John Bragg

“He built the largest farm fruit farm, basically, in, in the world, and he's built the largest, largest private telecom company in, in the country.”

“If it's a key asset that locks down, you know, a certain competitive advantage, don't quibble on price. In fact, come in over so that you make sure you secure that asset and you develop a reputation.”

“So he has 40 to 50% of the global supply, and about half of that is, like, stuff that he Owns and operates his farms, and half his farms he's buying, or owns like a, you know, big stake in”

“So at age 70, He was worth, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So he goes to each of the executives at his companies, and he says, today you're just businessmen. You're not investors. He gives them ten million dollars each. Not as a bonus, but as an in…”

“In the summers, he was making 4000 dollars picking wild blueberries, more than the teaching salary, doing what everyone else thought was beneath them.”

“The people who owned the freezers didn't grow blueberries, and the blueberry growers didn't own the freezers. Nobody controlled the whole chain.”

“Having built a factory and all, and geared it up to run two million pounds, and we ran I don't know, a 100,000. There just was no crop.”

“There would be no lawyers, no complex contracts, just a handshake and a one-page agreement that's still enforced today, over 50 years later.”

“40 years ago, Bragg started funding research at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, and he never stopped. They study everything from pollination to fungal diseases to vegetation management and berry composition. But here's the kicker that'll surprise you. Th…”

“They've sold over 700 of these harvesters now, about a hundred to Oxford, and the rest to competitors and other growers. But here's what separates John Bragg from ordinary businessmen. He didn't patent this invention.”

“Without bees, a field yields maybe about a thousand pounds per acre, but with the proper bee pollination, you can get up to 8000 pounds on the same acre.”

“Oxford Frozen Foods John's Company's processes a hundred and forty million pounds a year.”

“Sometimes being early looks exactly like being wrong.”

“Today, over 75% of Eastlink's earnings come from organic growth, systems Bragg bought and then made better.”

“We haven't shied away from using debt. Although today, our balance sheets are in great shape, but through the years, we've always been, what I would say, almost fully levered.”

“The entire company has four management levels. CEO, vice presidents, directors, managers. That's it. Government has 12. But big telecoms have seven or eight.”

“He understood that forcing change might create compliance, but letting people find their own way creates leaders.”

“They're not being trained as managers. They're being trained as owners. If they're good owners, Bragg says, they can hire good management.”

“He's built North America's largest private telecommunications company.”

“Every acquisition is really two acquisitions. It's the company you're buying today and the companies that might sell tomorrow. When opportunities are scarce, pay what it takes to get the asset you want. The people who nickel and dime their way out a great deal…”

“At 70, when he was a billionaire, Bregg gave six teams of executives ten million dollars each. Not for bonuses, but for investment portfolios. Real money, real stakes.”

“When he bought AM Telecom, which was a public company, one of the few public companies he actually bought, he immediately eliminated four million in overhead. That was all the cost just to be public.”

“For 50 years, Bragg never took a dividend. Every dollar went back into growth.”

“Bragg thought in terms of generations, and in a world of quick flips and fast exit, the person willing to wait 20 years has no competition.”

“Well, we've just plugged away at it, and we've got a couple billion of equity or more now in, in the portfolio. All that came late in life.”

“We haven't shied away from using debt, although today our balance sheets are in great shape, but through the years we've always been, what I would say, almost fully levered,”

“We not only have to have our own farm sufficient, we need the farmers sufficient.”

“But what you need as a farmer is somebody else to be in trouble with their crop, and your crop work out well.”

“Our advantage is that we are in three, three different microclimates.”

“We built a tower down at Mount Shamcook on the U.S. Border, and we received the Bangor channels there, taped them, put them on the bus, and of course Halifax got them first. By the time we got them in Amherst, they were two weeks old”

“There's six buyers, but you always get them, and it was basically, we became easy to deal with, and we always lived by our word, and we always paid top price, and so we just kept picking them off one at a time, And made it easy and didn't over, over negotiate.”

“If you paid a little too much and you're a private company, You just have to live a little longer to make it work. My brother used to say about buying a woodlot, well, maybe we're paying too much, but if we live long enough, it'll be a good deal. So this is th…”

“We'd rather buy more Buffett stock than pay too much for an operating company.”

“Yeah, and telecom, and southern Ontario, we got some real efficiencies by taking it private, and it, you know, became a branch plant, as compared with a separate head office, separate accounting, separate, I don't know how much, it wasn't that big a company, b…”

“One of the best marketing tools you can have is use your own name. People catch on. McCain's would be a great example. Everybody knows McCain french fries.”

“I was determined that from a family point of view, and if my grand, grandson or granddaughter want to have a Just a normal job in the business or outside of the business. They don't need the burdens of the name being everywhere. So I was quite determined to ke…”

“Family companies are great to work for, and we're going to pay you well, and you're going to feel very comfortable here, but there's no equity available, and too complicated with the finance structures if you start giving it away, and then if they want out, an…”

“If I had my druthers, I'd rather Pay you a million dollars and just expect you to work hard than to pay you 500 with a 500 bonus. Incentives seem to be a way of life, but a lot of people will perform without, without incentives.”

“I read where so-and-so's running two billion dollars and three billion, and we're doing more than that, and so we've got a big portfolio that's done very well for us, so we try to streamline it and keep it simple and let the operators run the business, and the…”

“We're buying Buffett for a 10 or 11 or 12% return. We're not looking for 20 or 25%. We just like to buy good, solid investments and, ah, and let them grow.”

“We've always had a modest portfolio, but when interest rates were down to where we could borrow money for one or two percent, We said, look, this is an opportunity. We should get at this, and so we did. Borrowed lots of money to buy good stocks, and it's been …”

“Buffett would say that, that if you're a businessman and investing in your business, you're probably a better stock picker, because you use the same principles. But if you're an investor, it will help you in your business, because you're using the same princip…”

“I'm a big believer in being a low cost producer. Doesn't matter what you're doing. There's no excuse to waste money. You're low cost. You're going to stay in business in the tough times.”

“So I would say, for instance, in the food business, all about cost, because you don't know what the revenue is going to be, because we don't know whether we're going to have a frost or whether the currency is going to change or whether somebody else got a big …”

“And I would say in cable, you know, you always have to look at costs, but capital is probably the biggest thing in the cable business, because you can make big mistakes, and, you know, spending, let's say a billion dollars to get into programming, and that jus…”

“The real debt load was in cable where the cash flow was quite consistent.”

“Most of my real equity, the way you would measure it, Has come after 60.”

“When you, this particular case, it was a thousand acre woodlot, and we were building roads through it to do silviculture work, great for the future, and I went to see where they put a bridge in, and it wasn't a bridge, but it was half bridge and half rock. It …”