Don McDougall, Stratford’s 2023 business leader of the year, knows an opportunity for success when he sees it

On paper, Don McDougall’s list of accomplishments in business is staggering.

McDougall served as Labatt Brewing’s youngest president and helped the company establish the Toronto Blue Jays as a new Major League Baseball franchise in 1977. He bought and grew Stratford-based aerospace-parts manufacturer Novatronics which, among other projects, produced parts used on the Canadarm at the International Space Station.

McDougall also founded Rambri Management, the company that developed a big piece of Stratford real estate at the south end of Erie Street, he served as chancellor of the University of Prince Edward Island, and he had a hand in bringing both the University of Waterloo and the RBC Data Center in Stratford.

The list goes on.

It’s no wonder the Stratford and District Chamber of Commerce selected the 85-year-old as business leader of the year ahead of its 27th annual Business Excellence Awards gala May 4.

“When I got the call from (chamber general manager) Eddie (Matthews), I was overwhelmed. It was completely unexpected,” McDougall told the Beacon Herald from his winter home in Florida. “My first reaction was, ‘Is this a prank?’ Clearly it’s a great honour. …I’m thrilled. For the last 40 years — I bought Novatronics with a partner there in ’83 — we’ve been involved in a lot of different ventures in Stratford.

“…Having said that, we’ve been living there now since 2009, so it’s been 14 years we’ve been living there. We lived in London before that. So I feel like I know Stratford very well and I’ve had lots of experiences there and I have a wonderful, wonderful group of friends, both from the business side and the social side and the church side. So this is great.”

As an outsider looking in on McDougall’s lifetime as a business leader and community builder, he would seem the man has a penchant for being in the right position at the right time in the right place to make big things happen. With countless stories about finding opportunities for success in the unlikeliest of places, some of which he is looking forward to retelling during his keynote address at the awards gala, McDougall said the secret to finding those opportunities has a lot to do with being aware of the world around him.

“So much is written about goals and plans and all of that. I have to say that a lot of the opportunities that proved to be the best for me came from keeping my eyes open to both sides as I was perusing something else,” he said. “In the Labatt case, we were really trying to improve our market share in Toronto. We had analyzed the problem … and our market share wasn’t as good as we thought it could be, and we were losing out to Molson. We found out very quickly the big problem was Toronto. It wasn’t all of Ontario, even.

“When we focused in on that, this baseball opportunity came up. We could have just as easily brought in a new brand of beer, but that baseball opportunity; we didn’t create it. It came out of reading a newspaper article where a group in Toronto was pursuing a Major League Baseball team. … So it’s important to keep your antennae up.”

McDougall also said opportunities for success can sometimes come from taking that one-in-a-million shot. Before he and his partner bought Novatronics, McDougall said he was brought on to the company’s board by then-president Albert Novak, first to help him secure defense contracts with the Canadian government and then, two years later, to help him find a buyer for Novatronics’ Canadian division after he had decided to sell.

“So myself and another guy put together a dossier that we could use to talk to prospective buyers, but we fell in love with our own work,” McDougall said. ” … So I called Al, who I knew quite well by then, and I said, ‘Al, I know you want to sell. Would you consider selling to (us)?’ There was a long pause and then he says, ‘Do you have any money?’ And I said, ‘No.’

“He said, ‘Don, that would be one reason I might not sell this to you.’ ”

Yet despite the odds against them, McDougall and his partner managed to strike a deal with Novak that saw them purchase the company for $120,000 up front — the sum McDougall and his partner could come up with between the two of them — and $100,000 a year over the next five years.

“We had no money so we had to make it work,” McDougall laughed. “But my point is there were not many people who would have even thought of asking. I mean this was a business that was doing maybe $3 million to $5 million a year and employed maybe 50, 60, 70 people. … They had a lot of really good attributes: good products that were well designed, good people … and then it was in a growth business. Aerospace was taking off. … So it turned out to be a huge opportunity that could have easily slipped us by.”

The Stratford and District Chamber of Commerce will host its 2023 Business Excellence Awards at the Arden Park Hotel May 4. The business leader of the year is decided annually by the chamber board of directors through a three-step, secret-ballot process.

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