Luke: Hi, this is Luke Hansen-MacDonald and welcome back to Beyond the Family Business, a podcast focused on the challenges of family enterprise. This is made in collaboration with Canadian Family Offices, and this episode is brought to you by BMO Private Wealth. As a client myself, I’m proud to have them as a sponsor of this show.
Today’s guest is Iqbal Kassam. He is the founder and chairman of Zynik Corporation, a family office based in Vancouver, BC. Iqbal shares his incredible life story which began in Kenya, the challenges he faced with an abusive alcoholic father and the important lessons he learned from his tenacious, hard-working mother. After college, Iqbal saw his first major success when he moved back to Kenya and started a financial institution. After this initial success, he used this capital to get out of Kenya and move to Canada. He bought a charter bank and then grew it into a multi-billion-dollar business. Iqbal has had many successes, but his most recent focus has been on the industrial manufacturing sector, specifically a thesis based around skilled labor. This is one of the most enlightening and interesting strategies I’ve heard. He’s focused on things like high levels of profit sharing and incredible employee benefits to attract the best talent to his own team. All right, let’s jump into it.
Who are you? Where are you from? And what do you do?
Iqbal: I’ve been asked many times the same questions, so it’s easy for me. Who am I? I’m a lifelong learner. That’s how I’d describe myself. Where are you from? I come from Africa, but my roots are from India. So, my forefathers came to build the railroad in Africa, brought in by the British Empire and then my roots were in Africa. I grew up there. I went to school in the UK, did my MBA (we will get into that] and then immigrated to Canada in the early 1980s.
Luke: Okay. And where in Africa were you born?
Iqbal: I was born in Kenya, in Nairobi.
Luke: Okay. I’ve had another Kenyan on the show before-whose family was from there as well. I would love to go there, by the way. I’ve been to South Africa a few times, where my mom is from, but I’ve unfortunately never been to Kenya. So that’s at the top of the list.
Iqbal: Well, I just took all of my family, generation one, two, and three, for our 50th wedding anniversary. We went to Kenya, on a safari, and then to the coast.
Luke: Oh, that’s amazing.
Iqbal: Including Zanzibar. Yeah. It’s quite the country, and it’s very, very beautiful.
Luke: Yeah. I would love to go there. When my kids are a little bit older, I really want to take them to do the proper safari experience.
Iqbal: Right.
Luke: And could I ask, what do you do? What is your day job?
Iqbal: Well, look, I’m an entrepreneur. I learned many years ago, from Howard Stevenson, who’s a professor at Harvard, and I’ve been going there for over 30 years. And an entrepreneur looks for opportunities beyond his constraints, so he doesn’t get constrained by what he has, but looks for opportunities beyond what he’s able to put together, and that’s what I’ve done throughout my life. I’ve always explored what are the opportunities out there that I can explore and been doing that for 50 years now.
Luke: Wow, that is incredible. To have that long of a legacy of entrepreneurship, given the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and still be building a legacy as strong as yours, that’s one heck of an achievement. So, my hat’s off to you, sir.
Iqbal: Thank you.
Luke: And we have many topics we want to cover today, so I apologize to ask for a summarized version, but could you give a summarized version of the story of your family business? How did it come about?
Iqbal: So, my father was an alcoholic, and he ran a gas station, but my mother did most of the work there. And I saw her work very hard to put meals on the table. She raised chickens in the backyard. She sold charcoal, just to put food on the table, because my father was an alcoholic. And my father was also a little bit abusive, so I had to leave home when I was eight years old, to another country. And I don’t say this as a negative. At that time, I thought it was, but he was a victim of his trauma. And I realized that many years later. But from a very young age, I had to fend for myself, and so I’ve always looked for opportunities when you are in that position. And so, I have seen a lot of strife in my life.
And to give you an example, I went to the UK with no money. I had 200 pounds in my pocket. I bought a car, got myself into college in 1972, and I drove a taxi in London to put myself through college because I thought that was the best opportunity to make an unlimited amount of money because you just had to work harder at your own time to make more money, rather than a nine-to-five job.
And I’ve always been of a belief that our potential is so great compared to what we think it is, that we just have to unleash it.
And as you know what Tony Robbins says, “Unleash the power within you.” And so, I didn’t know Tony Robbins’ lessons at that time, but I’ve always tried to unleash the power within me in everything that I’ve done. And so that’s what I have done. So I’ll stop there, and then I’ll go through my journey of business as we go along.
Luke: Sure. Maybe I could ask a question about that upbringing. And it sounds like it was obviously an incredibly tough thing to go through. I can’t imagine having to leave your parents at such a young age.
But one part of it that resonates with me is your mother’s work ethic. And my dad often says that his work ethic came from his own mother, where he grew up in a similar household. His father was an alcoholic, didn’t contribute as much, and his mother was a nurse working double shifts and raising seven kids. And so, it had a real impact on him and his brothers that they saw that work ethic.
Can you speak a bit about how your mother’s work ethic affected you and maybe changed your perspective on approaching work?
Iqbal: Yes, actually. My mother was very, very frugal and took her responsibility extremely seriously. She did not want to deprive her kids from anything in spite of my father’s conduct.
And so, she ran the gas station while he was absent most of the time, and did all the work at home, and had entrepreneurial skills. I remember, for instance, she buying a trailer for the backyard and buying 100 day-old chickens to raise them so she could sell them when they grew up.
And I remember I used to go to this trailer, and it was very difficult, but she would feed them, she would raise them, she would sell them through people in the market. I remember she would take wood. We had a very large garden. She would take wood, get it cut, put it underground, and light it on fire so she could sell the coal. And so, I remember the times where she tried everything, everything that she thought was possible, to get us through school, to put meals on the table, and yet she was abused by my father.
And so, I find that that stuck with me. And if I’ve got anything of this drive, of taking us out of what I would call poverty, it’s my mother’s hard work. And that stuck with me and has always guided me that no job is below your dignity, no company is below your dignity, and no entrepreneur is better than the other. All they need is hard work and to keep on trying.
Most people give up. My mother never gave up. Never gave up. And she’s instilled this on me. My biggest strength is resilience. And if you’ve got resilience, that I think is the sharpest and the most important skill that you can learn as an entrepreneur.
Luke: That is a powerful, powerful message. And from everything I’ve seen, I’ve been fortunate to be around many successful entrepreneurs with my father and my uncles and people through YPO, and perseverance and tenacity seems to be that key ingredient, to your point. They’re not some genius that has some better idea. It’s the ability to execute through just endless, relentless effort. And that is a powerful story. Wow.
So building on that, how did you go from poverty, as you put it, working long hours as a taxi driver, putting yourself through school. How did you get into being an entrepreneur yourself?
Iqbal: Well, let me tell you, let’s start just with the taxi driver situation. I always believe that most people will tell you to live within your means. Entrepreneurs don’t live within their means. They live beyond their means. I just talked to you about you are not constricted by your constraints. So, I had made a purchase when I was a taxi driver because I was with friends, and I wanted to show that I’m not inferior to them.
So I bought, in 1972, a small belt, which I didn’t know the cost of, but it was a Hermès belt. I didn’t know the brand, and it was so expensive that I felt shy and not to pay for it. It was £85 then. And then I had to work harder to pay for that belt, to make my living, and to pay all my bills. So, I started working harder at night, longer hours, and then I saw repeated opportunities come to me as a taxi driver, where we got the call. So, this was what they called MiniCabs, which is now Uber in Canada and the US and everywhere else. They were called MiniCabs. And you got a call, and you waited in line for your turn.
But I saw a pattern. And I saw a pattern of the same customer calling again and again every hour. And so I said to myself, “If that customer is going to call every hour, who I now recognize,” I said, “Why don’t I just wait for you because you’re going to call in an hour to take you to the next place?” And that saved me gas, it saved me waiting time because it took me more than two hours to get the next call. But here, and I stood, I waited for that passenger, and I started getting repeat customers without having to do this. And effectively, to put it bluntly, I became the taxi driver for the ladies in the night in my area because they told each other, “This driver is so good. He waits for us. He keeps us safe.” So, I became a driver getting huge tips, huge benefits for prostitutes in 1972. But I saw that opportunity, and I made my money. So, then I started going to drive a taxi at 11:00 at night because I knew that at 11:00 at night, those were when the opportunities are. Entrepreneurs look for patterns of opportunities. They’re seeking, they’re looking, they’re validating, and then if you can validate it, you execute on that validation.
So from there, I moved on after graduation, which I put myself through college. The next time I came to London, I came with my wife. She worked, and I did my MBA, and we were constrained at that time as well.
I went back to Africa, and I saw the pattern that there were no local credit card businesses in Africa, and I was working for a bank, the First National Bank of Chicago, and I saw that that was an opportunity.
So I set up a credit card business with no money down, which we can talk about, and did basically a leveraged buyout. It was the Diners Club, and I basically put boots on the ground on commission agents and started issuing local credit card business with cards in Africa, in Kenya to start with, and became one of the largest local currency credit card providers in Kenya.
So from there, as I was working for banking, I saw that I could start a bank. I started a bank in Kenya, private bank. I could see that things were not going well as we got bigger and bigger, and my brother was with me at that time. So I left the bank to him, and I came to Canada in 1983.
I first visited in 1980. I started looking at the banking scene here, hired a consultant to look for a financial institution. In 1983, I saw that the big picture, the trend was that banks were getting very, very large. They were the big four banks at that time.
And so, I thought, well, this is a huge, huge market. If I can even get a very small percentage of this market for mortgages, I would do well. And I saw that the constraint at that time was that mortgages, because it was so monopolistic, customers or applicants had to wait for a long time to get approval. Because I tried to buy my own house, and I had to wait a long time before getting approval.
So I thought maybe I can come up with a system where I give one-day approval on mortgages. And so, I bought a charter, which was already an existing charter called Equitable Trust Company, and started the Equitable Trust Company, brought it to Toronto. I had no credit in Canada, so I couldn’t get a lease. Luckily, I got a sublease from a white pure guy called Lawrence Bloomberg, who gave me 1,500 square feet of premises in Toronto.
And I took that business and grew it until I brought an outside president, and then thereafter, the business has gone public, and that is now a bank called EQ Bank or Equitable Bank, and the assets are over $140 billion.
Luke: Wow. That’s incredible.
Iqbal: Now I’m a shareholder, but I’m not on the board, and I don’t run the bank anymore, but I did at that time.
Luke: Wow. And so, you’ve stayed involved in that bank, though, as far as a shareholder goes, all that time?
Iqbal: Yes, I have stayed since 1983 a shareholder of that bank. And I bought another financial institution in Canada called SEAL Mortgage Investment Corporation. It was the first publicly traded MIC, which is a mortgage investment corporation, in Canada. And we grew that and sold it to Mutual Trust, and Mutual Trust bought it many years ago. So those were my first sort of foray into business in Canada.
Luke: Could I ask what the lessons were you learned going from operating a very successful business in Kenya, but going from operating in Kenya to operating in Canada, I assume it must have been pretty different from a business culture and regulatory perspective. What were some of the learnings you had with those first successes?
Iqbal: Well, I think in Kenya, I would describe it as the following. In Kenya, you needed the brains, but you also needed to be a bravado, meaning there were political pressures, there were other pressures which you don’t have here. And here you need more brains and just hard work.
So the difference is they’re not pressures of worrying about which party you’re pleasing or not pleasing. In Kenya, you had those pressures. Were you on the wrong side of the fence or the right side of the fence? And here, it doesn’t matter which government is in power. It doesn’t matter which premier is in power in the province you’re operating in. You can operate your business to the best of your ability and not fear any undue pressure coming on to you. That’s the big difference.
Luke: That’s very high praise for Canada. I assume it must be a big part of why you decided to stay here and build your future here.
Iqbal: 100%. I think Canada is an unbelievable country to do business from.
It grants you a lot of opportunities, and you don’t have to worry about the politics. You may have an opinion on it. You may want to influence how policy is made, but you don’t have to worry about it.
Luke: Incredible. And so, after your successes with the financial institutions, where did you go from there?
Iqbal: Well, you know, I’ve always been interested in thinking of a thesis.
So, I described to you the thesis when I first started the financial institution, which is there was monopoly of banks, and if you took a small sliver of business, you could do very well. And as it happens, that thesis is correct because Equitable now is the seventh largest bank in Canada.
In a similar way, I started looking at the thesis, and I would call them, what are the macro trends? Most people do business because opportunities come to them. You suddenly get an opportunity from a broker, this business is for sale, and you look at it and you say, “Oh, okay. I’ll either do it or not.” But have you thought about the thesis of what that business or what that industry or what the country is going through?
So, I started thinking deeply, and the thesis in front of me, which you will recognize now, is there are 93 million baby boomers in North America. The first time in history where there are so many baby boomers.
Number two, they own the largest component of family businesses. At some count, there are like 12 million family
businesses in North America.
Number three, all these family businesses don’t have succession. Some have, some don’t, but most of them don’t.
Luke: Yeah, absolutely. Many of them do not, unfortunately.
Iqbal: So, if you look at that, it’s a big orbit of companies that don’t have succession. Within that, what is the most critical shortage going to be over the next 20-25 years in those businesses that these baby boomers have been running?
The biggest shortage is going to be not money, not land, not equipment, but labour, skilled labour. So I started studying the skilled labour concept and believed that if you could harness skilled labour and you could look after them, make sure that they work with you for as long as they want to and for their working life, you would have the most important ingredient in running these businesses.
So I’ll give you an example. I started thinking about what industries, what companies should I go after. And one of our platforms is tool and die making. There were 750 tool and die shops in North America. Now there are 450. There were 25,000 people in the tool and die industry 25 years ago. Now there are about 7,000 among these companies. We’re going to be the second largest tool and die shop in North America now, and I started the first one, which is the first one from actually from bankruptcy, from Price Waterhouse Coopers in 2007. But the thesis was there that if you buy one tool shop and you now put it together with the aim of focusing on the skilled worker, right? And we’ll come to that very soon.
Why is that significant? You will soon be a big player in that sector. Now, the tool and die industry is not going away. It is AI resilient. Tool and die makers will be augmented with AI but hardly replaced as it happens now. So the shortage of labour, of skilled labour is what my thesis is. And so now we have 35 companies, 2,000 skilled labour in six platforms that we operate, and we aim to be a $2 billion company in revenue in the next eight years. So what transports from a small company when I bought Weber, it was $16 million in revenue, and it had 200 skilled labour, and it was in bankruptcy in CCAA.
And the journey is, the lesson to entrepreneurs is, think about the thesis. Think about the thesis you want to deploy.
So just talking about baby boomers, about 15 years ago, I invested with a friend of mine who started his first retirement homes called Amica. We knew that the demographic is going to be that baby boomers are going to look for very curated assisted living and independent living. Amica went after the independent living market at the highest end, and that business was sold for over $1 billion. One billion dollars from a humble beginning, and I was part of that, invested in part of that.
So I’m imploring you to think of the pieces before you start buying businesses.
Luke: It’s great advice. It’s very tempting in the world of family office. People bring you deals all the time, as you said, and it’s easy to get caught up in the shiny objects rather than thinking about what the actual strategic reason for what this acquisition is. So, I think that’s great advice.
Could I ask, can you explain a bit more what you mean about harnessing and focusing on the skilled labour? How did you actually do that and unleash that growth potential?
Iqbal: So, there are a couple of thoughts that I want to put together here. Number one, families all make money, and the patriarch always is thinking about, “How do I leave a legacy from what I do?” And I’ve seen many patriarchs who will leave billions of dollars after they die for causes, they don’t know, to people they don’t know. So, they form a foundation, and they give it to a foundation, and then that foundation looks for causes.
What I will tell you from my research is that I found that the skilled labour in this country, 50% of them are living paycheck to paycheck, just like my mother was living paycheck to paycheck. In effect, they don’t have a safety net.
So I thought, what if my cause is to make a meaningful difference in the life of those associates, rather than leave billions behind to causes I don’t know, to people I don’t know? So what I first did was think about what is it that I can do to make a meaningful difference in their lives. And the first thing I did was saying, I want to give them part of our profits every year. So, we instituted a 30% profit participation for our associates. 30%. 30% is meaningful, as you said, wow. Most people, most entrepreneurs will say, “Well, that’s very noble of you.” But it’s not only nobility, it’s not charity. That, number one, I want to do good right now with the people who are toiling with me every day.
I see billionaires who will leave $40 billion after they die, but in the meantime, their workers are going on strike or want to form a trade union because they’re not being dealt with fairly. And I say, absolutely no need for that if you know what your cause is right now. So my purpose in life is to make a meaningful difference in the life of my associates. That’s a deep purpose. I talked about the 30%.
The second thing is, every one of our companies has a hardship fund. If an associate, let’s say, bust four tires on his truck tomorrow, he’s living paycheck to paycheck, how does he pay $2,000 for his tires? They’re not cheap. So we have a hardship fund in every one of our company.
Next, we have a lifetime dedication award. My wife has been married to me 50 years. I would say she’s dedicated her life to me. When a worker has worked for 40 years in your company, do you celebrate him, or do you say, “Thank you”? We celebrate seniority. We celebrate people, especially people who work 40 years for us. What do we do? We give them an award. We give them a big check. We give a Canadian gold coin, which now costs $6,000, on a plaque. And we tell them that they can work flexi hours as much as they want. We don’t want them to leave because initially, in the first 10 years, they got a lot of experience from knowledge, from reading books. The second 10 years, they taught other apprentices. In the last years of their life, they become wise. They have seen all the movies before, and anything that comes, they know how to deal with it. They are the ones who take on the most difficult jobs because they say yes to the customer, we can do it. Those are the ones we rely on, and yet we don’t value our skilled labourers as they age.
I’m 74 years old, and I’m going full speed now. I believe that our skilled workers, and I’ve seen many work till 40 years and beyond, are as productive because of their wisdom rather than just doing a job 9 to 5. Sometimes they will come and solve a problem in one hour compared to a younger guy who takes a whole day solving that problem. That’s wisdom. That’s worth.
So, coming to my point, Harvard has taught me many, many things. So has Stanford. They talk about value creation. How do you create value? Number two, value extraction. How do you extract value from customers? What they don’t teach us is value distribution. How do you distribute that value?
So, my 30% profit participation is part of my value distribution. My hardship funds are part of my value distribution. My lifetime dedication awards are part of my value distribution. Then I’ll tell you about a program. We have a scholarship fund. Scholarship fund for all our associates.
Anyone who gets their kid into school, into trade school or university, nursing school, whatever you want to do, Zynik will pay up to $50,000 for the three or four years that you’re in school as a scholarship. And if you’ve worked for 10 years for Zynik, you can sponsor your grandkid. So we have given over $2 million of scholarships to our associate kids with no strings attached, because I believe that education is the best equalizer. That’s what gives you opportunities.
I went to college in England. That changed me. And so, if you want to make a meaningful difference in the life of associates, make a difference in their family as well.
And then lastly, but not the least, I look at the health and welfare. People talk about work-life balance. I don’t believe there is a thing like work-life balance. I believe it’s work-life integration. You integrate your work into your life. I integrate your life into my work. I don’t say, “You go and take care of yourself in your own time.” So, I encourage all our associates to take advantage of wellness, mental health, spiritual health, physical health. I’m a yoga instructor. I work out every day. I don’t work out the same time every day, but I go and work out every day. I never count how many days a week I work out. I only count how many days a year I miss working out. So last year, I missed 17 days.
If I ask you, how many days did you not eat last year? You probably know that answer by heart. Probably zero. That is what your wellness should be. You should be not looking after your health, physical health, zero days a year. And so I tell my associates, “You want to go in the afternoon, you want to go in the morning, you go and join a club. We’re going to pay for it. We’re going to pay for your wellness. We’re going to do everything to support you.” And then lastly, we have a community support program.
So we’ve got seven pillars of how we make a difference to our associates, and we measure our seven pillars, and we show how we enhance these programs every year.
So I want to tell you about a concept that Harvard doesn’t teach, also another concept that Harvard doesn’t teach. So, if you go to Harvard, you can know to the precise dollar what is the lifetime value of a customer. You will never hear a concept at Harvard showing the lifetime value of an employee. I call it the lifetime value of an associate. There is not a paper written on it. You cannot quantify it. And I want to write that paper because I believe when people know in dollars and cents what is the value of that associate who works for you for life, and I gave you the example of working for four years, then we will change our mind of how we attract, deal, retain, and cherish our workers. We always say people first, but most entrepreneurs don’t walk the talk.
Luke: That is a very powerful message as well. That is a fascinating concept, and I really, really appreciate you explaining that in full detail because people love to say platitudes, as you just said, about your number one asset is your people and things like that. But that is a comprehensive strategy to, as you said, unlock that skilled labour and really engage them in a way that not enough businesses do that. That’s a very, very unique and generous, but as you said, it’s not purely about generosity because it ultimately drives better results as well.
Iqbal: 100%.
Luke: And I think in this day and age where there is so much divisiveness driven by frankly wealth inequality, especially what’s accelerated over the last number of years, it’s these types of philosophies that are going to resolve this, is figuring out how you can have a more equitable business structure and strategy. And it’s not purely, I don’t want to say socialist, but it’s not at the fault of the company. It’s still a for-profit effort, but everybody shares in it. And that’s brilliant.
Iqbal: You know, I said to you that I’ve seen a lot of poverty because I come from Africa, but I see people living hand to mouth here too.
And I say when I meet government officials and ministers in the federal government, I say, “For entrepreneurs, we feel like we’re always getting the stick,” meaning more taxes, more taxes, more taxes. “But why don’t you give us a carrot? Because if you give us a carrot, we can make a difference between the have and the have nots.”
And they say, “Well, what type of carrot can we give you?” And I said, “Look, I profit participate 30% of my profits with my associates. 50% of them are living paycheck to paycheck. Think about a concept of giving tax credits to promote that idea to more entrepreneurs.”
So if you give tax credit for that idea, we’ll go to entrepreneurs who say, “Wow, by doing this mission, by participating in profit participation with my employees, I’m going to get tax credits?”
Now, I do it for union workers. I profit participate with union workers. I hug union workers because they’re as good as non-union workers. They’re as trained as non-union workers. They’re as skilled. So why should I differentiate between the two?
And many of our entrepreneurs don’t even buy a company if it’s unionized. It doesn’t make sense to me. If you’re willing to share with them, then why do you differentiate?
Luke: In our seafood business, we had some boats that were unionized and some boats that were not unionized in the fishing vessels and to be completely honest, there was pluses and minuses of both situations because we learned how to work very well with the unions, and if you were eye to eye and transparent and constructive working together, in some cases, it allowed for more clarity of the rules of engagement because everybody understood what to expect.
So, yeah, I understand what you’re saying. It’s not a binary good or bad situation. You can definitely make it work.
Iqbal: Well, you know, I’ll give you an example. We have a factory, one of a foundry in Niagara. And a couple of years ago, it burned down. Not all of it, but about 40% of it.
And our CEO thought it was going to take 11 months to rebuild, and we’d be shut down. It was a unionized shop. Talking to the unionized shop workers, they, number one, when they went off work, because they only get 65% of unemployment benefits, I said to my people, “Top it up. Give them nearly all their salary because number one, we want them to come back, but number two, how are they going to live? They live paycheck to paycheck.”
But more importantly, they came up with a workaround to work within the 60% that wasn’t burnt, move some equipment, work around, and keep the factory going until the burnt part would get rebuilt. And look, they made more profits in that year than they did in the previous year. And each one of them got a profit participation, and on top of it, they got a check of $5,000 each as an appreciation for coming up with the idea of the workaround. So I’m saying to you, that if you treat them well, they will find how to enhance your business, satisfy customer needs, and that in itself brings more customers. It’s a vicious cycle.
You know, Charlie Munger says, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the results.”
So the incentives are there. We need to put the incentive. We have to have faith in it. And it’s also a deep purpose with changing their lives, which I believe in. And I believe to such an extent that I’m just on my desk writing my succession plan wishes to my kids and grandkids and we have family meetings, et cetera. And the whole intention is there for years to come. This is my intention, to make a meaningful difference in the life of our associates.
Luke: I want to be mindful of your time, but are we good for another 10 minutes? Is that okay with you?
Iqbal: Yeah, sure.
Luke: I think that’s a perfect segue into the last topic I wanted to discuss, which is, how do you pass on these values and this legacy?
And again, I don’t want to sound cliché because that’s a relatively cliché topic of passing on values, but I think you’re doing something truly unique and something that, frankly, is probably only possible with an entrepreneur that has gone through the struggle and the trauma you faced when you were younger.
Unfortunately, many business owners are very selfish and are very focused, as you said, on extraction of value and hoarding of value, rather than the distribution of that value. And I think that that is at the core of a lot of the socioeconomic issues that our country and many countries are facing right now. But you lived through those. You saw your mom struggling and feeding those baby chickens and doing whatever she could to provide for her family. And that obviously inspired you in a very personal way. How do you pass that on?
Because that’s something I think about a lot, where my dad lived through very unique circumstances growing up with no wealth, or sorry, growing up in poverty in many ways, and the work ethic that he learned for that to be bestowed upon me, and frankly, for me to pass it to my kids who are going to be another generation removed from that struggle. I at least got to see my father’s work ethic. It’s something I think about a lot, is that transition of those family values and whatnot. So how are you approaching that very complex challenge?
Iqbal: So, one of the most difficult questions that generation one faces is how do they leave their legacy while enduring their values? And I’ve been to many, many succession planning sessions. From 25 years ago, I’ve been going to John Davis’s programs at Harvard, where they teach you the three-circle model. That’s all good in theory, but each family is different and each entrepreneur and patriarch is different. And while I think through it, the patriarch is faced with sort of two thoughts.
Number one, how much is enough to give to your family, and what do you want to do with the rest of it? And number two, are decisions going to be made by the next generation by one person, or are you going to spread it to all your kids among all their siblings, so there is no fight, everybody’s treated equally? And these are thoughts that come in every patriarch’s mind, and there are no hard and fast rules, and there are no right and wrong answers.
But for me, number one, my purpose is my business, making a meaningful difference in the life of associates. So, I have no desire to take money, give it to people you don’t know for causes you don’t know. I’ve got my cause. I need to focus on how that cause survives. And so, I’m going through the process where I put a board of advisors, external board of advisors in place, talked about my whole intention, brought in the three kids who ran their own businesses, hired their own people, sold their own businesses. They’ve all come in. They’ve all bought into the cause. Right now, we’re living the cause. Right?
And then we have a family constitution which says what we will do and what we won’t do. So those are safeguards as much as you can put together. And most people on succession planning are driven by tax.
Yes, I have tax advisors, but that’s not what I’m driven by. I’m driven by purpose and cause. If a purpose, for instance, I’m thinking of parking. Everybody does a succession trust, as you know. I’m thinking of putting it into a 99-year trust. It only exists in Manitoba. A Manitoba trust is a 99-year-old trust. So, you put your businesses for 99 years in a trust. And that survives generations. Yes, it’s probably not the most tax efficient, but that wasn’t the purpose of the succession planning. The purpose of the succession planning, in my mind, is to go with the purpose that we are all bought into.
So to me, as long as you are driven by your purpose first, that drives the succession plan, compared to go to your tax man and say, “How do I most efficiently, tax-wise, do my succession plan?” There’s a complete different philosophy in that. So, I’m coming up with ideas of how do I drive my purpose after I’m gone, because that’s my legacy, and my purpose in the business is one and the same thing.
And so, look, I want to finish off with, if I got up 100 years from now, looking from up there in heaven or whatever area, universe you want to call it, and I’m looking at the difference I made, is I can see thousands of associates that are associated with Zynik whose life had become meaningfully different because they were associated to Zynik. And by the way, Zynik, to end with, was coined by my wife and each initial symbolizes each one of us in the family.
So, Z stands for my daughter, Zara,
Y stands for my wife,
N stands for my two sons, Nabil and Nadeem,
I stands for me, and
K is our surname.
So, what we want to be is a true family company that treats our associates as family and everybody’s life is meaningfully changed and that’s what would make me proud.
Luke: That is a wonderful philosophy and story, and an inspiring approach to business, a refreshing and inspiring approach to business. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain that in detail. I think my audience is going to find this refreshing, frankly, rather than just focusing on investment strategy or inter-family dynamics.
This is a much-needed conversation about distribution of wealth and how you can do things differently. And I think trying to make all of your associates’ lives better, it was an amazing calling, an amazing purpose. So, I really applaud that and really appreciate your time, Iqbal. Thank you so much.
Iqbal: I want to leave you with this thought. Most of the people do have a to-do list. If I ask you, what do you have to do? You will tell me.
Most people do not have a to-think list. And I would suggest to you that a to-think list is as important to a to-do list. So I tell all my executives, “I want to know what’s on your to-do list, but more importantly, I want to know what’s on your to-think list, which is different than on your to-do list.”
And these concepts about the lifetime value of an associate, all that comes from my to-think list. I think every morning when I get up very early, I have a to-think list that I think through. It’s not a to-do list.
And I want to leave this concept in your audience’s mind that from tomorrow, start doing a to-do list, but also do a to-think list. And that will change the way you think and change your trajectory of how effective and powerful your thoughts become.
On that note, Luke, I wish you well.
