April 10, 2025 • 43 mins
"Tourism advances our Cabot brand and provides people and communities with an incredible opportunity to escape inequality.” – Ben Cowan-Dewar.
Welcome to Chatter That Matters, where we share inspiring stories of human journeys, extraordinary dreams, and transformative ideas. The timing couldn't be more perfect for this episode—today marks the beginning of The Masters, one of the most celebrated sporting events of the year. It's also a pivotal moment as we explore ways to create a more self-reliant economy that attracts foreign investment, generates employment, and brings positivity and opportunity to our communities.
I sit down with Ben Cowan-Dewar, the visionary entrepreneur behind the acclaimed Cabot golf courses. Ben shares his remarkable journey, from childhood golf dreams to building internationally renowned golf destinations that uplift local economies and communities.
Listen as Ben discusses passion, perseverance, and purpose, revealing how tourism can drive transformative economic growth and impact communities. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or involved in tourism, hospitality, or local communities, this episode will illustrate why tourism and the experience economy must evolve beyond just being a place to visit and into a place to be.
Chris Ronald, the President of RBC in the Atlantic Region, joins the show to discuss what they are doing to help clients thrive and communities prosper, and why this region offers so much for those who visit, live and build their future.
To learn more about RBC Community Junior Golf: https://www.golfcanada.ca/rbc-community-junior-golf/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Over the course of my advertising career, I've had the privilege of working with
some fantastic brands. I still do with Chatter AI.
But if you ask me what's one that I hold so dear to my heart,
it was the global repositioning of Thomas Cook. At the time,
it was one of the world's most respected names in tourism. That
assignment took me to London, England every six weeks to work with their
(00:25):
internal strategy team. And what I learned
has stayed with me ever since. Tourism isn't just about travel.
It's about transformation, places, people, and of
economies. Tourism accounts for roughly 10% of the world's
global GDP, and close to 9% of employment.
It attracts foreign capital and fuels entrepreneurship. It
(00:47):
breathes life into local economies. It's one of
those few industries where creativity, culture, and commerce come together
to create something truly magical. Canada, with our
natural beauty, our three coastlines, our multicultural
mosaic, we have cities and eco and adventure tourism, we
have the second largest land mass in the world. We
(01:09):
have everything it takes not to just grow tourism, but to become
a superpower. But here's the thing, we need to stop
thinking of Canada as just a place to visit. We need to start positioning
ourselves as the place to be. What does that look
like? Well, it's the experiences that we offer that no one else
can. Our true points of distinction, and today's episode offers a
(01:31):
perfect example. I'd make the the right turn at Truro and
head towards Cape Breton Island. And without fail, every time I came on
Cape Breton, the sun came out. I'd get to that site in
Inverness, and I'd smell the salt, and I'd see that
landscape. I knew there was nothing else I could do but move
forward with it. The Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, one of the most
(01:54):
breathtaking drives on the planet, carved into cliffs, kissed by
ocean air, and wrapped in history and art. It's already a destination.
But it was Ben Kalandure who saw something more. I think that's
what the great golf architects are really doing, figuring out
how you interact with this landscape and move through
it. People would say, it was magical.
(02:17):
Ben envisioned to feel the dreams along this iconic trail, not for
baseball, but for golf. And in doing so, he created not just
one, but two world renowned courses that now draw visitors from
every corner of the globe. And more than that, he sparked a
movement, a local economy, a community, a reason for young
people to stay, and a reason for people to come back. He
(02:38):
created the reason to be and the reason to believe. In this
episode, you'll hear how it all came together and why Ben so
deeply believes in the power of place to build economic
prosperity. This is a story of vision, of perseverance,
and what's possible when we dare to imagine Canada not as a stop
in someone's itinerary, but where memories last a
(03:01):
lifetime.
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by
RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast, and
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always appreciated.
Ben Cowan-Dewar, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Hi, Tony. It's great to be
(03:23):
with you. I always start with sort of how did this all begin? And I
understand your childhood in Kingston, Ontario, playing something like a
hundred holes of golf a day without a soundtrack, but just tell me a little
bit about how you fell in love with golf. I fell hard for golf, at
a young age, and we lived, on a family farm that my mom still
lives on. We weren't farmers. But, as any, any
(03:44):
natural 10 year old with a little bit of land would do, I thought I
would go out and play, play golf in my yard, and that led me
to, building a golf hole, which my
dad helped me with. And, I had a 200 yard par
three that had seven tees that I used to mow in a really deep
bunker. It gave me a lot of joy as a kid, and I was a
(04:05):
member at a, at a wonderful little course and,
you know, 12 years old getting dropped off first thing in the morning on my
dad's way to work with one of my great pals and, going and playing
as much golf as we could. And so that was my summer camp. And, you
know, the game gives you so much and teaches you so much, but it, you
know, teaches you patience, it teaches you manners, it teaches you how to
(04:27):
treat people, and, I read golf books. I was a a
little bit of a golf nerd and really, didn't have a choice but to do
this, I guess. Crow flight closed secondhand. My dad brought home for my
birthday. We played for the first year in the field behind
our high school. We made three holes, then we graduated to
Dorval golf club, a nine holer. And I remember the first time
(04:49):
walking on and just being mesmerized by the
whole experience. Just curious, your first impression when you left that hole that
you built in your farm and showed up in a golf course. Do you remember
that? Do you recall that first moment? The smells, the feels, and what was it
like? You know, and it's funny. I mean, growing up in, in the Kingston
area, the golf was not downtown, Toronto,
(05:11):
you know, sort of private clubs. It was, it was rough and tumble. And I
remember going on Easter and being allowed to play, and I was
10. And it was soggy and wet as it always was in Eastern
Ontario if you played golf in April, and it just didn't matter. I mean, I
literally and I'd watch golf on TV on the weekends, and
I'd draw golf holes. It's just that, you know, I'd drive by golf holes and
(05:33):
be craning my neck out the window. And, I
remember watching the masters in 1986 and Jack
Nicklaus winning. You could only get updates on what happened at the
masters, on CBS at 11:35 just before the
late show. And they would come on, and they would have sort of the highlights
of what happened that day. And, you know, as a young kid, I would set
(05:54):
my alarm and wake up at 11:33 and run downstairs and watch
the highlights then go back to bed. So, you know, I mean, it was magical.
What do you think it is about golf that has that bagger Vance mentality
where we actually know who designed the courses and we almost walk in
their footsteps at times? Like, I don't know who designed Wimbledon as a
stadium, and I don't drive that deep in any other sport but golf, but golf
(06:16):
somehow seems to knit this this conversation with nature
and this this sense of sport. Well, I mean, it's amazing. Right? Because if you
think about it, so the the world's top 100 golf
courses and, you know, the first rankings of golf were actually,
in the late sixties by Golf Digest, maybe the early seventies, and it was
the the toughest courses. It was about what were the hardest golf
(06:39):
courses. And that evolved into ranking of one of the best golf courses.
But if you think about one of the best tennis courts, and
Wimbledon is just an ethereal experience. Tennis
courts by their very nature are uniform. And so, you know, traveling
to one country or another to play tennis, you know, you might get some
variation of grass or clay. But if you look at
(07:01):
the best golf courses around the world, there's so
much at their core reflections of the places they
are. And whether that is Saint Andrews or
Cypress Point or Royal Melbourne, they shine through
the landscape and the place. The best golf architects are
really artists, and I think that's why you remember them. And so I sort
(07:24):
of think of it like sculpture. Right? And so if you think about
Michelangelo and David, you know, to start with that
big piece of marble and to end with that and to
get the proportions right and to understand the beauty,
I think that's what the great golf architects are really doing is they're
sort of figuring out how you interact with this landscape
(07:47):
and move through it. And we've been so blessed to work with the
best and in stunning landscapes. And, you know, when
we started to see the early guest reviews in Cape Breton and people would
say, it was magical. And I thought that's what
I wanna do for the rest of my life. I wanna give people that day
in their life that, you know, is so resonant and special for
(08:09):
them. When I opened the show, I talked about the holy
grail of life as you can find passion,
pursuit, and purpose. And if they all come together, I mean, that is one
of the great gifts of a life well spent. When I listened to your interviews
and you just see in the way you just talked about, I wanna bring that
magic every day to people. How do you think
(08:30):
you stumbled on that? You know, my mom, who's a,
a family doctor, still practicing at seventy five in Eastern
Ontario and, and an amazing exemplar
and a dad who really fostered my love of golf. And
so my mom tells the story of obviously being a
young woman and growing up in Toronto and having a dad who told her she
(08:52):
could do anything. And so she believed that and went off to Queen's Medical
School in the seventies and would have been one of a handful of women in
her class. You know, they gave me that when I was in university
and the it was basically the beginning of the Internet, and I'd started a
golf travel business and, you know, which
was the Internet was so rudimentary in those days. I
(09:13):
think it was me and the handful of other people on it and took it
and said, I'm gonna do, you know, golf marketing and golf tours, and I'm
gonna do digital photography. And and it got me around the world,
then I got to play most of the world's great golf courses sort of
shockingly by the time I was 24. I was doing this while
going to U of T. You know, I just knew at that point, yeah, I
(09:35):
just had to get going. And, as a kid who grew up in rural
Ontario, the thought of being able to set out around the
world, see amazing places and particularly
see amazing places through golf, it really propelled me forward. I always
say, you know, with golf, if I wanted to have
lunch with a bank CEO four
(09:58):
times a year, you know, everybody would say good luck. But if you get to
play golf with them, you form a far deeper relationship. You know, you
sort of learn about people. You learn about their family. You watch how they
interact with service staff, if you're lucky enough to have a caddy,
how they treat their caddies. You watch how they act when they hit a bad
shot, do they take themselves too seriously. And my grandfather
(10:20):
was great. Always said no one cares what you score.
Everyone would care if you cheated. And if you cheated at golf, which we
do for fun, imagine what you would do in the rest of your life. Those
life rules were probably all the foundational pieces that set
me up to pursue a career and a passion. And you're
absolutely right. I mean, we're twenty years and a month after I visited Cape
(10:42):
Breton for the first time. But when I came back from that, I had a
a girlfriend who would then become my wife and two parents who all told me
they thought it was a really good idea. So, I blame the
three of them for everything that came after it. We look
at Cape Breton now and we realize that, you know, you've created something that's that
roars around the world, yet it wasn't a skip in the park. I mean,
(11:05):
you had to deal with a lot of initial skepticism from the local community.
You had to deal with a lot of bureaucracy. How
does someone that obviously has an appetite for life and getting on with
life and at a young age playing some of the greatest golf courses in the
world. How do you suddenly find patience at a young age to see something
through versus, god, this isn't worth it. I'm gonna move on to something else. You
(11:27):
know, Ben Hogan, the great golfer famously said that
the harder I work, the luckier I get. I was so lucky.
I was at a dinner in Toronto. I got seated next to Rodney McDonald, who
was then a young MLA from Inverness and a minister of the
of tourism who would go on to become a premier of Nova Scotia.
But Rodney was talking my year off about this site for golf
(11:50):
in in his home riding, and I joked with him. I said, administer every
farmer with, you know, 200 acres since they have the next great site for golf.
But they had this site that they had been as a town
dreaming of golf as far back as 1969, and
they'd worked tirelessly at it. Jack Nicklaus had done a routing plan.
Mike Herdson, who'd done Devil's Pulpit And Paintbrush, had said it was one of the
(12:13):
50 greatest sites left for golf in the world. And so they'd
had all of these attempts of trying to get this golf course off the
ground. Rodney followed up and he sent me photos,
and I went and saw it on a December day in 02/2004.
And so I didn't have patience. I think I had youthful
naivety and, and rose colored glasses. But,
(12:36):
again, I'd seen enough of the world's great golf courses that I
saw the land on a December day, and it was beautiful and the sun was
out. And I sort of thought I might be playing golf up till Christmas. And
these town fathers, and they were all men, greeted me, and it was
the, superintendent of education, the dentist,
the high school principal, all of these people who watched the decline
(12:58):
of their town from 1953 when the coal
mines closed to 02/2004.
Inverness was a mining community. It started in 1880 and
went till the fifties. And, you know, at the
peak, it was 10,000 people. When I got there, it was
1,200. Unemployment was extraordinarily high, and it
(13:20):
was, you know, a community that had certainly seen better
days. And I think these people just had a passion and a belief that
this land that had been their coal mine, you know, not an open
pit. It would had shafts that went down 300 feet and a mile out under
the ocean floor. And when you think about, you know, that
ending seventy years ago and what it would have cost, you
(13:42):
know, people in terms of their their lives to mine coal,
you know, you felt, an acute responsibility to the
place and the town to do a great job. And so
there were lots of skeptics, and I remember one fellow that I met and I
said, what do you think of that golf course? My first visit, so that'll never
happen. Change has been a bad thing. It's been about losing things. It's been
(14:04):
about losing children. It's been about losing industry.
What I encountered in Toronto, which was home at that point,
was people who would tell a young entrepreneur hateful
things like, that's a terrible idea. And just
absolutely brutal things. You're out of your mind. Why do you think you could
do this? How do you think you could ever pull this off? And in hindsight,
(14:27):
it was probably all really good points, which were you know,
people would say, are you a golf prods? And now are you an architect? No.
Are you a construction person? No. Have you ever worked at a hotel? Nope. And
so, you know, that does seem like an unlikely set of things.
But I think that with positivity and if you're
lucky enough to find purpose, you can
(14:48):
work your tail off, I think the nicest thing,
you know, you could say is people at work their
peers. I outwork my peers. Do you ever feel an impostor
when you're a young kid, the town elders coming out and
desperately trying to find a way to, you know,
reinvent, reestablish this home. You must have felt like
(15:10):
they're gonna see through me. Totally. Every day. I was also I was 25.
I felt like I was about 45 when I was 25, and and I
was desperate to act like it because I didn't want them to say no to
me. But they were clearly in a place of desperation to trust
me who had, a little bit of money, and a big dream.
But I think I could so clearly articulate, and I had seen it.
(15:32):
I'd been to Scotland, and I'd been to Ireland, and I've been to Band and
Dunes. And I had slide shows. I mean, back when you had a slide projector,
I would, you know, show them and I'd tell, like, we can build this here,
and I believe I can do it. You know, I'd grown up in rural Canada,
and so I knew rural people. And it's you know, you
just have to build trust, and I was one and I showed up and,
(15:54):
you know, some of the entrepreneurial constructs like doing what you say you're gonna do
when you say you're gonna do it. I didn't know that then, but I knew
it intuitively that that's what you had to do to build trust. And so
I think I did that and built on it brick by brick. Did you ever
wanna quit? Did you ever at a point of it where you went, oh my
god. This is just I I don't I've bitten off way more than Yeah. I
(16:14):
used to feel it pretty frequently. The fear and self loathing of an
entrepreneur, particularly of a young entrepreneur, is an
enduring thing. I was in a business that was
get rich very, very slow, if ever at all. It wasn't,
you know, sort of a tech business that you're trying to scale and, you know,
and again, this was around the .com boom. So, you know, you watched
(16:36):
entrepreneurs going in that direction and you could have thought, god, I was really
on the wrong track. And I did think that. And it was so hard, and
it was met with a lot of resistance on a lot of different fronts.
And so I used to leave Toronto, and I'd fly to
Halifax. And there was no parkade
across from the terminal. It was just a big open parking lot.
(16:59):
And I was renting with Budget who was at the farthest corner because they were
the cheapest. And every single time I landed in Halifax, it was
pouring rain, just pouring. I'd get in my rental car drenched
and drive 316 kilometers up to Inverness. And
I literally would just think I'm sinking everything, you know,
all of the savings I made in my business in those early days
(17:20):
from, from the golf travel business. I was plowing into
this to try and make this dream come true. And I just would feel like
I can't do this. I've gotta stop doing it. And I'd make
the the right turn at Truro and head towards Cape Breton Island.
And without fail, every time I came on Cape Breton, the sun came
out. I'd get to that site in Inverness, and I'd
(17:42):
smell the salt, and I'd see that landscape. I
knew there was nothing else I could do but move forward with it. You know,
you talked about creating that magic for the golfer.
How does it feel to also create the magic for a community? I don't mean
it. I'm, you know, giving you the wand that you're suddenly Gandalf,
but it must be something of immense pride that
(18:04):
this town is now got a new lighthouse. It has nothing to do
with coal. It has everything to do with its beauty. Well, I think it's not
why I did it, you know, twenty years ago and it's entirely why I do
it twenty years later. And I think we've had so many
wonderful stories. The primary school
filling up and split classes in a rural community, of the
(18:26):
tax base going from one of the lowest in the municipality to one of the
highest. You know, young men having to leave and go to
Alberta to support their families and mothers raising their
children alone to people being able to stay home and find a community
or repatriate to Nova Scotian. So those are
the magical stories. And I think if you look
(18:48):
at the reviews we've had out of Citrus Farms in Florida, which
we opened a couple of weeks ago, and some, notes
I had this morning from groups that were in Saint Lucia last week,
They talk so much about the beauty of the
places, but they quickly go to the magic of the
people and the service. Building a culture that people are
(19:10):
loyal to and that they care about has really been what the
success in Cape Breton has been about. And then, you know, hundreds of people
cash a paycheck, you know, that has a whole, a whole
series of rewards. And I think, you know, it it changes your outlook
on, you know, people who are down on rural Canada. How do you
reconcile today? I mean, you've got this conversation
(19:32):
with golfers. You wanna create an experience. You have to have this
conversation with nature because you're building the golf course as part of
mother nature. And this conversation with the community, do they they always
reconcile or is it there's a constant battle to sort of trade
each other off so that you're creating something that meets
everybody's needs? It it was a battle earlier
(19:54):
on. It is now not for a bunch of
reasons. Mostly, we have an unbelievable track
record and, you know, we have the only platinum
certification by the Audubon Society on, you know, sort
of for golf courses. And I think that wasn't a reason
we set out to fifteen, twenty years ago saying we wanted to be
(20:16):
environmentally sustainable. That was a key pillar of it. It just felt
like common sense. And Saint Andrews, which is my
favorite exemplar, which is 500 years old in Scotland, has coexisted
in a community, a university town, and, you know, the original
magical place in golf for five hundred years. And Royal Dornoch
has been a part of its community's fabric for four hundred years. And so
(20:39):
if you think about that, you know, you wouldn't, if you're in Saint Andrews,
poise in the water table in a community that everybody who works for you and
that you need the support of those folks would do it, and you wouldn't treat
your community shoddily. And and you can't pick up and
leave, you know, to another country and open a
call center. You're you're there, and you're there for good. And if I think
(21:00):
about part of what we were building were things
that stood the test of time. And while I don't know what retail will look
like on Bloor Street in, you know, five years, I know that
Pebble Beach will still be amazing and and Banff Springs will be amazing and
Saint Andrews will be there calling people from all over the world to
go and see it. So I think it's gotten a lot easier, but yeah, it
(21:22):
was incredibly hard in those early days.
We're not just providing money. You know, we're there to support
community
support committees. You know, they're active participants in the growth of
these rural communities, and it matters. Those are the words of Chris
(21:44):
Ronald, who's the president of RBC in The Atlantic,
and he'll talk about why the Atlantic provinces
is such a special place to live, to visit, to
dream, and to do. When we come back, I ask Ben,
a question I ask any successful entrepreneur. Your dream
has now become big. How do you hold on to what matters
(22:07):
most? How do you keep the heart of your culture beating strong?
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. RBC has been a long standing supporter of golf
in both Canada and The United States through their title sponsorship of the
PGA Tour's RBC Canadian Open and RBC's Heritage
Tournament, as well as key partnerships with the Heritage Classic Foundation Golf
(22:29):
Canada and the PGA of Canada. Combined,
RBC golf tournaments have raised over $35,000,000
to help communities thrive. But did you know about RBC
Community Junior Golf? This is an initiative led by RBC
in partnership with Golf Canada that's building greater diversity and equity in
golf by providing affordable access for youth from equity
(22:51):
deserving communities across Canada. To date, RBC
Community Junior Golf has engaged more than 20,000 youth participants
by providing first tee programming at no cost and subsidizing
green fees through youth on course. Who knows? One of
those kids might be the next Nick Taylor. For the eagle, for the
win, to the cap, taken. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
(23:14):
The
champion. He's an icon
now in this country. Supporting Canadian youth? Well, that
matters to you, to me, and to RBC.
(23:34):
Buffett's quote, the greatest luxury
is to do what you love with people you love doing it with, and I've
been blessed to do that every day of my working life. To
me, work is an extension of my life, and it's grown up around my three
children, and and that is, you know, just so fortunate.
My guest today is Ben Calendure, a Canadian who's making his mark
(23:58):
globally with his Cabot brand. Why?
Because he sees golf courses as more than a place to play,
but a place to be. Be with each other, be with
mother nature, and be with the community.
Obviously, you've got a brand now that you're stretching across a number of
sites, but it's also you as the individual. I mean, talking to Ken
(24:21):
Mason at RBC, Clive Caldwell, people that know you and just talk
about who you are and your values, how do you make sure that
continues to cascade across your organization as well? Because as you get
bigger, becomes less about the heart at times and
more about the machine. So how do you make sure that machine continues to
have a lot of Ben inside it? To do it and to do anything
(24:43):
at scale, which obviously we've done now, it isn't about me. It's
entirely about the team, and it was about the golf course architects and all of
the people. And and we build a culture that people are loyal
to. And so last week in Saint Lucia, I
saw a team of people who have been making that project
happen and, including, Andrew
(25:05):
Alkenbrack, who was a friend from childhood, who was my original GM,
and Kay Breton, who I've gotten gotten to work with for
almost fourteen years, and his, wife who was my
original CFO, and Kate Bratton who they're now with their
two little kids down in Saint Lucia. And, you know,
we built an amazing team in Toronto that support these
(25:27):
properties and we have amazing people at the properties and I think
we view it as these places should shine through the places they are. And
so the number of Saint Lucians who we've created opportunities
and I think will create jump off opportunities to go to other properties
and, you know, we have a project in the North Of Norway, which is amazing,
and the superintendent there is an Irishman who's just a
(25:50):
phenomenal guy who's working in Saint Lucia this winter. It's,
you know, there's no golf in, in the Arctic Circle this time of
year. And we have some of our really young bright lights from Cape
Breton over in Bordeaux, France where we've done it. So I think
it's cross pollinating it. And I have a poster on my wall, which I've had
for a long time that says work hard and be nice to people. But I
(26:11):
think one of the things for me is it's important to
get to those properties. And when you see a
service culture that is so rooted in kindness, you know, in the
early days of Cape Breton, we couldn't have had a kinder team.
And, you know, we had a woman, Ellen, who had
retired from cutting hair and came back to help us. I mean, we
(26:34):
needed all the help we could get. Our first thirty two caddies had university degrees
and, you know, Vince, who was the dentist in town, would caddy on
his off day just to help us out. We had a a
gentleman who had a sore back, and he was looking for Advil. And we didn't
sell it in the Pro Shops we do now. But she drove across town to
the pharmacy and bought it and gave it to him. And he sent it on
(26:54):
a page. She's like, no. No. No. That's okay. That was just the service that
we had from the beginning. A woman who came in and saw Wendy
and, it was just a brilliant woman who worked with us for many years and
said, I love that shirt. And it was last year, we didn't we didn't
have the model, and then Wendy literally gave her the shirt.
Building that culture in Cape Breton, that
(27:16):
really was the foundation. And so when you look, you
know, at an overnight success that's taken me over twenty
years, it's built on a foundation that was Cape Breton. One of the
things that we can do when we acquire something in
Bordeaux is, you know, get our GM there, Vincent,
to come over to Cape Breton. That's a really, really, really
(27:39):
positive and impactful thing that, you know, we've just made a huge part
of our onboarding process. You know, you talk about these values and
the sense of, I would say, almost simplifying business to bring it back to
humanity, put the person back in the brand personality. How
does that play when you talked a bit earlier, you know, that fear and self
loathing that people have with entrepreneurs? When they say, you know,
(28:01):
Ben, if you're looking for capital now, it must be a lot easier. But back
then, yeah, that's all great, but show me the profit. Well, let me see the
the spreadsheet. What's the bottom line like? How do you reconcile the
language they wanna speak? Or do you just find
capital partners that understand that heart matters as much
as the head and the hands? You know, Mike Tizer had built Bandon
(28:22):
Dunes in Oregon, which was really my exemplar,
a golf resort on the Southern Coast Of Oregon and a community
that, you know, I'd seen mining and logging pass it by.
And it was just an absolute international success.
And in many ways, Mike was like a second father, and I sort of met
him at the right time in my life where I needed to
(28:44):
mentor and I needed someone who would give me all the help in
the world. He knew the model and knew what success was,
and he bet on young people and sort of gave
them a shot. And he gave me an enormous opportunity with probably
a belief the downside risk wasn't that great and the invest the original
investment, you know, was relatively modest. And then as
(29:08):
we had success, you know, he fan fanned those flames,
you know, pushed me to to dream bigger and, and I've got
five good ideas, and 10 bad ones before I fall out of bed in
the morning. So I I think it wasn't a problem of ambition or
dreaming. I think it was just really learning all of those pieces
along the way. And we have several families, mostly
(29:30):
Canadian. Mike was my original capital as an American, but
the rest of the families who invested with us have been Canadian. And I think
they believe in the long term nature of it.
And it was extraordinarily hard early on.
A young entrepreneur can't underestimate. Like, it's just a real grind.
It's just very, very, very, very, very difficult if you do
(29:52):
it, and then you have the success, and then you have the
spreadsheets that you can point to the track record of it. And
I think it's also your network. It's your
knowledge. It's how many situations you've been in. So when you hit a
crisis, and I was in the travel business as a, you
know, 22 year old when nine eleven hit, which was catastrophic,
(30:14):
and the financial crisis almost ended Cabot, Cape
Breton. We'd started construction in the summer of o eight. We were one of
only four golf courses under construction in o nine. And then
COVID hits and, you know, I couldn't have thought of like, 2019 was
a record year in Cape Breton. What in the world could possibly
derail 2020? And over twenty years, you learn how to deal
(30:36):
with adversity and you have more people, you have a better
team, you've got more knowledge, you understand what believers do.
And so I think your knowledge, your network, your team compound
in the same way. And and so the longer you stick with it,
sort of feels like you start to get a feel for it. You know, I
think what we're seeing in the world right now is a lot of divide and
(30:59):
at the same time might be a rallying point for Canada to start really thinking
about making our destiny a matter of choice, not chance. And tourism's a key component.
What advice would you give to the public sector? What advice would you give
to the tourism industry in terms of leading with our best foot
forward? I've had to deal with government a lot throughout
all twenty years of doing what we do. We touch a lot of different departments
(31:21):
and, you know, you learn a lot about the bureaucracy and that
there are great people who can be convinced of great ideas.
And you learn that their downside risk for something
going wrong is they're fired and their upside risk is not
correlated to success. They rarely even get a
job well done, and that makes it tough. In the
(31:44):
tourism file, we have a brand that
is one of the top three in the world as a tourism destination.
Tourism is an unbelievable lead precursor
to people visiting a place and then deciding to immigrate to it.
I think it's interesting as we see, you know, tariff week
and a weak dollar. This is the most unbelievable opportunity to
(32:06):
welcome Americans, our other
relatives, really, you know, our our cousins, aunts, uncles,
neighbors from The United States into Canada, you reinforce with
the Americans that we are your friends and we've been
great friends. And, you know, sometimes in friendships and relationships, there
are ebbs and flows. But I think that's one of the most potent things,
(32:29):
and I think people don't give tourism credit. As an industry,
you know, the bureaucracy probably knows it. The politicians
don't really care about it. It gets so much
less support than any other sector. I used to, in
Nova Scotia, say it employed more people than forestry, and everybody would say,
no. And I'd say, and mining, no way. Agriculture too, no
(32:52):
way. And fishing, no, that was always the one. But it
was actually more than all four of those industries combined. And you had to say
it again and again to reiterate that it's so important and it
works in the rural communities of this country and it carries forward our
brand And it gives people an unbelievable
ladder out of inequality in a first time job. I'm not picking on
(33:14):
other industries, but I had somebody say, you know, tourism needs to stand on
its own more. I said, stand on its own. It's all it's done. You know,
what is the farm credit balance sheet? Is agriculture
having trouble getting financed by banks? I don't think so. You know, there's
private equity in that space. We have, you know, a banking
system that, you know, is not a huge supporter of
(33:36):
tourism, hasn't been traditionally. You don't have farm credit
equivalent with billions of dollars on a federal government balance sheet of our
taxpayer dollars supporting tourism growth initiatives. And most
of the tourism product that's been built in this country was built
around the railway, Banff Springs, Jasper Park, all
of those great places you know. I don't think there's an asset in the
(33:58):
country that's done more for the country's fabric and brand than
the Banff Springs Hotel and Banff National Park.
I was in The US and in The Caribbean twice the last two weeks. Had
three people said I'd been to Banff in the last year. What a beautiful what
wonderful people. This is an industry that's gotten a bad a bad luck
wrap, and we've got a number three brand and a product that
(34:20):
doesn't rival what's happening out there in the world.
Do what do I say about that? Is that a complaint? No. It's an unbelievable
opportunity. We are investing heavily outside
of Canada, being based in Canada. And what I'd say
is whether it's in Florida, in France, in Norway, in
Scotland, other places, you know, we'll hopefully see
(34:42):
soon. These places are dying for the investment, and it's an unbelievably
capital intensive business that can't be picked up and moved. Like,
to me, I'd be saying, gosh, that sounds like it's got a lot of the
tenants of success and there's a lot of knock on effects and it'll work in
the rural communities. I just wish we were doing more
to fan the flames of people like that. You know, Ben, I always end
(35:04):
my podcast as my three takeaways, and I just wanna go up front
and say, I could do a series on what you have to offer
because I think tourism means the world to us. I think what you've done with
the circle economy and the local community. But I wanna begin with the first one
is your comment about fear and loathing and the sense of
trying to pull people down and trying to take the the shining
(35:26):
eyes and the heartbeat away from entrepreneurs and ideas.
That wet cement is sadly, I think, even more so in
Canada than a lot of places in the world, that we somehow or other don't
celebrate our successes. We we want Blackberry to fail. We
want, you know, roots to not succeed versus celebrating the fact that we've built
these global brands. Second thing is the word magic, and I talk
(35:48):
about the magic of, you know, your your grandparent, your parents, the the
magic of the the sunshine showing up every time you drew to Cape
Breton and you wanted to quit. You've just surrounded yourself with
mentorship and love and people that believe in you.
And I think when you chase purpose and you chase positivity and
possibility and passion, you need to have that in your corner.
(36:10):
And I think it's a lesson in life for all of us to surround yourself
with people that believe in you and want you succeed versus wanna
hold you back because maybe your eyes shining and your heart
beating is something they either don't understand or are envious of. And
the last thing is the art of serendipity. You know, the harder I work, the
luckier I got. You can have those passion pursuit, but at the same
(36:32):
time, it takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of dedication. As
you said, success my overnight success of twenty years. So all of that and more,
Ben, I just, you know, I knew I was gonna enjoy this interview because I
love the game of golf and I love what you're doing, but I I don't
even think this is about golf anymore. This is about what the world
needs. Guy Nicholson, who, used to be an editor at
the Globe and Mail, wrote a piece about Catacliffs when
(36:55):
it opened and he said, he was talking about the
fabric of Cape Breton and Bill Coor, who's our wonderful golf course
architect with Ben Crenshaw, who we would get to work with again in Saint
Lucia, said, you know, this really is a celebration of Cape
Breton. You know, it's about celebrating the
special places we have in this country and most importantly celebrating
(37:16):
the people in those places. And, and I can't get a
job doing anything else, Tony, so I'm gonna get back to work and keep doing
that.
Joining me now is Chris Ronald. He's a regional president for Atlantic Canada at
RBC. He's been on chatter that matters before. What I'm
particularly happy with is after spending a couple years with his
(37:39):
hand on the rudder of RBC's Caribbean operations, he's finding his way
back to Atlantic Canada because this guy is an impact
banker, and, boy, do Canadians need to have people that are
capable of making an impact. So Chris, that's quite an introduction and welcome back to
Chatter That Matters. Yeah. Hi, Tony. You know, it's so great to be here and
as you know, I'm a huge fan of your work and your podcast and in
(37:59):
particular, you know, your passion for a stronger Canada. Chris,
before I get into talking about tourism and the circle economy, what
astonished me working with RBC is how much you
go beyond banking. And if you could just give me the highlight reel of
what RBC does to support the Atlantic provinces. I think
it's knowledge that's not readily known but should be known. I'll start
(38:22):
with employment. You know, RBC would be one of the larger employees in the
region, especially when you take into account. We've got 1,200 people that
work, in the RBC Innovation Hub in Bedford. So that's
outside of the of our of our main business here in in branch of
commercial banking. You know, then RBC pays its fair share of taxes, you know, as
we should, which supports federal, provincial, and local municipal
(38:44):
governments. You know, then I think of the local not for profit community
organizations, many of which we support, you know, as do other financial
institutions. You know, for RBC last year, we gave, you know,
5,400,000.0 in donations, dollars 500,000 in
regional sponsorships, and then add almost a $700,000 in
community together grants that RBC gives to its employees for them to
(39:06):
give to support the charities that are near and dear to their hearts. It's not
just about the money, it's the hours our employees spend in volunteering at
these same organizations that is equally important. You know, we are one of
the largest, if not the largest, financers of small, medium, and
large businesses in this region and across Canada for that matter. You know, and so
because of that, you know, we've got the privilege of dealing with many tourism
(39:28):
operators, merchants, restaurants, service providers,
and we're providing them with the advice to help them start, run,
and expand their operations. I wanna now talk about
tourism and the circle economy. Build it and they
will come. It's not just tourism, it's other industry. It's young
people staying because of purpose and possibility. Is that
(39:51):
something that you're seeing in the East Coast? And if
so, what does an entity like RBC do to add
sort of that passion to that fire, capital to that fire?
You know, I think it starts with our people. Local matters. They're
part of the community, and they're there to support individuals
and and businesses. And and knowing the community and being part
(40:14):
of the community, I believe is really key. And I'll give you an
example. So we've got a branch in West Pubdeco,
and West Pubdeco is a small community at the Southwestern
Tip of Nova Scotia. You know, it's got one of the largest commercial fishing fleets
in Atlantic Canada. In fact, the RBC is there supporting these
clients and the fishing industry matters. You know, we know them
(40:36):
and the uniqueness of their industry. And I was there two weeks ago and the
clients told me exactly that. You know, the advice we
provide, I believe, is second to none. You know, we hire the best and
their goal is to really know their clients. We're here in good times and more
more importantly in tough times to help our clients turn their ideas
into reality, whether that's saving for retirement, putting their
(40:58):
kids through school, taking a bucket list trip, or as you, you know,
talked about helping them start, run, or expand their
businesses. And talk to me about this sense of place, this
beautiful landscape called Eastern Canada. It's
gonna have a magnetic force. It's gonna attract
others. It's not just a question of can I make money on a golf course
(41:19):
or make money on an inn? Can this inn support
regenerative farming? Can this golf course support the
tourism schools? Canada's future might not be trying to
solve everything at once, but creating a series of places across
Canada that, in fact, when they start resonating, what it
does is starts revitalizing our economy. I've been to Interverness, Nova
(41:41):
Scotia. I believe that Ben has has created magic there. You know,
it's one of my favorite places on earth. One of the top golf
experiences, worldwide. Creating a destination
where people wanna come and people wanna grow their economies, bring
their businesses. From a tourism perspective, you know, it is the seeds that
is generating more and more economic growth.
(42:03):
Took risks, you know, risks that many would have said that wouldn't have been successful.
Those seeds are showing that entrepreneurs can and, you know, RBC,
the fact that we are in many of these small communities, we have the opportunity
to end up taking these seeds and and helping these customers grow with their
with their ideas. RBC has this campaign called Your Ideas
(42:23):
Happen Here. How open, honestly, is
an organization the size of RBC to having these entrepreneurs
come in and going, I have this idea that the
dreams and imaginations of Canadians, are
welcome when you walk through our doors. Ideas do happen here. You know, I
think right now, Atlantic Canada is is having
(42:46):
its day. People are choosing from all around the world
to come to Atlantic Canada. What has impressed me the most of, you know,
coming back to to Halifax is just the different languages that are spoken on
the on the boardwalk here in Halifax that would have happened four or
five, six years ago. To make their dreams happen here, help them
start their businesses, helping them find their the home of
(43:08):
their dreams. And it's really exciting. I'm thrilled you're back there.
Hopefully, you'll make your way back to Toronto this summer, and we can have a
round of golf. I look forward to that, Tony.
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
Over the course of my advertising career, I've had the privilege of working with
some fantastic brands. I still do with Chatter AI.
But if you ask me what's one that I hold so dear to my heart,
it was the global repositioning of Thomas Cook. At the time,
it was one of the world's most respected names in tourism. That
assignment took me to London, England every six weeks to work with their
(00:25):
internal strategy team. And what I learned
has stayed with me ever since. Tourism isn't just about travel.
It's about transformation, places, people, and of
economies. Tourism accounts for roughly 10% of the world's
global GDP, and close to 9% of employment.
It attracts foreign capital and fuels entrepreneurship. It
(00:47):
breathes life into local economies. It's one of
those few industries where creativity, culture, and commerce come together
to create something truly magical. Canada, with our
natural beauty, our three coastlines, our multicultural
mosaic, we have cities and eco and adventure tourism, we
have the second largest land mass in the world. We
(01:09):
have everything it takes not to just grow tourism, but to become
a superpower. But here's the thing, we need to stop
thinking of Canada as just a place to visit. We need to start positioning
ourselves as the place to be. What does that look
like? Well, it's the experiences that we offer that no one else
can. Our true points of distinction, and today's episode offers a
(01:31):
perfect example. I'd make the the right turn at Truro and
head towards Cape Breton Island. And without fail, every time I came on
Cape Breton, the sun came out. I'd get to that site in
Inverness, and I'd smell the salt, and I'd see that
landscape. I knew there was nothing else I could do but move
forward with it. The Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, one of the most
(01:54):
breathtaking drives on the planet, carved into cliffs, kissed by
ocean air, and wrapped in history and art. It's already a destination.
But it was Ben Kalandure who saw something more. I think that's
what the great golf architects are really doing, figuring out
how you interact with this landscape and move through
it. People would say, it was magical.
(02:17):
Ben envisioned to feel the dreams along this iconic trail, not for
baseball, but for golf. And in doing so, he created not just
one, but two world renowned courses that now draw visitors from
every corner of the globe. And more than that, he sparked a
movement, a local economy, a community, a reason for young
people to stay, and a reason for people to come back. He
(02:38):
created the reason to be and the reason to believe. In this
episode, you'll hear how it all came together and why Ben so
deeply believes in the power of place to build economic
prosperity. This is a story of vision, of perseverance,
and what's possible when we dare to imagine Canada not as a stop
in someone's itinerary, but where memories last a
(03:01):
lifetime.
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by
RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast, and
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always appreciated.
Ben Cowan-Dewar, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Hi, Tony. It's great to be
(03:23):
with you. I always start with sort of how did this all begin? And I
understand your childhood in Kingston, Ontario, playing something like a
hundred holes of golf a day without a soundtrack, but just tell me a little
bit about how you fell in love with golf. I fell hard for golf, at
a young age, and we lived, on a family farm that my mom still
lives on. We weren't farmers. But, as any, any
(03:44):
natural 10 year old with a little bit of land would do, I thought I
would go out and play, play golf in my yard, and that led me
to, building a golf hole, which my
dad helped me with. And, I had a 200 yard par
three that had seven tees that I used to mow in a really deep
bunker. It gave me a lot of joy as a kid, and I was a
(04:05):
member at a, at a wonderful little course and,
you know, 12 years old getting dropped off first thing in the morning on my
dad's way to work with one of my great pals and, going and playing
as much golf as we could. And so that was my summer camp. And, you
know, the game gives you so much and teaches you so much, but it, you
know, teaches you patience, it teaches you manners, it teaches you how to
(04:27):
treat people, and, I read golf books. I was a a
little bit of a golf nerd and really, didn't have a choice but to do
this, I guess. Crow flight closed secondhand. My dad brought home for my
birthday. We played for the first year in the field behind
our high school. We made three holes, then we graduated to
Dorval golf club, a nine holer. And I remember the first time
(04:49):
walking on and just being mesmerized by the
whole experience. Just curious, your first impression when you left that hole that
you built in your farm and showed up in a golf course. Do you remember
that? Do you recall that first moment? The smells, the feels, and what was it
like? You know, and it's funny. I mean, growing up in, in the Kingston
area, the golf was not downtown, Toronto,
(05:11):
you know, sort of private clubs. It was, it was rough and tumble. And I
remember going on Easter and being allowed to play, and I was
10. And it was soggy and wet as it always was in Eastern
Ontario if you played golf in April, and it just didn't matter. I mean, I
literally and I'd watch golf on TV on the weekends, and
I'd draw golf holes. It's just that, you know, I'd drive by golf holes and
(05:33):
be craning my neck out the window. And, I
remember watching the masters in 1986 and Jack
Nicklaus winning. You could only get updates on what happened at the
masters, on CBS at 11:35 just before the
late show. And they would come on, and they would have sort of the highlights
of what happened that day. And, you know, as a young kid, I would set
(05:54):
my alarm and wake up at 11:33 and run downstairs and watch
the highlights then go back to bed. So, you know, I mean, it was magical.
What do you think it is about golf that has that bagger Vance mentality
where we actually know who designed the courses and we almost walk in
their footsteps at times? Like, I don't know who designed Wimbledon as a
stadium, and I don't drive that deep in any other sport but golf, but golf
(06:16):
somehow seems to knit this this conversation with nature
and this this sense of sport. Well, I mean, it's amazing. Right? Because if you
think about it, so the the world's top 100 golf
courses and, you know, the first rankings of golf were actually,
in the late sixties by Golf Digest, maybe the early seventies, and it was
the the toughest courses. It was about what were the hardest golf
(06:39):
courses. And that evolved into ranking of one of the best golf courses.
But if you think about one of the best tennis courts, and
Wimbledon is just an ethereal experience. Tennis
courts by their very nature are uniform. And so, you know, traveling
to one country or another to play tennis, you know, you might get some
variation of grass or clay. But if you look at
(07:01):
the best golf courses around the world, there's so
much at their core reflections of the places they
are. And whether that is Saint Andrews or
Cypress Point or Royal Melbourne, they shine through
the landscape and the place. The best golf architects are
really artists, and I think that's why you remember them. And so I sort
(07:24):
of think of it like sculpture. Right? And so if you think about
Michelangelo and David, you know, to start with that
big piece of marble and to end with that and to
get the proportions right and to understand the beauty,
I think that's what the great golf architects are really doing is they're
sort of figuring out how you interact with this landscape
(07:47):
and move through it. And we've been so blessed to work with the
best and in stunning landscapes. And, you know, when
we started to see the early guest reviews in Cape Breton and people would
say, it was magical. And I thought that's what
I wanna do for the rest of my life. I wanna give people that day
in their life that, you know, is so resonant and special for
(08:09):
them. When I opened the show, I talked about the holy
grail of life as you can find passion,
pursuit, and purpose. And if they all come together, I mean, that is one
of the great gifts of a life well spent. When I listened to your interviews
and you just see in the way you just talked about, I wanna bring that
magic every day to people. How do you think
(08:30):
you stumbled on that? You know, my mom, who's a,
a family doctor, still practicing at seventy five in Eastern
Ontario and, and an amazing exemplar
and a dad who really fostered my love of golf. And
so my mom tells the story of obviously being a
young woman and growing up in Toronto and having a dad who told her she
(08:52):
could do anything. And so she believed that and went off to Queen's Medical
School in the seventies and would have been one of a handful of women in
her class. You know, they gave me that when I was in university
and the it was basically the beginning of the Internet, and I'd started a
golf travel business and, you know, which
was the Internet was so rudimentary in those days. I
(09:13):
think it was me and the handful of other people on it and took it
and said, I'm gonna do, you know, golf marketing and golf tours, and I'm
gonna do digital photography. And and it got me around the world,
then I got to play most of the world's great golf courses sort of
shockingly by the time I was 24. I was doing this while
going to U of T. You know, I just knew at that point, yeah, I
(09:35):
just had to get going. And, as a kid who grew up in rural
Ontario, the thought of being able to set out around the
world, see amazing places and particularly
see amazing places through golf, it really propelled me forward. I always
say, you know, with golf, if I wanted to have
lunch with a bank CEO four
(09:58):
times a year, you know, everybody would say good luck. But if you get to
play golf with them, you form a far deeper relationship. You know, you
sort of learn about people. You learn about their family. You watch how they
interact with service staff, if you're lucky enough to have a caddy,
how they treat their caddies. You watch how they act when they hit a bad
shot, do they take themselves too seriously. And my grandfather
(10:20):
was great. Always said no one cares what you score.
Everyone would care if you cheated. And if you cheated at golf, which we
do for fun, imagine what you would do in the rest of your life. Those
life rules were probably all the foundational pieces that set
me up to pursue a career and a passion. And you're
absolutely right. I mean, we're twenty years and a month after I visited Cape
(10:42):
Breton for the first time. But when I came back from that, I had a
a girlfriend who would then become my wife and two parents who all told me
they thought it was a really good idea. So, I blame the
three of them for everything that came after it. We look
at Cape Breton now and we realize that, you know, you've created something that's that
roars around the world, yet it wasn't a skip in the park. I mean,
(11:05):
you had to deal with a lot of initial skepticism from the local community.
You had to deal with a lot of bureaucracy. How
does someone that obviously has an appetite for life and getting on with
life and at a young age playing some of the greatest golf courses in the
world. How do you suddenly find patience at a young age to see something
through versus, god, this isn't worth it. I'm gonna move on to something else. You
(11:27):
know, Ben Hogan, the great golfer famously said that
the harder I work, the luckier I get. I was so lucky.
I was at a dinner in Toronto. I got seated next to Rodney McDonald, who
was then a young MLA from Inverness and a minister of the
of tourism who would go on to become a premier of Nova Scotia.
But Rodney was talking my year off about this site for golf
(11:50):
in in his home riding, and I joked with him. I said, administer every
farmer with, you know, 200 acres since they have the next great site for golf.
But they had this site that they had been as a town
dreaming of golf as far back as 1969, and
they'd worked tirelessly at it. Jack Nicklaus had done a routing plan.
Mike Herdson, who'd done Devil's Pulpit And Paintbrush, had said it was one of the
(12:13):
50 greatest sites left for golf in the world. And so they'd
had all of these attempts of trying to get this golf course off the
ground. Rodney followed up and he sent me photos,
and I went and saw it on a December day in 02/2004.
And so I didn't have patience. I think I had youthful
naivety and, and rose colored glasses. But,
(12:36):
again, I'd seen enough of the world's great golf courses that I
saw the land on a December day, and it was beautiful and the sun was
out. And I sort of thought I might be playing golf up till Christmas. And
these town fathers, and they were all men, greeted me, and it was
the, superintendent of education, the dentist,
the high school principal, all of these people who watched the decline
(12:58):
of their town from 1953 when the coal
mines closed to 02/2004.
Inverness was a mining community. It started in 1880 and
went till the fifties. And, you know, at the
peak, it was 10,000 people. When I got there, it was
1,200. Unemployment was extraordinarily high, and it
(13:20):
was, you know, a community that had certainly seen better
days. And I think these people just had a passion and a belief that
this land that had been their coal mine, you know, not an open
pit. It would had shafts that went down 300 feet and a mile out under
the ocean floor. And when you think about, you know, that
ending seventy years ago and what it would have cost, you
(13:42):
know, people in terms of their their lives to mine coal,
you know, you felt, an acute responsibility to the
place and the town to do a great job. And so
there were lots of skeptics, and I remember one fellow that I met and I
said, what do you think of that golf course? My first visit, so that'll never
happen. Change has been a bad thing. It's been about losing things. It's been
(14:04):
about losing children. It's been about losing industry.
What I encountered in Toronto, which was home at that point,
was people who would tell a young entrepreneur hateful
things like, that's a terrible idea. And just
absolutely brutal things. You're out of your mind. Why do you think you could
do this? How do you think you could ever pull this off? And in hindsight,
(14:27):
it was probably all really good points, which were you know,
people would say, are you a golf prods? And now are you an architect? No.
Are you a construction person? No. Have you ever worked at a hotel? Nope. And
so, you know, that does seem like an unlikely set of things.
But I think that with positivity and if you're
lucky enough to find purpose, you can
(14:48):
work your tail off, I think the nicest thing,
you know, you could say is people at work their
peers. I outwork my peers. Do you ever feel an impostor
when you're a young kid, the town elders coming out and
desperately trying to find a way to, you know,
reinvent, reestablish this home. You must have felt like
(15:10):
they're gonna see through me. Totally. Every day. I was also I was 25.
I felt like I was about 45 when I was 25, and and I
was desperate to act like it because I didn't want them to say no to
me. But they were clearly in a place of desperation to trust
me who had, a little bit of money, and a big dream.
But I think I could so clearly articulate, and I had seen it.
(15:32):
I'd been to Scotland, and I'd been to Ireland, and I've been to Band and
Dunes. And I had slide shows. I mean, back when you had a slide projector,
I would, you know, show them and I'd tell, like, we can build this here,
and I believe I can do it. You know, I'd grown up in rural Canada,
and so I knew rural people. And it's you know, you
just have to build trust, and I was one and I showed up and,
(15:54):
you know, some of the entrepreneurial constructs like doing what you say you're gonna do
when you say you're gonna do it. I didn't know that then, but I knew
it intuitively that that's what you had to do to build trust. And so
I think I did that and built on it brick by brick. Did you ever
wanna quit? Did you ever at a point of it where you went, oh my
god. This is just I I don't I've bitten off way more than Yeah. I
(16:14):
used to feel it pretty frequently. The fear and self loathing of an
entrepreneur, particularly of a young entrepreneur, is an
enduring thing. I was in a business that was
get rich very, very slow, if ever at all. It wasn't,
you know, sort of a tech business that you're trying to scale and, you know,
and again, this was around the .com boom. So, you know, you watched
(16:36):
entrepreneurs going in that direction and you could have thought, god, I was really
on the wrong track. And I did think that. And it was so hard, and
it was met with a lot of resistance on a lot of different fronts.
And so I used to leave Toronto, and I'd fly to
Halifax. And there was no parkade
across from the terminal. It was just a big open parking lot.
(16:59):
And I was renting with Budget who was at the farthest corner because they were
the cheapest. And every single time I landed in Halifax, it was
pouring rain, just pouring. I'd get in my rental car drenched
and drive 316 kilometers up to Inverness. And
I literally would just think I'm sinking everything, you know,
all of the savings I made in my business in those early days
(17:20):
from, from the golf travel business. I was plowing into
this to try and make this dream come true. And I just would feel like
I can't do this. I've gotta stop doing it. And I'd make
the the right turn at Truro and head towards Cape Breton Island.
And without fail, every time I came on Cape Breton, the sun came
out. I'd get to that site in Inverness, and I'd
(17:42):
smell the salt, and I'd see that landscape. I
knew there was nothing else I could do but move forward with it. You know,
you talked about creating that magic for the golfer.
How does it feel to also create the magic for a community? I don't mean
it. I'm, you know, giving you the wand that you're suddenly Gandalf,
but it must be something of immense pride that
(18:04):
this town is now got a new lighthouse. It has nothing to do
with coal. It has everything to do with its beauty. Well, I think it's not
why I did it, you know, twenty years ago and it's entirely why I do
it twenty years later. And I think we've had so many
wonderful stories. The primary school
filling up and split classes in a rural community, of the
(18:26):
tax base going from one of the lowest in the municipality to one of the
highest. You know, young men having to leave and go to
Alberta to support their families and mothers raising their
children alone to people being able to stay home and find a community
or repatriate to Nova Scotian. So those are
the magical stories. And I think if you look
(18:48):
at the reviews we've had out of Citrus Farms in Florida, which
we opened a couple of weeks ago, and some, notes
I had this morning from groups that were in Saint Lucia last week,
They talk so much about the beauty of the
places, but they quickly go to the magic of the
people and the service. Building a culture that people are
(19:10):
loyal to and that they care about has really been what the
success in Cape Breton has been about. And then, you know, hundreds of people
cash a paycheck, you know, that has a whole, a whole
series of rewards. And I think, you know, it it changes your outlook
on, you know, people who are down on rural Canada. How do you
reconcile today? I mean, you've got this conversation
(19:32):
with golfers. You wanna create an experience. You have to have this
conversation with nature because you're building the golf course as part of
mother nature. And this conversation with the community, do they they always
reconcile or is it there's a constant battle to sort of trade
each other off so that you're creating something that meets
everybody's needs? It it was a battle earlier
(19:54):
on. It is now not for a bunch of
reasons. Mostly, we have an unbelievable track
record and, you know, we have the only platinum
certification by the Audubon Society on, you know, sort
of for golf courses. And I think that wasn't a reason
we set out to fifteen, twenty years ago saying we wanted to be
(20:16):
environmentally sustainable. That was a key pillar of it. It just felt
like common sense. And Saint Andrews, which is my
favorite exemplar, which is 500 years old in Scotland, has coexisted
in a community, a university town, and, you know, the original
magical place in golf for five hundred years. And Royal Dornoch
has been a part of its community's fabric for four hundred years. And so
(20:39):
if you think about that, you know, you wouldn't, if you're in Saint Andrews,
poise in the water table in a community that everybody who works for you and
that you need the support of those folks would do it, and you wouldn't treat
your community shoddily. And and you can't pick up and
leave, you know, to another country and open a
call center. You're you're there, and you're there for good. And if I think
(21:00):
about part of what we were building were things
that stood the test of time. And while I don't know what retail will look
like on Bloor Street in, you know, five years, I know that
Pebble Beach will still be amazing and and Banff Springs will be amazing and
Saint Andrews will be there calling people from all over the world to
go and see it. So I think it's gotten a lot easier, but yeah, it
(21:22):
was incredibly hard in those early days.
We're not just providing money. You know, we're there to support
community
support committees. You know, they're active participants in the growth of
these rural communities, and it matters. Those are the words of Chris
(21:44):
Ronald, who's the president of RBC in The Atlantic,
and he'll talk about why the Atlantic provinces
is such a special place to live, to visit, to
dream, and to do. When we come back, I ask Ben,
a question I ask any successful entrepreneur. Your dream
has now become big. How do you hold on to what matters
(22:07):
most? How do you keep the heart of your culture beating strong?
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. RBC has been a long standing supporter of golf
in both Canada and The United States through their title sponsorship of the
PGA Tour's RBC Canadian Open and RBC's Heritage
Tournament, as well as key partnerships with the Heritage Classic Foundation Golf
(22:29):
Canada and the PGA of Canada. Combined,
RBC golf tournaments have raised over $35,000,000
to help communities thrive. But did you know about RBC
Community Junior Golf? This is an initiative led by RBC
in partnership with Golf Canada that's building greater diversity and equity in
golf by providing affordable access for youth from equity
(22:51):
deserving communities across Canada. To date, RBC
Community Junior Golf has engaged more than 20,000 youth participants
by providing first tee programming at no cost and subsidizing
green fees through youth on course. Who knows? One of
those kids might be the next Nick Taylor. For the eagle, for the
win, to the cap, taken. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
(23:14):
The
champion. He's an icon
now in this country. Supporting Canadian youth? Well, that
matters to you, to me, and to RBC.
(23:34):
Buffett's quote, the greatest luxury
is to do what you love with people you love doing it with, and I've
been blessed to do that every day of my working life. To
me, work is an extension of my life, and it's grown up around my three
children, and and that is, you know, just so fortunate.
My guest today is Ben Calendure, a Canadian who's making his mark
(23:58):
globally with his Cabot brand. Why?
Because he sees golf courses as more than a place to play,
but a place to be. Be with each other, be with
mother nature, and be with the community.
Obviously, you've got a brand now that you're stretching across a number of
sites, but it's also you as the individual. I mean, talking to Ken
(24:21):
Mason at RBC, Clive Caldwell, people that know you and just talk
about who you are and your values, how do you make sure that
continues to cascade across your organization as well? Because as you get
bigger, becomes less about the heart at times and
more about the machine. So how do you make sure that machine continues to
have a lot of Ben inside it? To do it and to do anything
(24:43):
at scale, which obviously we've done now, it isn't about me. It's
entirely about the team, and it was about the golf course architects and all of
the people. And and we build a culture that people are loyal
to. And so last week in Saint Lucia, I
saw a team of people who have been making that project
happen and, including, Andrew
(25:05):
Alkenbrack, who was a friend from childhood, who was my original GM,
and Kay Breton, who I've gotten gotten to work with for
almost fourteen years, and his, wife who was my
original CFO, and Kate Bratton who they're now with their
two little kids down in Saint Lucia. And, you know,
we built an amazing team in Toronto that support these
(25:27):
properties and we have amazing people at the properties and I think
we view it as these places should shine through the places they are. And
so the number of Saint Lucians who we've created opportunities
and I think will create jump off opportunities to go to other properties
and, you know, we have a project in the North Of Norway, which is amazing,
and the superintendent there is an Irishman who's just a
(25:50):
phenomenal guy who's working in Saint Lucia this winter. It's,
you know, there's no golf in, in the Arctic Circle this time of
year. And we have some of our really young bright lights from Cape
Breton over in Bordeaux, France where we've done it. So I think
it's cross pollinating it. And I have a poster on my wall, which I've had
for a long time that says work hard and be nice to people. But I
(26:11):
think one of the things for me is it's important to
get to those properties. And when you see a
service culture that is so rooted in kindness, you know, in the
early days of Cape Breton, we couldn't have had a kinder team.
And, you know, we had a woman, Ellen, who had
retired from cutting hair and came back to help us. I mean, we
(26:34):
needed all the help we could get. Our first thirty two caddies had university degrees
and, you know, Vince, who was the dentist in town, would caddy on
his off day just to help us out. We had a a
gentleman who had a sore back, and he was looking for Advil. And we didn't
sell it in the Pro Shops we do now. But she drove across town to
the pharmacy and bought it and gave it to him. And he sent it on
(26:54):
a page. She's like, no. No. No. That's okay. That was just the service that
we had from the beginning. A woman who came in and saw Wendy
and, it was just a brilliant woman who worked with us for many years and
said, I love that shirt. And it was last year, we didn't we didn't
have the model, and then Wendy literally gave her the shirt.
Building that culture in Cape Breton, that
(27:16):
really was the foundation. And so when you look, you
know, at an overnight success that's taken me over twenty
years, it's built on a foundation that was Cape Breton. One of the
things that we can do when we acquire something in
Bordeaux is, you know, get our GM there, Vincent,
to come over to Cape Breton. That's a really, really, really
(27:39):
positive and impactful thing that, you know, we've just made a huge part
of our onboarding process. You know, you talk about these values and
the sense of, I would say, almost simplifying business to bring it back to
humanity, put the person back in the brand personality. How
does that play when you talked a bit earlier, you know, that fear and self
loathing that people have with entrepreneurs? When they say, you know,
(28:01):
Ben, if you're looking for capital now, it must be a lot easier. But back
then, yeah, that's all great, but show me the profit. Well, let me see the
the spreadsheet. What's the bottom line like? How do you reconcile the
language they wanna speak? Or do you just find
capital partners that understand that heart matters as much
as the head and the hands? You know, Mike Tizer had built Bandon
(28:22):
Dunes in Oregon, which was really my exemplar,
a golf resort on the Southern Coast Of Oregon and a community
that, you know, I'd seen mining and logging pass it by.
And it was just an absolute international success.
And in many ways, Mike was like a second father, and I sort of met
him at the right time in my life where I needed to
(28:44):
mentor and I needed someone who would give me all the help in
the world. He knew the model and knew what success was,
and he bet on young people and sort of gave
them a shot. And he gave me an enormous opportunity with probably
a belief the downside risk wasn't that great and the invest the original
investment, you know, was relatively modest. And then as
(29:08):
we had success, you know, he fan fanned those flames,
you know, pushed me to to dream bigger and, and I've got
five good ideas, and 10 bad ones before I fall out of bed in
the morning. So I I think it wasn't a problem of ambition or
dreaming. I think it was just really learning all of those pieces
along the way. And we have several families, mostly
(29:30):
Canadian. Mike was my original capital as an American, but
the rest of the families who invested with us have been Canadian. And I think
they believe in the long term nature of it.
And it was extraordinarily hard early on.
A young entrepreneur can't underestimate. Like, it's just a real grind.
It's just very, very, very, very, very difficult if you do
(29:52):
it, and then you have the success, and then you have the
spreadsheets that you can point to the track record of it. And
I think it's also your network. It's your
knowledge. It's how many situations you've been in. So when you hit a
crisis, and I was in the travel business as a, you
know, 22 year old when nine eleven hit, which was catastrophic,
(30:14):
and the financial crisis almost ended Cabot, Cape
Breton. We'd started construction in the summer of o eight. We were one of
only four golf courses under construction in o nine. And then
COVID hits and, you know, I couldn't have thought of like, 2019 was
a record year in Cape Breton. What in the world could possibly
derail 2020? And over twenty years, you learn how to deal
(30:36):
with adversity and you have more people, you have a better
team, you've got more knowledge, you understand what believers do.
And so I think your knowledge, your network, your team compound
in the same way. And and so the longer you stick with it,
sort of feels like you start to get a feel for it. You know, I
think what we're seeing in the world right now is a lot of divide and
(30:59):
at the same time might be a rallying point for Canada to start really thinking
about making our destiny a matter of choice, not chance. And tourism's a key component.
What advice would you give to the public sector? What advice would you give
to the tourism industry in terms of leading with our best foot
forward? I've had to deal with government a lot throughout
all twenty years of doing what we do. We touch a lot of different departments
(31:21):
and, you know, you learn a lot about the bureaucracy and that
there are great people who can be convinced of great ideas.
And you learn that their downside risk for something
going wrong is they're fired and their upside risk is not
correlated to success. They rarely even get a
job well done, and that makes it tough. In the
(31:44):
tourism file, we have a brand that
is one of the top three in the world as a tourism destination.
Tourism is an unbelievable lead precursor
to people visiting a place and then deciding to immigrate to it.
I think it's interesting as we see, you know, tariff week
and a weak dollar. This is the most unbelievable opportunity to
(32:06):
welcome Americans, our other
relatives, really, you know, our our cousins, aunts, uncles,
neighbors from The United States into Canada, you reinforce with
the Americans that we are your friends and we've been
great friends. And, you know, sometimes in friendships and relationships, there
are ebbs and flows. But I think that's one of the most potent things,
(32:29):
and I think people don't give tourism credit. As an industry,
you know, the bureaucracy probably knows it. The politicians
don't really care about it. It gets so much
less support than any other sector. I used to, in
Nova Scotia, say it employed more people than forestry, and everybody would say,
no. And I'd say, and mining, no way. Agriculture too, no
(32:52):
way. And fishing, no, that was always the one. But it
was actually more than all four of those industries combined. And you had to say
it again and again to reiterate that it's so important and it
works in the rural communities of this country and it carries forward our
brand And it gives people an unbelievable
ladder out of inequality in a first time job. I'm not picking on
(33:14):
other industries, but I had somebody say, you know, tourism needs to stand on
its own more. I said, stand on its own. It's all it's done. You know,
what is the farm credit balance sheet? Is agriculture
having trouble getting financed by banks? I don't think so. You know, there's
private equity in that space. We have, you know, a banking
system that, you know, is not a huge supporter of
(33:36):
tourism, hasn't been traditionally. You don't have farm credit
equivalent with billions of dollars on a federal government balance sheet of our
taxpayer dollars supporting tourism growth initiatives. And most
of the tourism product that's been built in this country was built
around the railway, Banff Springs, Jasper Park, all
of those great places you know. I don't think there's an asset in the
(33:58):
country that's done more for the country's fabric and brand than
the Banff Springs Hotel and Banff National Park.
I was in The US and in The Caribbean twice the last two weeks. Had
three people said I'd been to Banff in the last year. What a beautiful what
wonderful people. This is an industry that's gotten a bad a bad luck
wrap, and we've got a number three brand and a product that
(34:20):
doesn't rival what's happening out there in the world.
Do what do I say about that? Is that a complaint? No. It's an unbelievable
opportunity. We are investing heavily outside
of Canada, being based in Canada. And what I'd say
is whether it's in Florida, in France, in Norway, in
Scotland, other places, you know, we'll hopefully see
(34:42):
soon. These places are dying for the investment, and it's an unbelievably
capital intensive business that can't be picked up and moved. Like,
to me, I'd be saying, gosh, that sounds like it's got a lot of the
tenants of success and there's a lot of knock on effects and it'll work in
the rural communities. I just wish we were doing more
to fan the flames of people like that. You know, Ben, I always end
(35:04):
my podcast as my three takeaways, and I just wanna go up front
and say, I could do a series on what you have to offer
because I think tourism means the world to us. I think what you've done with
the circle economy and the local community. But I wanna begin with the first one
is your comment about fear and loathing and the sense of
trying to pull people down and trying to take the the shining
(35:26):
eyes and the heartbeat away from entrepreneurs and ideas.
That wet cement is sadly, I think, even more so in
Canada than a lot of places in the world, that we somehow or other don't
celebrate our successes. We we want Blackberry to fail. We
want, you know, roots to not succeed versus celebrating the fact that we've built
these global brands. Second thing is the word magic, and I talk
(35:48):
about the magic of, you know, your your grandparent, your parents, the the
magic of the the sunshine showing up every time you drew to Cape
Breton and you wanted to quit. You've just surrounded yourself with
mentorship and love and people that believe in you.
And I think when you chase purpose and you chase positivity and
possibility and passion, you need to have that in your corner.
(36:10):
And I think it's a lesson in life for all of us to surround yourself
with people that believe in you and want you succeed versus wanna
hold you back because maybe your eyes shining and your heart
beating is something they either don't understand or are envious of. And
the last thing is the art of serendipity. You know, the harder I work, the
luckier I got. You can have those passion pursuit, but at the same
(36:32):
time, it takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of dedication. As
you said, success my overnight success of twenty years. So all of that and more,
Ben, I just, you know, I knew I was gonna enjoy this interview because I
love the game of golf and I love what you're doing, but I I don't
even think this is about golf anymore. This is about what the world
needs. Guy Nicholson, who, used to be an editor at
the Globe and Mail, wrote a piece about Catacliffs when
(36:55):
it opened and he said, he was talking about the
fabric of Cape Breton and Bill Coor, who's our wonderful golf course
architect with Ben Crenshaw, who we would get to work with again in Saint
Lucia, said, you know, this really is a celebration of Cape
Breton. You know, it's about celebrating the
special places we have in this country and most importantly celebrating
(37:16):
the people in those places. And, and I can't get a
job doing anything else, Tony, so I'm gonna get back to work and keep doing
that.
Joining me now is Chris Ronald. He's a regional president for Atlantic Canada at
RBC. He's been on chatter that matters before. What I'm
particularly happy with is after spending a couple years with his
(37:39):
hand on the rudder of RBC's Caribbean operations, he's finding his way
back to Atlantic Canada because this guy is an impact
banker, and, boy, do Canadians need to have people that are
capable of making an impact. So Chris, that's quite an introduction and welcome back to
Chatter That Matters. Yeah. Hi, Tony. You know, it's so great to be here and
as you know, I'm a huge fan of your work and your podcast and in
(37:59):
particular, you know, your passion for a stronger Canada. Chris,
before I get into talking about tourism and the circle economy, what
astonished me working with RBC is how much you
go beyond banking. And if you could just give me the highlight reel of
what RBC does to support the Atlantic provinces. I think
it's knowledge that's not readily known but should be known. I'll start
(38:22):
with employment. You know, RBC would be one of the larger employees in the
region, especially when you take into account. We've got 1,200 people that
work, in the RBC Innovation Hub in Bedford. So that's
outside of the of our of our main business here in in branch of
commercial banking. You know, then RBC pays its fair share of taxes, you know, as
we should, which supports federal, provincial, and local municipal
(38:44):
governments. You know, then I think of the local not for profit community
organizations, many of which we support, you know, as do other financial
institutions. You know, for RBC last year, we gave, you know,
5,400,000.0 in donations, dollars 500,000 in
regional sponsorships, and then add almost a $700,000 in
community together grants that RBC gives to its employees for them to
(39:06):
give to support the charities that are near and dear to their hearts. It's not
just about the money, it's the hours our employees spend in volunteering at
these same organizations that is equally important. You know, we are one of
the largest, if not the largest, financers of small, medium, and
large businesses in this region and across Canada for that matter. You know, and so
because of that, you know, we've got the privilege of dealing with many tourism
(39:28):
operators, merchants, restaurants, service providers,
and we're providing them with the advice to help them start, run,
and expand their operations. I wanna now talk about
tourism and the circle economy. Build it and they
will come. It's not just tourism, it's other industry. It's young
people staying because of purpose and possibility. Is that
(39:51):
something that you're seeing in the East Coast? And if
so, what does an entity like RBC do to add
sort of that passion to that fire, capital to that fire?
You know, I think it starts with our people. Local matters. They're
part of the community, and they're there to support individuals
and and businesses. And and knowing the community and being part
(40:14):
of the community, I believe is really key. And I'll give you an
example. So we've got a branch in West Pubdeco,
and West Pubdeco is a small community at the Southwestern
Tip of Nova Scotia. You know, it's got one of the largest commercial fishing fleets
in Atlantic Canada. In fact, the RBC is there supporting these
clients and the fishing industry matters. You know, we know them
(40:36):
and the uniqueness of their industry. And I was there two weeks ago and the
clients told me exactly that. You know, the advice we
provide, I believe, is second to none. You know, we hire the best and
their goal is to really know their clients. We're here in good times and more
more importantly in tough times to help our clients turn their ideas
into reality, whether that's saving for retirement, putting their
(40:58):
kids through school, taking a bucket list trip, or as you, you know,
talked about helping them start, run, or expand their
businesses. And talk to me about this sense of place, this
beautiful landscape called Eastern Canada. It's
gonna have a magnetic force. It's gonna attract
others. It's not just a question of can I make money on a golf course
(41:19):
or make money on an inn? Can this inn support
regenerative farming? Can this golf course support the
tourism schools? Canada's future might not be trying to
solve everything at once, but creating a series of places across
Canada that, in fact, when they start resonating, what it
does is starts revitalizing our economy. I've been to Interverness, Nova
(41:41):
Scotia. I believe that Ben has has created magic there. You know,
it's one of my favorite places on earth. One of the top golf
experiences, worldwide. Creating a destination
where people wanna come and people wanna grow their economies, bring
their businesses. From a tourism perspective, you know, it is the seeds that
is generating more and more economic growth.
(42:03):
Took risks, you know, risks that many would have said that wouldn't have been successful.
Those seeds are showing that entrepreneurs can and, you know, RBC,
the fact that we are in many of these small communities, we have the opportunity
to end up taking these seeds and and helping these customers grow with their
with their ideas. RBC has this campaign called Your Ideas
(42:23):
Happen Here. How open, honestly, is
an organization the size of RBC to having these entrepreneurs
come in and going, I have this idea that the
dreams and imaginations of Canadians, are
welcome when you walk through our doors. Ideas do happen here. You know, I
think right now, Atlantic Canada is is having
(42:46):
its day. People are choosing from all around the world
to come to Atlantic Canada. What has impressed me the most of, you know,
coming back to to Halifax is just the different languages that are spoken on
the on the boardwalk here in Halifax that would have happened four or
five, six years ago. To make their dreams happen here, help them
start their businesses, helping them find their the home of
(43:08):
their dreams. And it's really exciting. I'm thrilled you're back there.
Hopefully, you'll make your way back to Toronto this summer, and we can have a
round of golf. I look forward to that, Tony.
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
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