BC Business
The Toigo family’s business empire spans restaurants, meat processing plants and a string of commercial real estate properties. But it seems only fitting that Ron Toigo chooses to meet me at his box in the Pacific Coliseum, home of the Vancouver Giants, the junior hockey league franchise owned by his company, Ron Toigo Holdings.
The maze of concrete passageways leading to Toigo’s suite is lined with bits of Vancouver history: posters of the 1993/94 Vancouver Canucks cheering a Stanley Cup goal on home ice (a series the Canucks would lose in Game 7, despite Trevor Linden’s two goals), another poster of a very young Bruce Springsteen on the Coliseum stage. Inside the suite, a puffy leather couch sits opposite a sink and a beer fridge. Straight ahead is a floor-to-ceiling window looking out on the arena’s empty seats and a Zamboni grooming the ice for tonight’s game against the Regina Pats.
Toigo looks anything but the typical business tycoon. In a long-sleeved golf shirt and slightly rumpled navy-blue Dockers, the balding 51-year-old exudes an affable charm as he introduces himself. In addition to Ron Toigo Holdings, he is also managing director of the family-controlled Shato Holdings Ltd., which owns White Spot Restaurants and a number of commercial real-estate properties across North America. He shares the title with his brother, Peter, who spends most of his time looking after Shato’s restaurant interests, while Ron focuses on the company’s real-estate-development arm.
Toigo describes the immense satisfaction he gets from his work with Shato, particularly from the approval he received recently to redevelop Tsawwassen Golf and Country Club, extending the golf course and building 400 housing units. (Spearheading that project involved 2½ years of public hearings and one-on-ones with local politicians.) But it’s when he turns to the Vancouver Giants that Toigo really comes to life. For the long-time Delta resident, there is no question as to where he’d rather spend his time. “Usually, I’m on the hot seat getting abused at a public hearing. It’s a lot easier sitting here, drinking beer and watching a hockey game, than listening to somebody yelling at you over something that they don’t agree with.”
So was getting into the hockey world a business decision or a personal passion? Toigo laughs when asked the question. “You don’t go into this business to make money,” he says. Even though he has done everything right – the Giants can be counted on to finish first in their division every year and regularly draw a crowd of about 7,500, nearly double the league average – he says the team is still a long way from paying back his investment since bringing the franchise to Vancouver in 2000. Nevertheless, he’s confident that the same philosophy that drives White Spot and his other business interests will eventually pay off. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant or building houses or the hockey team,” he says. “The principles are the same: you try to hire the best possible people and support them to do whatever they need to be successful, and hopefully people like what you’re doing. If you do it right, people will come, and if they get value, they’ll come back.”
As I’m leaving, I pass a gaggle of strikingly fit, smartly dressed young men, jostling each other and joking boisterously as they file through the Coliseum’s entry doors. The Vancouver Giants are on their way to the dressing room to prepare for tonight’s game. And upstairs, in his suite, Toigo is putting his beer on ice.