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I haven’t found anything I like doing better than going to work every morning.
Born in Saskatoon in 1928 and spending the first 6 years of his life in the small town of Luseland before moving to East Vancouver, no one could have ever imagined the life that Jim Pattison was destined to live. His parents were American homesteaders who moved to Canada; his dad ran a car dealership that failed in the midst of the Great Depression, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled him in the evenings.
Pattison's family was a churchgoing, Pentecostal family. And this is where Jim would get his first taste of the workforce, where he would be employed at a Church camp playing the trumpet. It was also where he would eventually meet his wife, Mary Hudson. Pattison would work tons of small gigs throughout his time in high school, including picking fruit, selling doughnuts in the school parking lot, selling seeds door-to-door, delivering newspapers, and working as a page boy at the Georgia Hotel. After high school he worked odd jobs while attending the Saunders School of Business at the University of British Columbia. He never graduated, but along the way he managed to work at a cannery and a packing house, as a labourer building bridges in the mountains, and then for the Canadian Pacific Railway as a dining car attendant, before accepting a job washing cars at a gas station with a small attached used-car lot.
It was at this last job that he would eventually find his calling in life. One day one of the regular salesmen was away, and Jim was able to sell a used car to a customer. This would go on to define his career, as after this, he became a salesman at one of the largest used car lots in Vancouver, using this to fund his tuition at UBC. After he eventually dropped out, Pattison continued selling used cars in the Vancouver and Richmond area.
He became so successful that in 1961 he was able to convince a manager at the Royal Bank of Canada to lend him $40,000 (about $433,000 today) to open his own Pontiac dealership. This amount was well above the bank’s lending limit; to counteract this, Pattison bet on himself. He sold his house, assigned the cash surrender value of his life insurance policy to General Motors and took a loan from GM for $190,000 (almost $2 million today) for preferred shares in the company. Twenty five years later, Pattison was selling more cars than anyone in Western Canada.
But Pattison’s business empire didn't just stop at Pontiac dealerships. Today, the Jim Pattison Group is a global conglomerate that employs 49,000 people across twenty five divisions including automotive, packaging, food, and forestry. The list of brands, companies, or organizations he owns includes Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Guinness World Records, the Vancouver Blazers, and Radio and Television stations throughout Western Canada. Pattison also served as the CEO of Expo 86, and led the push to bring the 2010 Winter Olympics to Vancouver.
In addition to being one of the most successful businessmen in Western Canada (or all of Canada, for that matter), Pattison is also one of the most generous. In 2008 it was revealed that the Pattison Foundation was Canada’s 8th largest giver of charitable grants by a private entity, motivated by Pattison’s deep rooted Pentecostal beliefs. Much of Pattison’s donations have gone to improving healthcare outcomes in Canada. In 1999 he donated $20 million to the Vancouver General Hospital, and in 2008, he donated another $5 million to the Lion’s Gate Hospital. In 2011, he donated $5 million to create the Jim Pattison Outpatient Care and Surgery Centre in Surrey, British Columbia. Two years later, he donated $5 million to the Victoria Hospital Foundation to help Victorian hospitals purchase high-end equipment for their facilities. In 2017 he set a Canadian record by donating $75 million to the construction of a new St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver; he followed this by setting a Saskatchewan record by donating $50 million to the creation of a new children's hospital in Saskatoon, which was named Jim Pattison Children's Hospital1.
Today, Jim Pattison is 97 years old, and has given no indication that he’s ever slowing down. He’s still the Chairman and CEO of the Jim Pattison Group and has stated that since he loves his job so much, it doesn't feel like work at all. We can all learn a lot from Jim Pattison, from his risk-taking, to his love of faith and family, and for his commitment to giving back to the communities in which he has grown up and prospered.
