BC Business
Brad Pelletier, Predator Ridge Resort | BCBusinessBrad Pelletier, former agent for PGA Tour star Mike Weir, took over Vernon's Predator Ridge Resort a year and a half ago.
Brad Pelletier, Predator Ridge Resort | BCBusinessBrad Pelletier, former agent for PGA Tour star Mike Weir, took over Vernon’s Predator Ridge Resort a year and a half ago.
Brad Pelletier returned to the Okanagan in 2010 to change his family’s lifestyle. Pelletier, formerly agent for PGA Tour star Mike Weir and former managing director of IMG Canada, wanted to remove himself from Toronto’s rat race before restarting his career. He didn’t foresee that within two years he’d be running what is arguably the most successful golf resort in Canada and retooling its operations to deal with a challenging economic climate.
“What I’ve been good at in my career is making products desirable and those same rules apply to this,” says Pelletier, 46, who took over Vernon’s Predator Ridge Resort, a Wesbild Holdings property, a year and a half ago and has restructured the operation in recent months. “In the end, once you have the pieces in place, it is about making your product desirable and selling it to the end consumer.”
Known for his marketing expertise and extensive corporate connections, Pelletier has focused on building the brand of the resort, generating business relationships with the likes of Hockey Canada, nearby spa Sparkling Hill, and hiring former touring pros Richard Zokol and A.J. Eathorne. It is a bold, ambitious plan launched at a time when many in the golf industry are battening down the hatches and cutting costs.
Zokol, who was represented by Pelletier at IMG, joined Predator last year as a roving golf ambassador with involvement in numerous parts of the resort. His take is that Pelletier’s skill set is exactly what you want at a time when the resort business faces significant challenges.
“Pelletier is a guy who is able to see the iceberg dead ahead before it’s too late, then is not bashful to institute a plan that steers the ship out of harm’s way,” says Zokol, a winner on the PGA Tour. “He’s a guy that you want as the leader when you go to battle.”
Pelletier’s career has never followed the logical path for someone who is now running a facility that employs more than 300, has two golf courses, including one pegged at No. 25 in SCOREGolf’s annual ranking of top courses, and a sprawling real-estate footprint. He grew up in Montreal playing sports and attended the University of New Brunswick before heading to the London School of Economics to pursue a graduate business degree. Pelletier returned to Canada in 1992, intent on working in the lucrative business-consulting world.
Instead, Pelletier, an avid golfer, cold-called golf pro Dick Munn, who was then working for the nascent GolfBC, the company owned by developer Caleb Chan. Though Pelletier was only 26 at the time, Munn took a chance on the ambitious upstart. When Munn began running the Canadian Tour’s B.C. Open, Pelletier worked a wide variety of roles in the operation and ultimately worked his way into a leadership role at the tournament.
“I saw the potential right away,” says Munn, a well-regarded elder statesman in B.C.’s golf industry. “He has some fabulous attributes. He can make decisive decisions and doesn’t procrastinate. I think his biggest attribute is his handling of people. He is a people person who knows the business side of things.”
Pelletier’s work on the Canadian Tour event was an astounding success, leading to the opportunity to help GolfBC create a Jack Nicklaus-designed course in Whistler that would become Nicklaus North. Pelletier had big aspirations for the property and brought the Skins Game to the course, an internationally televised event that included golf legend Jack Nicklaus and helped put Whistler on the map as a four-season resort community. That move also connected Pelletier with IMG, which ran the televised golf exhibition. That connection provided him with his next big break—the opportunity to move to Calgary and enter the lucrative sports marketing and sponsorship business. When IMG was sold to Wall Street hedge fund magnate Ted Forstmann for US$750 million in 2004, Pelletier was asked to come to Toronto and rework the company’s Canadian operations.
But after five years, Pelletier and his family (which includes four children and his wife, Tanya, who is originally from Vancouver) decided to leave the fast pace of Toronto for the Okanagan. By that point Pelletier had streamlined IMG’s operations in Canada, which left him little to accomplish with the company domestically. He was offered the opportunity to move to New York but wanted to slow down, spend more time with his family and uphold a promise to his wife to return to B.C. While the executive didn’t have a job or a plan in mind, real estate company Melcor Developments soon snapped him up. Only months later Wesbild Holdings Ltd. hired Pelletier away to run its Okanagan division.
He knew the new job would be a struggle given difficulties in the market that had seen several ambitious golf developments in the area, including Tobiano near Kamloops and The Rise in Vernon, fall into receivership.
“When I arrived we were faced with incredibly challenged times given the type of product we had—high-end, with high service levels,” he says. “This was a project that really faced challenges. My view was that I had great tools at my disposal: a great brand, great people and a great owner. How do we identify where Predator fits in and where it needs to be? How does it go from being good to great?”
Pelletier immediately began seeking out contacts that could help Predator’s visibility. He inked an ambitious deal with Hockey Canada making the resort the organization’s summer home, and worked to partner with nearby Sparkling Hill, a $100-million spa/resort in Vernon, owned by Swarovski Crystal.
“I want to pull away from the pack and that’s why we brought on new talent and did partnerships,” Pelletier explains. “Those have gone through the roof. The business has improved through the changes we’ve made, but now it is about moving the needle to grow.”
Even with 55,000 rounds over the resort’s two courses and record volumes for home sales at the end of the summer in 2012, Pelletier recognizes that doesn’t mean the road ahead is easy. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Pelletier, an executive who has made his career on outsmarting his competition and having deep connections throughout corporate Canada, plans to continue building Predator Ridge in the same way.
“It is also about relationships,” says Pelletier. “And it is about making sure people want what we have.”