G-Force Group managing director Gary Powroznik kicked a 50-yard field goal at age 11. A year earlier, he learned to fish on the Fraser River. By 13, he was running the “mosquito” boat, making two-kilometre drifts and dashing to the dock to sell his catch. “At 15, I owned the boat,” he recalled recently in his Seymour-at-Cordova Street seventh-floor office.
That’s within field-goal range of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ regional office. Powroznik took early retirement from the giant accounting firm last year after 13 years as managing partner. Naturally, he was the University of B.C.’s top accounting student in his year. Coopers & Lybrand ran out the gangplank for him in 1974, when the late-comer to Canada had a smallish audit practice but strong specialty practices. “That was a rich environment for us to develop our interests,” Powroznik said. “Guess what? I was soon doing fishing work.”
B.C.’s herring fishery had begun again after years of closure. “I’d never fished herring,” he said, laughing. “But I realized that, once you’d been in an industry, you had transferable skills and could show insight other professionals don’t have. The light went on for me — big time.” Still, though never having gone broke, he joined the firm’s fledgling insolvency group and built it to 27 full-time personnel by 1978 while spending half his time helping rationalize a fishing industry burdened by too many boats, plants and companies. “That enabled me to leverage my professional knowledge, operate as a business manager, and let fishermen get money back that the banks were holding.”
Another light went on. Meanwhile, after less than seven years on the job, and just as a bitter recession hit, Coopers made him partner. Insolvency boomed and, after a complex series of receiverships and acquisitions, Powroznik urged Jim Pattison’s right-hand man, Bill Sleeman, to recommend acquiring Ocean Fisheries. Pattison later called it one of the best deals he ever made, then successfully consolidated other firms.
Naming industry, business, professional and entrepreneurial know-how as success’s key components. Powroznik said: “Because most people don’t work in that multi-discipline environment, you have to teach them and show them that they can do it.”
Then, with 22-per-cent interest rates crippling hotels, Powroznik had another light come on. He rustled up some smart teammates, several of whom are among his 20 or so consulting colleagues today, and “started bailing out hotels, paying off the banks, and selling them for two or three times their value.”
By then, with the hospitality practice morphing into real-estate generally, Powroznik saw his activities as “the health care continuum for business.”
Leaving PwC last year, he bought the real-estate practice. Faced with post-Enron regulation, he said big accounting firms have narrowed their focus and shed such activities, along with executive-search, mining-consultancy, hospitality and the like. Unrestricted himself, he’s “a playing coach, getting involved where necessary — goal, defence, forward — then backing away.”
He showed a diagram picturing G-Force’s role in the entrepreneur-professional-individual relationship. Another pictured non-entrepreneurial pros trying to grab more of a pie’s finite slices instead of growing the pie and all getting more. His “integrated professional business & industry model” had discs labelled Insolvency, Loans, Hospitality, Real Estate, Business and Other partially overlapping to suggest opportunities for internal cooperation and external enterprise. Recounting the long-ago possibility of kicking with a CFL team, he said: “I also played quarterback. I threw a lot of passes.”
The following retraction was published on November 12, 2009.
SETTING IT STRAIGHT: It was the Canadian Fishing Co. Jim Pattison acquired in 1984, not Ocean Fisheries, as I reported recently.
malcolmparry@shaw.ca
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
