Bill Holland’s eyes dart around the room as he settles into a chair at one of downtown Toronto’s top dining spots.
“This place is great – just great,” he says by way of greeting at Nota Bene, a restaurant noted for its service. But Mr. Holland’s searching eyes are not just the eyes of a grateful customer – they are of a man trying to glean insights into how to run a business.
Restaurants are more than just a place for Mr. Holland to grab a power lunch. Throughout his 21 years at CI Financial Corp., where he rose to the chief executive’s job and built the firm into Canada’s largest independent mutual fund company, Mr. Holland has looked to other businesses for new ideas and inspiration. He is in the restaurant game himself, as a co-owner of Centro, an uptown standby. He finds kitchens a crucible for innovation.
“These guys are all such entrepreneurs, it’s unbelievable to be around them – you learn stuff,” he says. “Sometimes we forget we have the benefit of operating this multibillion-dollar company. We have a budget to do everything. When you run Centro and you want to get something done, there’s no budget. You don’t say I’m just going to write a cheque and do this. The creativity that’s spurred from that is amazing. Amazing.”
Make no mistake: Mr. Holland is still in the thick of things at CI, a company that runs $75-billion of assets for investors under familiar mutual fund brands such as Harbour and Signature. He points out it’s still his No. 1 job and the source of most of his net worth. His CI stake of 11.3 million shares is worth about $260-million. The dividends alone add up to $10-million a year.
But he has cut back from working 12 hours a day to just eight or nine. His title at CI is now executive chairman, having given up the CEO post last year. He’s got a raft of side ventures. There’s Centro. There’s a medical devices company, a maritime communications company and an online gaming company.
It’s half an hour before he pauses long enough to realize we haven’t ordered. He hasn’t given the menu so much as a glance, and it is still lying open before him. The servers at Nota Bene are too well trained to interrupt. Once summoned, the waitress outlines the specials and Mr. Holland orders a main of halibut and a starter of tuna tartare.
The appetizer is in keeping with the view of Mr. Holland as a raw-meat kind of executive, who launches (and sometimes loses) big takeover bids with regularity, and who is never afraid to speak out. He lays out his views, often unprompted, on issues ranging from CEO compensation (overpaid, the lot of ’em), to corporate tax policy (doesn’t make sense) to the federal government’s killing of income trusts, which hurt CI and his personal wealth (didn’t like it, but it was the right thing to do).
The one thing he doesn’t want to talk about, for a change, is his recent public spat with the Bank of Nova Scotia, CI’s largest shareholder.
It began in late 2010 with a dispute about whether Scotia trumped a CI bid to buy rival mutual fund company DundeeWealth Inc. CI’s position is that it had a deal to buy DundeeWealth, and even got a break fee when Scotia barged in with its own offer, using a contractual right to match to win.
Scotia and CI ended up at odds again this year when Scotia voted against CI’s poison pill plan and withheld support for Mr. Holland’s re-election as a director. Mr. Holland won anyway, then excoriated Scotia, calling the move “beyond idiotic.”
Now, he’s in a quieter mood. All Mr. Holland wants to say on the topic is that his shareholders support him. And why shouldn’t they, given his record. CI, since its initial public offering in 1994, has paid out $3.8-billion to shareholders through share buybacks, dividends and income trust distributions, he notes. Oh, and the stock is up 20-fold.
