Ron Joyce, co-founder of the Tim Hortons restaurant chain, revels in the coffee-selling giant he created - but not enough to reinvest any of his millions in it.
The company's stock-market value is over $6-billion, but the author of Always Fresh: The Untold Story of Tim Hortons says Tim's has likely hit a plateau for investors.
"It may well be worth that much, but to me, I don't know," Joyce said in an interview Friday from Toronto. "That seems like an awfully high figure."
That's not to say he doesn't love Tim's.
His autobiography is a tribute to the chain and the franchise owners who helped build it from a single cramped diner to a communal coffee-and-doughnut "hub of Canada."
In his spare hours, the stocky, silver-haired businessman occasionally sits anonymously in a corner of a Tim Hortons outlet, watching as seniors engage in caffeine-fuelled gossip, fathers pick up surprise Timbits for hockey teams and people down one tart too many.
Still, shares in the firm he built over four decades and sold to Wendy's International Inc. in 1996 are as tempting as week-old doughnuts to Joyce.
"Frankly I'm not interested. I'm enjoying my life away from the chain now," he said, noting he didn't buy shares when Tim Hortons was spun off from Wendy's this year.
It's not due to lack of money. "I'm pretty fortunate," he said. "My wealth is well in excess of a billion dollars."
Joyce, now 76 years old, is a classic rags to riches story, intimately tied up with one of Canada's major business stories.
In the autobiography, co-authored by writer Robert Thompson, he chronicles how he spent over four decades building the business from a struggling coffee shop in Hamilton to over 2,000 restaurants owned by a firm traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Born in 1930, he spent his early life in Tatamagouche, N.S., where his family lived without plumbing in a three-room house heated with a wood stove.
He travelled to Hamilton, Ont., at the age of 16 with $35 in his pocket, and worked in factories before joining the navy and sailing to Korea.
Joyce briefly became a police officer before buying a Dairy Queen and one the earliest franchises from burly NHL defenceman Tim Horton.
He only met his future partner three weeks after the 1965 purchase, when he realized some of the equipment he'd received for his Hamilton store was on the verge of being seized. He called the hockey player and asked for a meeting to sort the problem out.
In the years that followed, Joyce assumed a co-ownership role, struggling to find successful doughnut recipes, experimenting unsuccessfully with pies and fending off anxious bankers.
It was the relentless life of a workaholic, and his two marriages ended in divorce, with seven children.
The book includes a chronicle of the final night of Horton's life when the hockey star crashed his Pantera sports car driving home from a late-night meeting in 1974.
The two had been arguing over Horton's expenses entertaining other hockey players, but Joyce says they parted on friendly terms at 4 a.m., with Horton saying "I love you, Blub," using the nickname that refers to Joyce's girth.
Horton's death was followed by bitter legal battles with his widow, Lori, who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit claiming Joyce hadn't paid enough for the firm.
"We shared a grandchild (my son Ron Jr. had married Jeri-Lyn Horton, and they currently operate a Tim Hortons store). As it turned out, we never did get the chance to really talk after the end of the lawsuit," Joyce writes.
"There just wasn't anything to talk about."
Here and there in the book are hints of Joyce's insecurities and restless nature. At the height of his success, with hundreds of stores open and the recent purchase of a jet, Joyce admits he felt intense depression.
"When I got the damn thing (the plane), I realized this isn't all I thought it would be," he said Friday.
"I said to myself 'What the hell, I've obtained my goal and I have to go searching for a new one.' I've been like that ever since."
Since a sailing accident in which he suffered a crushed vertebra, Joyce suffers frequent intense back pain, and says he's aware of his mortality.
"I've got all my estate planning in place," he said.
"I've got oil fields in Argentina, oil in Alberta. I'm one of the owners of 20 radio stations in British Columbia and a packaging business that my son does."
Then there's his wandering life aboard the 41-metre sailing ship Destination Fox Harb'r.
"I live beyond my wildest dreams, when you think about it."