With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
68 BCBusiness july 2015 I'm actually here to interview a salesman. He's 45 ("Young!") and started selling contact lenses ("Contact lenses!") online in 1999. Last year, he sold the company for $435 million! Gary Holt shakes his head. "Blink of an eye." Holt exits the bus at a stop near an underpass, and I continue on to Hermosa Beach. It's a family- friendly village on the southern beaches of L.A. with a lively mix of small shops and restaurants (Steak + Whiskey, Lavish Home, Wash'n Shine Laundry). A short walk down the beach, at one of the long, narrow homes that overlook the ocean, I find Roger Hardy. He is buoyant and friendly and frequently pushes back his thick, boyish hair. He is here with his wife, Jenny, and their two small children on vacation, but let's qualify that. Two days ago, he flew back to Vancouver to pick up the winners of a squash tournament he spon- sors and take them in his Challenger to Las Vegas for dinner at Nobu and to a David Guetta show. Tomorrow morning he flies to San Francisco to interview a job candidate. The Hardys also have homes in Penticton and Whistler, but this vaca- tion is the first of what they hope will be annual month-long international adventures with their children in Japan, Australia, Italy, France and China. "Work hard, play hard" is how many of his colleagues describe his style, and it's true: he swam one kilometre in the ocean yesterday morning to prepare for an upcoming Ironman, and later did some surfing. "It's a good workout," he says, serving me Mountain Dew in the sunny white living room of this rented home, "because someone else is determining how hard you have to work when the next wave is coming." In business, at least, anticipating waves is something Hardy has done extremely well. He rode out the unpredictable years of Internet commerce in the early 2000s and made Coastal Contacts Inc. (Clearly is the brand name in Canada) a model of global success. Now, with many of his team from Coastal, he is building an online shoe empire with Shoes.com Technologies. He also invests in other young B.C. companies that hope to follow in his wake. Sure, Gary Holt is correct: a good salesperson will give customers what they want. But Hardy goes a step further. He gives customers what they will want tomorrow. "Roger is a builder," says Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon. He and Hardy did regular hikes on the Grouse Grind over the time that Hardy was growing Coastal. "He has the ability to see where the world is shifting, four, five, six years out. Like most entrepreneurs, he's doing something that no one else can believe in because they can't see the future. He can see the future—and he's build- ing something now for then." R oger Hardy grew up in Kanata, Ontario, which in the 1970s was a farming town just outside Ottawa. Hardy's mother, Mary Jane, a high school English teacher and guidance counsellor, tells a story about getting a call from a neighbour when Roger was seven years old. He was at the door, trying to sell used People magazines. Hardy doesn't remember this, but he remembers someone at his own door. That was Terry Matthews, the father of a boy on his soccer team, trying to raise cash for a new ven- ture. Matthews was an engineer who would deconstruct the barbecue on camping trips, and the new venture was Mitel Networks. The com- pany, which Matthews founded with Michael Cowpland, kickstarted a transformation of Kanata. New buildings, new companies, new streets. Hardy remembers the town sign read- ing Population 3,000; later it was over 100,000. Matthews later started Newbridge, and Cowpland started Corel. On a field where he used to ride his dirt bike sprang the Corel Centre. Mitel—which would become a global leader in communications technolog y— morphed and divided and sold several times over, while Newbridge was eventually acquired by French telecom behemoth Alcatel-Lucent for $7.1 billion. "He was an exciting guy," recalls Hardy. "It definitely left an impression." The neighbours who had given Matthews even $1,000 at the door saw their lives change. Hardy's father, also named Roger—and, like his mother, also a high school English teacher and counsellor (but with a PhD in psychology)—did not. "He was a young man with a young family," says Hardy. "You can't blame him." After his par- ents divorced, his mother remarried and three older stepbrothers joined the family. His father encouraged sports, which domi- nated Hardy's teenage years. "He was quite a bit smaller than the guys on his hockey team," says his younger sister, Michaela Tokarski, "but he would always get chosen as the captain." Hardy went to Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, in part because of the proximity to ski hills. He played volleyball, squash and rugby. He majored in political science, "the retailing of ideas," as Hardy puts it, but wasn't terribly into academics. "I probably got a higher return than I deserved." I tell him a story too. In business, at least, antici- pating waves is something Hardy has done extremely well. He rode out the unpredictable years of Internet commerce in the early 2000s and made Coastal Contacts Inc. (Clearly is the brand name in Canada) a model of global success. Now, with many of his team from Coastal, he is building an online shoe empire with Shoes.com