Jim Pattison

Location: British Columbia| Profession: Business

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Jim Pattison selling cars

Growing up the son of a car salesman in rural Saskatchewan and Vancouver, British Columbia, Jim Pattison had selling in his blood. While his old man wanted him to work at Neon Signs, Pattison soon found himself running a used car lot for his father’s old boss. Gradually,  building up his reputation in the community and using a number of innovative sales techniques, Pattison began growing his profits at an almost exponential rate. Soon, he ran the biggest car dealerships in the city. Today, the Jim Pattison Group employs over ten thousand people, working in everything from transportation to communications to food and financial services. Pattison also owns Ripley’s Believe it or Not or The Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He was instrumented in orchestrating the 1986 World’s Fair in Vancouver.

Jim Pattison Now

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There was no point in my life where I realised I wanted to sell cars.
As a kid, I sold garden seeds and I sold magazines and I sold newspaper
subscriptions and adhesive tape.  Selling cars just seemed like a natural
extension.  My dad did it and I liked cars.  It’s  as simple as that. I
didn’t decide. It was just a natural extension of what I enjoyed.  If you
like doing something you sort of fall into it.  At least that’s my opinion.

When I was at UBC, I started buying used cars and driving them onto campus
and selling them for profit. I sensed there was a need among the students
and no one else was doing it, so I just stepped up. I’d pick up the
classifieds, find good deals, buy the cars, drive them in to school, sell
them, and take the bus home. I would sell eight to ten cars per year.

After my third year at school, I realised that I was pretty good at selling
cars. There was this street in Vancouver called the Kingsway. All along both
sides of it, there were about forty used car dealerships in a row. But there
was one empty lot there. So I got it into my head that I could sell cars on
the lot while I finished my final year of school. When I approached the guy
who ran the lot, he told me that it had just been bought the day before by a
Nash dealer. ‘But he’s looking for someone to run it,’ the old landlord
said. So I approached the Nash dealer, Mr. McLaren, and told him I’d like to
run the lot. Luckily for me, my father had worked for McLaren year earlier.
McLaren knew my dad was honest and so he figured I probably was too. He just
said ‘sure.’

So I dropped out and got married and ran the lot. Later on, McLaren allowed
me to go back to school. I would take a course every day or every second
day. It was amazing that he let me do that.ng back to her. With no other option, Valerie decided to wait things out at CFRB.

Reflecting on the criticism she had received from the directors, Valerie decided to do something about her voice. If it was too high, lower it. Too shrill, strengthen it. She visited her old high school drama coach for her advice. The teacher gave her voice lessons, making Valerie enunciate the words of Shelley’s Ozymandias, putting an emphasis on the vowel sounds.

Maybe it worked, maybe not. Either way, a program director at CFRB heard about the effort she was making and was impressed. Suddenly, doors began to open up for her. When Andy Barrie or Betty Kennedy went on vacation, she would be asked to fill in to host their shows. Valerie now likens the change to the story of the emperor’s new clothes. "One minute I was naked, one minute I had clothes. All of a sudden, I became ‘okay’."