A master salesman with an appetite for risk

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"I don't know why I'm telling you this," says Miles Nadal; but no matter, he's already five minutes into his opening anecdote and is still warming up; it would be rude to interrupt. For right now, Miles Nadal is doing what Miles Nadal does best, which is to say, selling - a story, a business concept, himself: sometimes all three at once.

The story he's unpacking is about a young woman he met working here, at Mark McEwan's aggressively stylish One Restaurant in Yorkville's Hazelton Hotel. When he's in town, this is his regular breakfast haunt, by virtue of being located a few steps from the Toronto headquarters of MDC Partners Inc., the marketing services holding company he founded in 1980 and of which he is chairman and CEO. About 18 months ago, he was enjoying a drink with Chuck Porter, MDC's Miami-based "chief strategist" and the chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, MDC's best-known ad agency, when they began chatting with the young woman about her career aspirations. (Though Mr. Nadal reveals her name, it shall not be repeated here, for reasons that will soon become apparent.) It turns out the young woman possessed a masters degree in analytics, and Mr. Nadal, recognizing that he'd been impressed with her comportment during previous visits, said he'd like to get her an interview at one of his market research firms. She was flattered by the offer, but her response caught him off-guard: she turned him down, explaining that she recently had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, and was about to begin treatment.

"It really sort of smacked me," he says, hitting the table for emphasis. He picks up a wedge of lime and squeezes it into a glass of sparkling water, absentmindedly wiping his hand on the white tablecloth as he continues speaking.

"She sort of reminded me of one of my daughters. My eldest is 20. She had that sort of beautiful smile, lovely disposition, not a stitch of makeup, but looked like a person who was ready to take on the world," he recalls. "So I gave her a hug, and she couldn't see I was teary-eyed," he says. "I said, 'I won't get you an interview, I will get you a job. As soon as you're finished.'" A little over a year later, declared free of cancer, the young woman started work as a research associate at an MDC company where, he says, she is now a rising star.

Mr. Nadal may or may not know why he tells the story, but it's illustrative, nonetheless. For here is a (self) portrait of him as a canny talent scout, albeit an impetuous and sentimental one; of MDC as an organization that values people over the bottom line; of a young woman who embodies what Mr. Nadal most admires, namely an ability to overcome challenges and then draw wisdom from adversity. The tale also gives him the opportunity to use one of his favourite adages: 'One hundred years from now, no one will remember the car you drove, the house you lived in, for that matter how much money you had in the bank, but the world will be a different place if you make a difference in the life of the young.'"

Mr. Nadal is fond of such adages. Sit with him for a few hours, and you'll start to think he's the Deepak Chopra (or at least the John Bartlett) of the marketing services world. Gnomic nuggets are a regular feature of his Twitter stream, which this week interwove an update on the growth of online shopping with quotes by Winston Churchill ("Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.") and Kierkegaard ("Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.") One of Mr. Nadal's favourite quotations is attributed to the Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Parcells: "You are what your record says you are." Mr. Nadal's record since he incorporated MDC in 1980 is a mixed bag. We're in the middle of discussing it - "I always had a challenge of managing my ambition," he's just acknowledged - when the waiter circles by again to see if Mr. Nadal is ready to order.

He hasn't looked at the menu, but he doesn't need to. Instead, he requests a large salad - "endive or whatever" - with some grilled shrimp, avocado, tomatoes, cucumbers, and whatever else the chef might have at hand. Informed by the waiter that tomatoes aren't in season, and there are no cucumbers in the kitchen, Mr. Nadal says with a touch of magnanimity, "Whatever you have is wonderful. And if you don't have shrimp, some grilled chicken would be great."

His dietary restraint is impressive, considering he also is fond of his doctor's quotation, "You can never outrun a cheeseburger." But the restraint is a medical necessity. "I had diabetes historically," he says, explaining that at one point his blood sugar level was about 600 per cent of normal. "I was literally in a walking coma."

But if his tableside appetite has been tamed, his hunger for business acquisitions is unquenchable. Last year MDC, the 10th-largest marketing services holding company in the world by revenue, splashed out about $100-million to buy either all or a majority of shares in 13 companies, including the Toronto shops Capital C and Kenna, the New York PR firm Kwittken & Company, the San Francisco PR firm Allison & Partners, and the hot L.A.-and-Amsterdam-based creative agency 72andSunny.

He has acquired so many companies, he can't actually tell you precisely how many are in the MDC family, nor their names. ("I was good for the first 20, reasonably good for the next 10, not so good on the next 10, and now it's touch-and-go, but I'm getting better.") And he says MDC will splash out another $80-million or so this year.

Gluttony may be one of the seven deadly sins; Mr. Nadal sees it as a virtue. "If we could buy 51 per cent of every brilliant firm in the world, we would do it," he says. The approach builds in redundancies that, he says, help avoid risk, a tack as common in his personal life as in his professional life.

"Everyone always makes fun of me because I have a multitude of devices," he explains, pulling from his pocket a $60 no-name cellphone, of which he says he bought 20. Why 20? "Because inevitably when you like something, they discontinue them," he says. When he found a fax machine he liked, he bought four. "Invariably, that will break down. Something will happen, or there will be a part missing, and for me, life is about instantaneous solutions."

"I always manage everything in life about contingencies - because I never want to be in a position to be disappointed."

Sometimes, though, that gluttonous approach can induce rather than hedge risk. Ten years ago, MDC nearly blew its brains out when its subsidiary Maxxcom piled on debt to fund a shopping spree. Large writedowns and losses left some shareholders wary of ever dealing with Mr. Nadal again. Which brings us back to that Bill Parcells quote. "If you actually look at our track record over 30 years," nods Mr. Nadal, "you will see that inevitably when we make bold initiatives, sometimes the world melts down completely."

He ticks off what he calls his black swan moments. "Interest rates went from 11 to 22 per cent in 1980. We went public [in New York]on Friday, Oct. 16, 1987, the day before Black Monday. Got listed [in Toronto]on Friday, October 23, 1987, the first day in the history of the Toronto Stock Exchange it closed early. Took [MDC subsidiary]Maxxcom public in March of 2001, just before the Internet bubble burst."

"When I reflect back on my history, when things went wrong, we didn't have enough margin for error, and our reach exceeded our grasp," he says. The losses still sting.

In the last five years, though, MDC's fortunes have improved. The return of the ad market in 2010, together with MDC's strategy of investing in small, smart companies adept at using technology to target consumers with marketing messages more efficiently than traditional approaches, helped the MDC share price double over the last year. "The world has opened up to us - not only because of our accomplishments, but because the world's changed," he says.

Last month, the New York Observer pegged Mr. Nadal at #94 on its annual list of the city's Power Brokers, six spots above editor Tina Brown (though ten below New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan).

He insists that the approach of much larger advertising holding companies like Omnicom and WPP, stacked with agencies that do everything from strategic planning to media buying and creative duties, is a turnoff for clients. "Scale, multi-national, multi-service, multi-office is a negative," he says. "A negative for the ability to drive creativity, innovation, and that kind of nimble performance, because scale and innovation are to some degree mutually exclusive." With that in mind, though, MDC faces two challenges: continuing to find small, smart, undervalued companies to buy, and helping its larger agencies like Crispin Porter expand internationally as he's pledged. (That is, to help them become multi-national, multi-service, multi-office.) There's also the fact that Mr. Nadal feels, more than ever, the weight of legacy. He's an active philanthropist; he'd like to do more, and encourage others to step up, too. "I guess there is still a part of me that does want the acceptance and recognition - that I'm a good guy," he says.

He reaches for his BlackBerry: there's a saying that Bill Parcells frequently quoted that he wants to offer up, and he wants to get it right. "'You can fool the whole world down the highway of years, and take pats on the back as you pass / But your final reward will be heartache and tears / If you fool the man in the glass.' I've had that with me my whole life. I thought that was spectacular," he says. "You get to a point where you sort of say, I do what I do because it's what I want to do. I'm not running for public office, I'm not trying to win a popularity contest, I'm trying to do the things that I want to do for my own motivations, and as long as your friends and your family and the people that matter a lot to you are happy with you, that's all that matters."