T had the resources together, and they could own the Atlantic Canadian Communications.
0:31:56 Bell Canada, MT&T’s parents killed the deal.
0:31:58 If you’re an entrepreneur, you know this moment.
0:32:00 Now Bragg had to go alone.
0:32:03 First, he bought out his partner, Stu Rath, in 1995.
0:32:06 Then came the big move in 2001.
0:32:11 Shaw Communications was selling all of their Nova Scotia assets.
0:32:11 The price tag?
0:32:14 $265 million.
0:32:16 This wasn’t another acquisition.
0:32:20 This would give Bragg 80,000 new subscribers overnight.
0:32:24 It would make Eastlink the fifth largest cable company in Canada.
0:32:27 And it would give him virtually all of Nova Scotia.
0:32:37 But $265 million for a private family company in 2001 that refused to sell equity to anyone else?
0:32:41 It took 20 years to make the deal work.
0:32:41 20.
0:32:47 The banks begged him to go public, sell some equity, share the risk, but he refused.
0:32:50 He sold everything he could to finance this.
0:32:51 He sold his BC blueberry farms.
0:32:53 He sold his apartment buildings.
0:32:59 He borrowed until, as he put it, we were stretched, we were levered to the hilt.
0:33:01 This was the bet of a lifetime.
0:33:06 A quarter billion dollars on a cable television in Atlantic Canada.
0:33:07 But here’s the thing.
0:33:12 Bell’s rejection turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Eastlink.
0:33:17 If Bell had said yes to the partnership, every decision would have needed their approval.
0:33:21 There would be committees and studies and months of bureaucracy.
0:33:25 Instead, Bragg kept full control.
0:33:30 So he could move like a startup while his competitors moved like, well, Bell.
0:33:34 But being forced to go alone had an unexpected advantage.
0:33:35 Speed.
0:33:37 Here’s a perfect example.
0:33:42 When Eastlink engineers visited Atlanta to see telephone over cable technology,
0:33:44 they came back with one recommendation.
0:33:46 We should implement it.
0:33:51 At the big telecommunications companies, those recommendations would have triggered months of
0:33:53 studies, committees, reports.
0:33:57 At Eastlink, Bragg gave them $10 million and 30 people and said go.
0:34:02 This was the advantage of staying private, staying independent.
0:34:05 While Bell was still debating, Eastlink had already taken action.
0:34:08 So Bell said no to the partnership.
0:34:13 John Bragg borrows $265 million and built a big competitor instead.
0:34:19 Eastlink became the first cable company in Canada to offer telephone service over cable.
0:34:25 First in North America to bundle internet, phone, and TV into one package.
0:34:29 The first to let customers add or drop channels in real time.
0:34:31 And this pattern has never changed.
0:34:33 Bragg would spot a technology shift coming.
0:34:37 His team would find the best implementation anywhere in the world.
0:34:41 And they’d move fast while larger companies were still scheduling their first meeting.
0:34:45 The telephone over cable breakthrough shows exactly how this worked.
0:34:49 Big Canadian telecoms had already burned millions trying to make it work.
0:34:50 They gave up.
0:34:53 Eastlink succeeded by doing something simple.
0:34:58 They adapted existing telephone technology instead of trying to reinvent something new.
0:35:03 When John’s son, Lee Bragg, made that first call in 1999 and said,
0:35:08 Dad, I’m calling you over our telephone system, it changed telecommunications forever.
0:35:13 But the decision that really reveals John’s character happened around the same time.
0:35:17 His company was now a collection of local brands.
0:35:21 He had Halifax Cable Vision, Dartmouth Cable, New Glasgow Cable.
0:35:23 But they needed one name.
0:35:26 The obvious choice was Bragg Communications.
0:35:28 But John said something quite profound.
0:35:31 You should never let your ego run your business, Bragg said.
0:35:33 They picked Eastlink instead.
0:35:34 The name stuck.
0:35:36 The philosophy behind it mattered more.
0:35:38 No ego, just execution.
0:35:44 After the Shaw deal closed, 20 banks owned more of Eastlink than John Bragg did.
0:35:45 At least on paper.
0:35:47 They all sang the same song.
0:35:47 Go public.
0:35:48 Sell equity.
0:35:49 Reduce the risk.
0:35:51 But John Bragg kept saying no.
0:35:55 He’d watched the Irvings and McCains maintain family control through generations.
0:35:58 He knew what public ownership meant.
0:36:03 It meant quarterly earnings obsession, short-term thinking, dividend demands.
0:36:08 Imagine owning and growing a business for 50 years and taking nothing out of it,
0:36:13 as partner David Hoffman would later say, just reinvesting to fund the growth.
0:36:18 Compare that to our competitors, who pay out most of their earnings as dividends.
0:36:21 Bragg kept saying no to going public.
0:36:22 But he had no problem with debt.
0:36:23 Massive debt.
0:36:26 We haven’t shied away from using debt.
0:36:31 Although today, our balance sheets are in great shape.
0:36:35 But through the years, we’ve always been, what I would say, almost fully levered.
0:36:40 The food business, we were levered, but we had good assets.
0:36:43 The cash flow wasn’t as consistent as you’d like.
0:36:51 But in the cable business, we were buying cable companies all over Atlantic Canada and out west in Ontario.
0:36:55 But the cash flow was pretty consistent.
0:36:57 You could budget it and see where you were going.
0:36:59 So I wasn’t afraid of debt.
0:37:04 And I think that separated me from, you know, the original cable owners.
0:37:06 There were lots of them.
0:37:11 As the industry developed and fiber came along, we started tying them together.
0:37:24 Lots of the small-town operators just decided that it was time to move on, that they didn’t want to lever themselves the way it was required.
0:37:28 So we started buying small systems and tying them together.
0:37:38 And then we had the opportunity to get Halifax and eventually Dartmouth, basically all of Nova Scotia, except Glace Bay and a little bit in Cape Breton.
0:37:43 We just kept levering and levering and buying and buying some more.
0:37:47 And it was hardly a year that we didn’t have an acquisition.
0:37:51 In 2007, he did his biggest deal to date.
0:37:55 They bought Persona Communications for $775 million.
0:38:00 This gave them a presence in every Canadian province.
0:38:06 The same year, they added more Ontario customers with another deal for $120 million.
0:38:10 But Bragg had learned something fundamental from his blueberry business.
0:38:14 In consolidating industries, you either own the market or you’re at its mercy.
0:38:16 There’s no comfortable middle ground.
0:38:21 He looked at the horizon and saw cable and internet converging into something massive.
0:38:24 And he was determined not to watch from the sidelines.
0:38:33 By staying private, by refusing to blink, John Bragg had turned a money-losing cable system into North America’s largest private telecommunications company.
0:38:36 And we haven’t even gotten into all the fiber that he owns.
0:38:39 And he did all of this without going public.
0:38:47 If you walk through East Link’s headquarters today in Hall of Outs, you’ll find floors of ordinary offices in a rather ordinary building.
0:38:51 The boardroom hasn’t been touched since the previous tenant left.
0:38:53 There’s no executive dining room.
0:38:54 There’s no marble lobby.
0:38:57 And there’s no corner office with a view.
0:39:03 It’s better to invest in growing the business than spend on luxurious offices, Bragg explains.
0:39:05 This isn’t just about cheap furniture.
0:39:08 The entire company has four management levels.
0:39:11 CEO, vice presidents, directors, managers.
0:39:11 That’s it.
0:39:13 Government has 12.
0:39:15 But big telecoms have seven or eight.
0:39:19 A former executive from a major telecom tells this story.
0:39:24 At his old job, any real decision needed a 30-page proposal in weeks of meetings.
0:39:28 At East Link, it’s one page, a couple of days max.
0:39:32 He once bought a multi-million dollar fiber asset with one phone call.
0:39:35 The philosophy was quite simple.
0:39:37 It’s better to beg for forgiveness than permission.
0:39:38 Just don’t beg very often.
0:39:41 The speed advantage shows up everywhere.
0:39:47 When the government auctioned Wireless Spectrum in 2008, the big telecoms brought their consultants and committees.
0:39:50 East Link brought a simple strategy.
0:39:54 Run mock auctions, develop fake-out tactics, and know exactly what you need.
0:40:01 And they won licenses that covered 85% of their cable footprint and spent a fraction of what the giants paid.
0:40:06 Here’s what makes East Link impossible to replicate today.
0:40:07 It’s just patient money.
0:40:13 John Bragg poured cash into fiber optic cable when nobody understood why.
0:40:17 He built infrastructure between small towns when everyone else focused on cities.
0:40:21 He lost money for years on bets that wouldn’t pay off for decades.
0:40:24 He could do this because he never took a dividend.
0:40:25 He never cashed out.
0:40:27 He never went public.
0:40:31 For 50 years, every dollar of profit went back into growth.
0:40:37 So while the bigger companies like Bell and Rogers paid billions of dividends to keep shareholders happy,
0:40:39 John Bragg kept building.
0:40:47 By 2020, that money-losing cable system in Amherst had become the largest private telecommunications company in North America.
0:40:56 From Newfoundland to British Columbia, including U.S. assets, East Link was going toe-to-toe with companies 50 times its size.
0:40:58 Someone asked John Bragg about selling.
0:41:02 The company was well into the billions, and he was in his 80s.
0:41:04 It’s the perfect time to cash out.
0:41:06 No, John answered immediately.
0:41:07 Why would I?
0:41:08 Think about that.
0:41:13 Most entrepreneurs live for the exit, the validation, the I told you so moment.
0:41:17 But John Bragg, he’s building something his great-grandchildren could run.
0:41:25 The kid who turned down a teaching job to pick blueberries had built $2 billion businesses without ever selling a share.
0:41:28 And he wasn’t done yet.
0:41:34 This episode is brought to you by KitKat.
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0:42:06 By the 2000s, John Bragg was 80 years old and worth well over a billion dollars.
0:42:08 Most people would be on a beach.
0:42:13 Instead, he bought another company that recycled airplane de-icing fluid.
0:42:16 It was called Inland Technologies, and it wasn’t sexy.
0:42:22 The company collected the toxic glissol runoff from airport tarmac.
0:42:26 But when environmental regulations hit, every airport needed this service.
0:42:29 The owner wanted to sell to an out-of-province buyer.
0:42:31 That’s when John Bragg called.
0:42:35 Where others saw dirty work, Bragg saw his favorite setup.
0:42:36 It’s a fragmented industry.
0:42:39 There’s high regulatory barriers.
0:42:40 There’s recurring revenue.
0:42:43 And owners who don’t think big enough.
0:42:46 Owners who aren’t looking at the horizon about where things are going.
0:42:51 He bought Inland and immediately went shopping, acquiring two other companies right away.
0:42:54 Each acquisition followed the Bragg playbook.
0:42:57 Pay fair, integrate fast, reinvest everything.
0:43:01 Today, Inland serves 50 airports across five countries.
0:43:04 They’ve recycled over a billion liters of de-icing fluid.
0:43:08 The company has grown tenfold under Bragg’s ownership.
0:43:14 But you have to ask yourself, why would an 80-year-old billionaire care so much about airplane de-icing fluid?
0:43:18 Well, it’s for the same reason he cared about cable television in 1969.
0:43:38 In 2012, when Nova Scotia needed wind farms to hit renewable energy targets, a strange partnership demurged.
0:43:41 A frozen food company would help build them.
0:43:44 Why would Oxford frozen foods get involved in wind power?
0:43:51 Because when Minus Energy needed a local partner with deep pockets and credibility, of course, they called John Bragg.
0:43:56 And Bragg never said no to an infrastructure deal with a 20-year guaranteed return.
0:43:59 This South Canoe wind project wasn’t small either.
0:44:03 It was 34 turbines generating power for 32,000 homes.
0:44:06 But for John Bragg, the numbers weren’t the point.
0:44:09 I’m an environmentalist, he says, and he means it.
0:44:12 And this is a man who plants trees he’ll never see mature.
0:44:23 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.
0:44:26 But John Bragg doesn’t even cut those trees.
0:44:27 He just grows them.
0:44:31 In 2020 alone, he planted 350,000 trees.
0:44:35 Not to harvest, not to sell, but so his grandchildren can watch them grow.
0:44:40 He’s determined to leave the forest in better condition than he found it, says one associate.
0:44:47 Wind farms with 20-year horizons, trees that won’t mature for 50 years, while other billionaires buy yachts.
0:44:48 John Bragg plants forests.
0:44:55 This is patient capital taken to the logical extreme, investing in things you’ll never live to see pay off.
0:45:03 Most CEOs send their executives to business school, but John Bragg gave them $10 million and told them to invest in.
0:45:12 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.
0:45:15 For years, Bragg had resisted.
0:45:18 He was too busy building his companies to buy stocks.
0:45:22 But when interest rates dropped to near zero, Bragg saw an opportunity.
0:45:28 He was borrowing at 2%, and he’d invest in dividend-paying stocks paying 5%.
0:45:29 Even he couldn’t ignore the math.
0:45:32 He didn’t just invest, though.
0:45:33 He turned it into a teaching tool.
0:45:44 He created six teams from Oxford and East Link executives and gave them $10 million of company money, and told them to pick stocks and manage a real portfolio.
0:45:48 There’s no bonuses for good performance and no penalties for losses.
0:45:50 This wasn’t about making money.
0:45:52 It was about educating them.
0:45:59 I wanted them to see how strong companies operate, Bragg explained, and more importantly, how weak companies fail.
0:46:02 When you have real money at stake, you pay attention differently.
0:46:04 You read the annual reports.
0:46:06 You study the management decisions.
0:46:09 You learn what works and what doesn’t.
0:46:14 One team nearly tripled their stake, while others learned harder lessons.
0:46:20 Bragg himself became a student and started attending Berkshire Hathaway meetings, often bringing his maritime friends along.
0:46:24 His favorite Buffett quote became a bit of a mantra for him.
0:46:29 I’m a better investor because I’m a businessman, and a better businessman because I’m an investor.
0:46:32 The executives took those lessons.
0:46:34 They learned investing back to their day jobs.
0:46:36 They ran tighter operations.
0:46:38 They made better capital allocation decisions.
0:46:41 And they understood their competition better.
0:46:45 A great learning curve for everyone involved, Bragg called it.
0:46:49 Only John Bragg would turn portfolio management into employee training.
0:46:53 And I want to tell you a little bit about how John leads the company, too.
0:46:58 So every month at 6 a.m., John leaves Oxford and drives to Halifax.
0:46:59 And, you know, I’ve made the drive.
0:47:01 It’s not far, but there’s not a lot to look at either.
0:47:06 And by 8 a.m., Sharp, he’s sitting with his East Link executives.
0:47:11 After lunch, he’s back to Oxford for company meetings and then to Truro for Inland.
0:47:15 He goes to all of his companies, not the other way around.
0:47:17 The executives know the drill.
0:47:18 There’s seven updates.
0:47:21 Sales, operations, quality, complaints, shipments, financials.
0:47:25 But Bragg rarely tells anyone what to do.
0:47:30 John will suggest something we should consider and leave it at that, says East Link CEO Deborah Schaffner.
0:47:32 He wants us to lead.
0:47:34 This drives some people crazy.
0:47:43 David Hoffman tells one story of Burley Crane, who ran John Bragg’s main blueberry operations with methods from the 1970s.
0:47:48 He was still harvesting by hand when machines were available and outperforming them.
0:47:56 So every visit, John would suggest modernizing and Crane would nod, agree, and then go right back to his old ways.
0:48:00 That head office begged John to force the change.
0:48:03 And John just simply said, he’ll get there.
0:48:06 And Crane did, eventually on his own schedule, of course.
0:48:09 The main operations became one of their most efficient.
0:48:12 This is part of John Bragg’s genius.
0:48:18 He understood that forcing change might create compliance, but letting people find their own way creates leaders.
0:48:21 But don’t mistake patience for softness.
0:48:30 When beekeeper Jack Hamilton insisted that 2,500 hives was the maximum that one person could manage, John pushed back.
0:48:33 I have full confidence you can look after more.
0:48:34 Think about how it could be done.
0:48:39 Hamilton went away, redesigned the entire process, and came back with a plan.
0:48:44 And today, he manages 12,000 hives, five times what he thought was possible.
0:48:48 The difference, Bragg didn’t tell him how to manage more hives.
0:48:52 He just made it clear that the old limit wasn’t acceptable.
0:48:54 This is what makes all of our outliers amazing.
0:48:58 They don’t accept the limitations that society puts on things.
0:49:02 People have these preconceived notions about what can and can’t be done.
0:49:09 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.
0:49:14 When you tell managers what to do and how to do it, Bragg says, you make them weak leaders.
0:49:16 Think about this for a second.
0:49:19 John Bragg has three companies on Canada’s best managed list.
0:49:22 He owns North America’s largest telecommunications company.
0:49:28 They have billions of dollars in revenue, thousands of employees, and it’s all run by suggestion, not command.
0:49:33 Most CEOs build companies, but John builds leaders who build companies.
0:49:38 Before we go on, I need to tell you something about John Bragg that the numbers don’t capture.
0:49:40 I want to tell you about the person.
0:49:45 When the author of his biography, Donald Savoie, was playing golf with him in 2020,
0:49:48 he noticed that Bragg was using these old, scuffed-up golf balls.
0:49:51 And so the biographer asked John Bragg, why are you playing with those?
0:49:55 Well, Bragg replied, I find they go as far as the new ones.
0:49:59 This is a billionaire who still looks for lost golf balls and water hazards.
0:50:02 He uses a ball retriever to fish them out.
0:50:07 He doesn’t do this because he can’t afford new ones, but because waste offends him at a fundamental level.
0:50:12 His office tells the same story, and I was fortunate enough to get to visit him in his office.
0:50:19 It’s so modest that a visiting academic was embarrassed to admit that his university office was nicer.
0:50:22 And John Bragg had a great response.
0:50:24 He said, that’s okay, I find it very functional.
0:50:28 I’ve always felt it was better to reinvest in the business than have a big new office.
0:50:30 This wasn’t false modesty.
0:50:32 It’s a single-minded purpose.
0:50:35 John Bragg focuses on exactly three things.
0:50:38 His family, his business, and his community’s well-being.
0:50:40 Everything else is a distraction.
0:50:42 Social events in the city.
0:50:44 Sorry, can’t make it.
0:50:46 Industry conferences in Toronto.
0:50:47 Send someone else.
0:50:48 Award ceremonies.
0:50:49 Please, no.
0:50:51 He doesn’t just avoid attention.
0:50:53 He actively flees from it.
0:50:56 When he walks into a room, he doesn’t want to stand out.
0:50:59 He wants to observe, to listen, to learn.
0:51:04 And that’s why his companies are called Oxford and Eastlink and Inland, not Bragg Industries.
0:51:09 I have no reverse gear, he likes to say, but he has no ego gear either.
0:51:13 What he does have are the attributes that every entrepreneur needs.
0:51:14 He’s a self-starter.
0:51:14 He’s disciplined.
0:51:15 He’s open-minded.
0:51:16 He’s competitive.
0:51:17 He’s passionate.
0:51:19 He’s got a strong work ethic.
0:51:24 He’s willing to take risks and absolutely unwilling to give up.
0:51:28 But most importantly, perhaps, he keeps his eye on cost like a hawk.
0:51:33 Competitors with better access to blueberries went bankrupt, but John Bragg survived.
0:51:35 He kept management to a minimum.
0:51:37 For years, he was the CEO.
0:51:38 He was the head of marketing.
0:51:39 He was the CFO.
0:51:42 And the HR director all rolled into one.
0:51:44 He worked 18-hour days.
0:51:46 There was no such thing as work-life balance.
0:51:49 He never stopped watching the spending.
0:51:51 He never stopped living in the business.
0:51:56 Forty years after Bragg started, business researchers documented four principles of enduring success.
0:51:59 It turns out that Bragg has been following them all along.
0:52:03 First, exploit existing assets before exploring new ones.
0:52:05 He did this with wild blueberries on abandoned farmland.
0:52:08 Second, diversify your portfolio.
0:52:10 East Link, Inland, Wind Farms.
0:52:12 Third, remember your mistakes.
0:52:16 That June Frost taught him never to depend on one product.
0:52:18 Fourth, manage change carefully.
0:52:21 He knows exactly when to move fast and when to wait.
0:52:24 But here’s what the researchers miss.
0:52:26 It’s not just about following these principles.
0:52:29 It’s about who you are when nobody’s watching.
0:52:33 It’s about using scuffed golf balls when you could buy the pro shop.
0:52:36 It’s about sleeping on the factory floor when you could be home in bed.
0:52:42 It’s about treating the seller who’s going bankrupt with the same respect as the one who’s thriving.
0:52:48 It’s about building companies that will outlast you in communities that others have long abandoned,
0:52:51 using money you borrowed when everyone said you were crazy.
0:52:58 This is who John Bragg is, a man so focused on what matters that he doesn’t have time for what doesn’t.
0:53:03 Okay, here’s a bit of an epilogue.
0:53:07 Then we’re going to get into the reflections and the lessons that I take away from this.
0:53:15 John Sobey, who built one of Canada’s greatest retail empires, called John Bragg one of the very best managers he’s ever seen.
0:53:16 Why?
0:53:20 Bragg is the antithesis of a bully, Sobey explained.
0:53:23 He shows tremendous respect for everybody at all times.
0:53:24 I think it’s the farmer in him.
0:53:28 At 85, John Bragg is now starting to finally step back.
0:53:32 The new CEO will work from Oxford with a population of 1,100.
0:53:36 Not from Toronto, not from New York, from Oxford, Nova Scotia.
0:53:38 The message is clear.
0:53:41 You don’t need to leave home to build something extraordinary.
0:53:44 His four children have all worked the blueberry fields.
0:53:45 They all started at the bottom.
0:53:47 They’re not being trained as managers.
0:53:49 They’re being trained as owners.
0:53:52 If they’re good owners, Bragg says, they can hire good management.
0:53:54 The business will stay private.
0:53:55 They’ll stay family held.
0:53:58 And they’ll stay anchored in the communities that built them.
0:54:01 Think about what John Bragg actually did.
0:54:04 A young man turns down a secure teaching job to pick blueberries.
0:54:09 And 60 years later, he’s built three of Canada’s best managed companies.
0:54:12 He’s built North America’s largest private telecommunications company.
0:54:15 He employs thousands of people.
0:54:16 He dominates global markets.
0:54:18 And he’s worth billions of dollars.
0:54:21 And he did this from a small town.
0:54:26 When Bragg’s biographer asked who the book should be dedicated to, Bragg didn’t hesitate.
0:54:28 To all the future entrepreneurs.
0:54:30 Not to his family.
0:54:31 Not to his employees.
0:54:35 To kids in small maritime towns who haven’t even started their business yet.
0:54:39 That tells you everything you need to know about John Bragg.
0:54:42 At 85, he doesn’t talk about his billions or his global reach.
0:54:48 He talks about the next generation from small towns who will stay home and build something extraordinary.
0:54:53 While others looked at rural Canada and saw decline, John Bragg saw opportunity.
0:54:57 While others chased quick exits, he built for generations.
0:55:01 While others managed through commands, he led through suggestions.
0:55:02 And respect.
0:55:06 If you look after your company, Bragg says, it will look after you.
0:55:10 From Oxford, Nova Scotia, John Bragg looked after a lot of companies.
0:55:14 And in turn, saved an entire region that others had long written off.
0:55:16 That’s not just success.
0:55:17 That’s legacy.
0:55:27 Okay, I want to get into my reflections from doing this extra research and listening to the podcast I did with him again.
0:55:33 But then I want to get into some of the lessons that you can learn from John Bragg and take away from this episode.
0:55:39 So I want to tell you a story that I’ve never told publicly, but this is interesting.
0:55:41 So I’m going to interview John Bragg.
0:55:45 So I travel to Oxford, Nova Scotia, because there’s no way he’s going to fly to Ottawa.
0:55:50 And I get there, and I get into his office, and he’s like, you know, the guy is so nice.
0:55:53 So he spent the whole morning with me.
0:55:55 We start chatting, and he’s like, do you want a coffee?
0:55:56 And I’m like, oh, I would love a coffee.
0:55:59 So we go to the little cafeteria, and he’s like, it’s a dollar.
0:56:01 And I was like, what?
0:56:04 And he’s like, we charge for the coffee here.
0:56:06 He’s like, but I’ll spot you this time.
0:56:09 And it was just such an incredible moment.
0:56:15 He’s like, we used to give away the coffee for free, but we found it’s better if people pay for it.
0:56:17 So the executives have to pay for it, too.
0:56:23 And I thought that that was just such maritime common sense, the principles that he expounds.
0:56:26 I think I still owe him that dollar for coffee, by the way.
0:56:29 I’ll have to make good on that, and I’ll send him a little note with the dollar in it.
0:56:33 And I just want to say that there’s, I’m from the Maritimes.
0:56:38 There’s definitely a maritime sensibility and no nonsense with him.
0:56:43 There’s a saying in the Maritimes that, you know, if your business is worth $10 million, you kind of pretend it’s worth $1.
0:56:50 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.
0:56:57 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.
0:57:01 John Bragg is one of the legends of Canada in terms of building.
0:57:06 And, you know, we didn’t get into a lot of the details of it, the fiber optic network he owns,
0:57:11 but he’s been at the forefront of buying up North American fiber optic as it becomes for sale.
0:57:16 One of the things that really sticks with me, and this ties into the fiber optics a little bit,
0:57:18 is that it’s okay to overpay for assets.
0:57:20 This is such a profound concept.
0:57:25 I’ve been thinking about this since my interview with him, that these assets only come up once.
0:57:27 If you overpay for them, it doesn’t really matter.
0:57:30 You’re not going to get another shot to buy it.
0:57:33 You can think about this with a lot of different types of assets, you know.
0:57:39 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.
0:57:44 And you’re going to overpay for those, and that’s okay.
0:57:46 You can think about that with fiber optic networks.
0:57:49 They’re not going to be making a lot more fiber optic networks.
0:57:51 The cost to make those networks is huge.
0:57:55 So when they come up and you overpay 20, 30 percent, it doesn’t really matter.
0:57:58 Now, he can get away with that a little more because he’s private.
0:58:00 It doesn’t have to pay off as quickly for him.
0:58:02 It just has to pay off eventually.
0:58:07 The other thing I’d be remiss if I don’t mention here is the role that his wife played.
0:58:16 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.
0:58:18 You know, this is from a different era.
0:58:19 He’s obviously older generation.
0:58:22 His wife stayed home, took after the kids.
0:58:25 But that enabled him to do all these things that he wanted to do.
0:58:28 So they were a team as far as he’s concerned.
0:58:30 And she doesn’t get enough credit.
0:58:37 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.
0:58:43 And if you think of partnerships as teamwork, which I do, I think that that’s incredibly powerful.
0:58:47 And I think that she deserves a lot of credit and recognition for that.
0:58:57 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.
0:58:57 So here we go.
0:58:59 Number one, bounce, don’t break.
0:59:04 In 1968, John Bragg borrowed everything to build his first processing plant.
0:59:07 To say he was all in is an understatement.
0:59:10 And then the frost killed his entire crop.
0:59:11 It was a disaster.
0:59:17 He had nearly an empty factory, barely any revenue, and a lot of bills to pay.
0:59:20 Most people would have declared bankruptcy.
0:59:23 Instead, he called Wallace McCain at Bindyne.
0:59:26 What do you need that you don’t want to make yourself?
0:59:30 And McCain threw him a file that was too hard for the McCain family, onion rings.
0:59:37 And John Bragg had never made an onion ring, but he had an empty factory and he had no choice.
0:59:39 That frost forced him to diversify.
0:59:44 And today he processes 140 million pounds annually.
0:59:47 When you’re staring at complete ruin, the question isn’t, why me?
0:59:49 It’s what now?
0:59:50 What can I do?
0:59:52 To reputation is currency.
0:59:57 The bank manager literally laughed him out of the office when he needed his first loan.
0:59:58 Think about that.
1:00:01 The guy laughed at a young man trying to build something.
1:00:05 But a conservative politician stood up for the liberal family.
1:00:07 I wish we could go back to these days again in politics.
1:00:12 If we can’t lend money to the Bragg family, we can’t lend money to anyone.
1:00:16 And later, Bragg intentionally overpaid for acquisitions.
1:00:17 Word spreads fast.
1:00:19 If you want to sell, call John Bragg.
1:00:22 He’ll give you a fair price, quick close with no games.
1:00:27 While competitors fought over pennies on the deal, Bragg was already closing three more.
1:00:29 You can’t buy reputation.
1:00:32 You can only earn it one interaction at a time.
1:00:37 And three, this is one of my personal favorites that I use all the time now.
1:00:38 Look to the horizon.
1:00:46 In 1969, nobody wanted a cable TV license for Amherst, Nova Scotia with its population of 9,000.
1:00:48 Bragg was the only applicant.
1:00:53 Early cable meant recording shows on tape, putting them on buses and playing two-week-old programming.
1:01:00 And while others saw losses, Bragg saw rural communities desperate for connection, recurring revenue, and a shrinking world.
1:01:02 Listen to this quote, okay?
1:01:04 This is so profound.
1:01:08 We’re big, big believers in looking at the horizon, he says.
1:01:11 Only those who look at the horizon find the right road.
1:01:14 If you look at your feet, you will stumble.
1:01:15 How profound is that quote?
1:01:23 That license that nobody wanted was the first brick in what would become North America’s largest private telecommunications empire.
1:01:25 Number four, grow the pie.
1:01:29 Bragg’s brother invented a blueberry harvester that did the work of 30 handpickers.
1:01:32 Instead of keeping it secret, they sold them to competitors.
1:01:36 What’s good for the industry is good for everyone, Bragg said.
1:01:39 He wasn’t competing against other blueberry growers.
1:01:41 He was competing against every other fruit.
1:01:44 This drives people crazy, even today.
1:01:50 Oxford funds research on growing and cultivating and shares everything with everyone freely.
1:01:55 While other people want to divide the pie, John Bragg wants to grow it for everyone.
1:01:59 Five, overpay for what’s only available once.
1:02:04 Bragg routinely paid more than competitors for acquisitions, sometimes double.
1:02:05 His reasoning was simple.
1:02:08 It’s only available once.
1:02:11 While others squeeze sellers, Bragg closed deals quickly.
1:02:14 Every acquisition is really two acquisitions.
1:02:18 It’s the company you’re buying today and the companies that might sell tomorrow.
1:02:22 When opportunities are scarce, pay what it takes to get the asset you want.
1:02:26 The people who nickel and dime their way out a great deal spend years regretting it.
1:02:28 Six, no reverse gear.
1:02:33 At 22, Bragg turned down a secure teaching job to pick wild blueberries.
1:02:35 Everyone thought he lost his mind.
1:02:38 When his business nearly failed, he kept going.
1:02:41 When banks rejected him, he found another way.
1:02:48 When Bell killed his partnership, he borrowed $265 million and built a competitor instead.
1:02:51 I have no reverse gear, Bragg says.
1:02:56 The world is full of people who almost started something, almost took the risk, almost bet on themselves.
1:02:58 Don’t be one of those people.
1:03:00 Number seven, outcome over ego.
1:03:07 Bragg could have named his companies after himself, but instead, he called them Oxford and Eastlink.
1:03:09 Never let your ego run your business.
1:03:10 I love that quote.
1:03:13 Never let your ego run your business, he says.
1:03:16 At 85 worth billions, he still uses scuffed golf balls.
1:03:18 They go as far as the new ones.
1:03:21 His headquarters looks like a community college.
1:03:25 Every dollar that doesn’t feed your ego feeds your growth.
1:03:29 Most people would rather look successful than actually be successful.
1:03:32 And that’s why most people aren’t as successful as they could be.
1:03:34 Number eight, lead by suggestion.
1:03:39 Every month, Bragg drives to his executives instead of summoning them to the headquarters.
1:03:41 He rarely gives orders.
1:03:45 When a beekeeper said 2,500 hives was his limit, Bragg didn’t bark commands.
1:03:48 He simply said, I have confidence that you can handle more.
1:03:49 Think about how.
1:03:53 The beekeeper redesigned everything and now manages 12,000 hives.
1:03:57 Strong leaders help people discover what they’re capable of.
1:04:00 Number nine, never stop learning.
1:04:06 At 70, when he was a billionaire, Bragg gave six teams of executives $10 million each.
1:04:10 Not for bonuses, but for investment portfolios.
1:04:12 Real money, real stakes.
1:04:17 I wanted them to see how strong companies operate and how weak ones fail, he said.
1:04:20 There’s no penalties for losses and no bonuses for gains.
1:04:22 It was pure education.
1:04:27 Bragg himself became a student, attending Berkshire Hathaway meetings, studying other businesses.
1:04:31 And today, he manages his own multi-billion dollar portfolio.
1:04:37 His favorite Buffett quote is, I am a better investor because I’m a businessman and a better
1:04:39 businessman because I’m an investor.
1:04:45 Most people stop learning once they get successful, but outliers never stop being students.
1:04:48 Number 10, stay private, stay nimble.
1:04:50 For 50 years, banks begged him to go public.
1:04:51 He refused.
1:04:56 When he bought AM Telecom, which was a public company, one of the few public companies he actually
1:05:00 bought, he immediately eliminated $4 million in overhead.
1:05:02 That was all the cost just to be public.
1:05:05 It’s costly to be public, and it slows you down, he says.
1:05:10 Public companies need board approvals, regulatory filings, quarterly guidance.
1:05:15 When Bragg engineers recommended a new technology, he gave them $10 million the same day.
1:05:19 Private companies can take hits today to win tomorrow.
1:05:22 Public companies can’t afford to miss a quarter.
1:05:25 And finally, number 11, patient capital wins.
1:05:28 For 50 years, Bragg never took a dividend.
1:05:30 Every dollar went back into growth.
1:05:34 While competitors paid shareholders, Bragg kept building.
1:05:37 He invested in Fiber when nobody understood why.
1:05:40 He built infrastructure between small towns when everyone chased cities.
1:05:43 Bragg thought in terms of generations.
1:05:51 And in a world of quick flips and fast exit, the person willing to wait 20 years has no competition.
1:05:53 Thank you for listening and learning with us.
1:05:54 I hope you enjoy this outlier series.
1:05:56 We’re trying to get better at these.
1:05:58 So if you have any feedback, send me an email.
1:06:01 Shane at fs.blog.
1:06:03 Thanks for listening and learning with us.
1:06:04 I’ll see you next week.
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