No one equalled his daring.
Ted Rogers spent most of 50 years in business guided by his viscera and the message on his business card that carried the self-designated title, “Senior Salesperson.” His profession was selling himself, and he succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. Ted’s reputation had been forged as an entrepreneur extraordinaire—the high-wire trapeze artist of Canadian business. But by the end of his life he had turned himself into the indispensable alpha presence within the Canadian communications community who recognized, harnessed and marketed the technologies of the future. While he was known better for being a risk-taker than a pioneer, the two strains came together to define his personal brand.
He prided himself on being the kind of entrepreneur who thrived as much on risk as its rewards. From a modest start, as the owner of a one-station FM network, and his moves into cable, then wireless and iPhones—he was always there, ahead of his Canadian competitors, suffering the penalties of being the innovator in a country where anybody who survives puberty thinks they’re ahead of the game.
Out of all of those tests by fire came a new and impressive maturity and the evolution of a dynamic communications empire worth $25 billion that Ted Rogers created from a standing start. In its various incarnations, Rogers Communications amassed assets worth $15 billion and employed 29,000. Under Rogers’ inspired hands-on management, it became a world-class operator and initiator of 21st-century communications technologies. (Rogers’ private fortune was estimated at more than $7 billion.)
Ted and I attended Upper Canada College, the boys’ private school in Toronto, as boarders at Seaton House. We kept in touch and I later wrote up his various exploits in my several Establishment books, where I dubbed him the Canadian corporate world’s “Riverboat Gambler.” It was a title he amply earned, not by frequenting riverboats, but by creating the country’s most innovative and most powerful media empire based almost entirely on his nerve and his bank loans.
In the early 1990s, when he took a run at Maclean Hunter, then Canada’s premier publishing house, I described the standoff in Maclean’s as an epic showdown between a Riverboat Gambler and a Village Parson. “I guess that’s true,’’ Rogers quipped, the next time I met him. “But I don’t know why they keep referring to me as a Village Parson.’’
Now, upon his death of heart failure at age 75, his early exploits seem hard to credit—even in retrospect. Ted Rogers only occasionally slowed down long enough to be called an incurable workaholic, but most of the time he made that category seem comically inadequate. Negotiating deals and financing them was life to him; everything else (except his family) was distraction. His work habits more closely resembled the schedule of one of those donkeys that used to drive water pumps in tropical penal colonies. He never stopped.
His backers were Scotia and Toronto-Dominion bankers who treated him as a phenomenon in the art of financing. He could extract almost any loan from their nervous hands and in the process made these virago number crunchers feel graced for having financed his bounty. Still, each transaction took its toll. Robin Korthals, former president of the Toronto-Dominion Bank where Rogers did most of his initial banking, once confided in me that Ted had burnt out 14 of his most senior credit officers during their 20-year association, with his debts running as high as $5 billion at one time. One of his closest scrapes coincided with the endangered financial status of Brazil, which for some long-forgotten reason Canadian banks felt duty-bound to return to solvency. “No problem,” Ted told a startled Bay Street credit officer. “Just think of me as Brazil.”
Rogers cited many Golden Rules to live by, but his belief system came down to a single axiom: what he lacked in evidence, he made up for in conviction. He preached that loans in his capable hands created opportunities—the chance to sponsor and exploit the profit side of newness, which proved to be the case. With one exception (Unitel, his challenge to Bell’s long distance network), his plans always panned out. There was something un-Canadian about his unbridled enthusiasm, even more so because he believed as much in his country as in himself.
