sewn paper
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Entrepreneurship
May 2000
272 pages
ISBN 0-88984-206-X
$19.95
Great Expectations
ForewordJune 1977. The summer after I completed my CA, my wife Sheila and I
emigrated to Bermuda on the pretext that I would continue my studies
under the tutelage of Morris & Kempe.
The tennis was great, the Fuzzy Navels tolerable, but
it wasn't long before Sheila and I came to the realization that
living on an island could be idyllic - provided one had the wherewithal to get off the island.
And provided one had the wit to use the wherewithal,
and was disposed to debit the wit and expense the wherewithal at least once each fiscal quarter.
The tennis took a decided turn south
towards the end of December when two of the natives were executed by hanging in Hamilton for
the assassination
of an ex-governor. There were riots in the streets. Breaking glass. And
downdraft from Bell 212 helicopters on patrol over the doubles courts.
Sheila and I beat a retreat to the safety of Southwestern Ontario at the first opportunity,
but before we left Hamilton I did get to meet the very famous Galen Nicholas Aldebaan - just the once,
at a reception at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club.
Aldebaan and his wife were both accomplished sailors who had more than twice loosed their stays
in Chignecto Bay and found a slip in Hamilton Harbour.
His wife, apparently, had graduated from
high school in New Brunswick.
Aldebaan and I talked about Canada.
Investment opportunities.
Aldebaan himself was a striking man. Tall, and tanned, and sartorially resplendent in military khakis,
knee socks, tailored shorts and a safari shirt that sported button-down
epaulets.
The kind of man you would remember if you saw him a second time
but I never did see him again in Bermuda, and I never met him once in Canada,
though for a time in the mid-eighties
Aldebaan's exploits animated the pages of the Globe and Mail
virtually every second business day.
Safely back in Wellington County the following summer, I rejoined an established accounting practice - somewhat
less than earnestly after my brief taste of international intrigue, and certainly very much
on the lowermost rung. My first account was a small book-printing company in nearby Glendaele Village called Penmaen Lithography. The
proprietors, Thom and Sophie, were in their late twenties and reputed to be both eccentric and penniless. Their fledgling enterprise
had little to recommend it to my superiors, which may in part explain
how Penmaen Lithography came to be my first professional responsibility.
Accounting firms are hierarchical.
The partners' job is to do lunch.
The employees who do not do lunch are line staff.
The line staff is expected to post the client's self-generated bookkeeping creatively enough to justify the partners'
often-overstated elocution fees, added to the more legitimate expenses occasioned by burgers and fries;
occasionally cucumber sandwiches and tofu, but this was Guelph, in the late seventies.
The Penmaens were the first entrepreneurs I was permitted to advise directly,
maybe because their business was deemed to be precarious at the best of times or maybe it was fate.
Maybe it had something to do
with the coincidence that my father's father had spent a lifetime at the Beacon Herald in Stratford.
Maybe it was simply that not one of my new employers was willing to undertake any sort of a risk
on behalf of Thom, Sophie or little Penmaen Lithography.
I accepted the challenge.
I didn't, in retrospect, have much of a choice.
In researching this story I was surprised to learn from my grandmother, Lamotta Robinson, that her father at one time owned Weitzels' Bakery in Stratford. And that one of her father's brothers owned the Keystone Bakery shortly after the turn of the century, and yet another brother owned the Stratford Bakery, which was eventually acquired by the Westons. The wealth created by these family businesses and by their eventual sale has not, unfortunately, trickled down to this present generation of Robinsons - which leads me directly back to my story about Thom and Sophie.
Penmaen Lithography, this tiny little printing company in Glendaele Village, became something of a mission for this Robinson - this was my one chance to make a real difference to someone else's financial future - the opportunity to put into practice any number of theories scavenged from thousands of pages of accounting texts - the responsibility to ensure, first and foremost, that Penmaen Lithography, though it may never flourish, at the very least never founders. Each passing year brings new trauma. Sometimes it's cash flow. More often than not it's the lack of cash that does not flow, though I have tried, more than twice, to convince Thom that the management of wealth can often be more onerous than the management of debt.
I don't think Thom believes a word of it.
On one memorable occasion the Penmaens' application for a chattel mortgage, which had been denied with all due diligence by a Canadian chartered bank on a Friday afternoon, was unexpectedly approved the following Monday on the grounds that the manager happened to overhear Thom interviewed on CBC-Radio while the junior banker grilled chicken on his backyard deck.
`I hadn't realized you were famous,' the manager explained when he phoned up Monday to reverse his diligent and doubtlessly due decision. At the time Thom hadn't realized that he was famous, either. And I sure as hell hadn't realized that a chance interview on CBC-Radio could elevate a Wellington County printer from poverty to credit-worthiness, even for fifteen minutes. Facts are facts. They're derivative, often overstated, and often not that useful in business. Perception, on the other hand, is almost always the better part of reality.
It would be misleading for me to suggest that Penmaen Lithography is a corporate success. It is no such thing. But ten years have passed. Thom and Sophie still live above the shop in Glendaele Village, Thom still responds to any query as to his personal well-being with the grim retort `Still in business!' and Thom's improbable understanding of life, business, his employees and his neighbours on the Main Street has provided me with a wealth of stories that help illuminate challenges facing the Canadian entrepreneur on the cusp of the new millennium.
Many of these stories are more or less true, acknowledging in the first place that Thom and Sophie, and of course Galen Nicholas Aldebaan, don't exist, and neither does Glendaele Village, any more or less than the place Stephen Leacock called Mariposa in his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. And even if Thom and Sophie did exist, as much as Peter Pupkin or Zena Pepperleigh, then Thom would be both a colourful raconteur as well as a notoriously unreliable observer of his own situation.
Grant Robinson FCA, CFP
Guelph, January 2000