Raising the Stakes: Pat Bell

Pat Bell | BCBusiness
Pat Bell attributes much of his success in business and government to setting bold goals.

As B.C.’s Minister of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation, Pat Bell puts all his chips on the table.

Pat Bell is perhaps the busiest cabinet minister in the B.C. government: as if jobs, tourism and innovation aren’t enough to fill his plate, his formal title also includes “minister responsible for multiculturalism.” But if anyone has the range of experience – and the guts – to take on the portfolio, it’s the veteran entrepreneur who doesn’t believe in doing things by half measure.

Bell is no stranger to super-sized goals and high-stakes risks. He’s a small-business owner who, like a poker pro, has had to go all in on several occasions. His watershed moment came in 1988, when he and his wife Brenda decided to open a Wendy’s restaurant in her hometown of Prince George. With no money, no location and children aged three, five and seven, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. But, like most entrepreneurs, the Bells knew what they wanted and wouldn’t stop till they got it.

“We sold everything we could sell. We sold our home, sold our second car, sold our boat and sold anything that we could turn into cash,” Bell recalls. They also obtained some local investors, and opened their first Wendy’s on Victoria Street in downtown Prince George in December 1988.

It was an intimidating move at the time because buying the franchise meant Bell would have to give up his job as a junior executive with the burger giant. The 55-hour, six-day-a-week job, with starting pay of $12,000 a year, wasn’t the opportunity of a lifetime, anyway. “I still remember when I told Brenda, and she just looked at me and said ‘and you took it?’” Bell recalls.

Success was hardly guaranteed; Wendy’s was a fledgling company in the 1980s, nothing like the international fast-food juggernaut that it would become. But Bell had to start somewhere. He had left UBC’s education program in his fourth year after realizing it wasn’t for him. He was an entrepreneur at heart and he knew it.

The Wendy’s gamble paid off and about six months later the Bells opened another location, buying the old Shakey’s Pizza building on Highway 97 in Prince George and completely renovating it. Within a year, both stores were doing well, so the Bells decided to diversify and opened an Avis car rental business. “But very, very quickly we realized it was not going to work financially for us as the market was way too competitive and we didn’t have a location at the airport,” Bell recalls. Instead of going all in again, the couple decided to fold and walk away. “That was one of those near-fatal misses,” Bell says. “We got out of it just in time to save the mother ship, the Wendy’s restaurants.”

In the mid-’90s, they formed a successful logging company with Brenda’s father and brothers, and Bell reports making “quite a bit” of money in the first year, which they reinvested in the company. They sold the company in 2001 when Bell won the Liberal nomination.

“I don’t know that being an entrepreneur is particularly hard, but it’s very scary. It takes a lot of courage, involves a lot of risk and a lot of people are not prepared to take that risk,” Bell says, looking back on his business ventures. Transitioning smoothly into his political pitch, Bell adds that B.C. will have to take some risks if it is going to capitalize on growing global economies. He’s convinced B.C. has to take advantage of its natural resources and its geographic proximity to Asia. “It’s most important that we focus our efforts in areas with natural advantages and don’t follow the flavour of the day,” he concludes.

Bell adds that it’s also imperative to set lofty goals, as he did when, as Minister of Forests and Range in 2008, he predicted B.C. would be sending four billion board feet of lumber to China by 2011. “Everyone said, ‘No way we will reach that. We should be thinking about two or 1.5 billion,’” Bell recalls. “But I kind of ignored the advice and publicly went out and said four billion by 2011 and people rallied around it. We are just waiting on the final numbers, but we should be at around 4.6 billion for 2011.”

Bell notes that Premier Christy Clark is hoping he will be just as intrepid and successful with his new ministry. “Her comment to me was, ‘I like what you did in Forests. I need you to do it with the rest of the economy now,’” he says with a laugh.

Not surprisingly, Bell’s goal for the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation is tantamount to a poker pro’s all-in push: “Like with the forestry thing, I tend to make what some people call very bold goals and in this case I think there is no reason why British Columbia should not be growing its GDP at five, six, seven per cent annually . . . instead of the typical two to three per cent,” he says. “With the economies of China, India, Korea and Japan right on our doorstep, and the fact that they need natural resources, and the fact that we are the gateway from Asia to the North American continent, I think B.C. is extremely well positioned . . . to take advantage of what many will see as an economic decline elsewhere, but we will do very, very well.”