Canadians have never tired of Canadian Tire, but what lies ahead?
My first job ever was in the local neighborhood Canadian Tire outlet where, over the summer of 1970, assembled bicycles and acted as a sales associate. It was all-in-all a wonderful experience and taught me some basic values like responsibility and dealing with different personalities in a workplace setting. The preferred soundtrack in the store where I worked was Beatles music, an almost endless loop of “All you need is Love”, which to this day reminds me of bicycle parts.
While I knew that I was starting my professional existence with a truly iconic Canadian business, it was only years later that I learned how the store had its modest roots in 1909 Toronto as The Hamilton Garage and Rubber Company. Later, in September of 1922, brothers Alfred and William Billes invested their combined savings of $1,800 to launch their first store together, The Hamilton Tire and Garage Company, building on their association with the earlier store. By 1934, they had opened a flagship outlet at 837 Yonge Street , and proceeded to work on a catalog and mail-order system that would lead them eventually to have almost 60,000 employees and revenues well above $12 billion annually. In the process, they used advertising and slogans such as “There’s a lot more to Canadian Tire than tires” or “Tested for life in Canada” to become a part of our national identity, our collective consciousness. When business journalist and author Rod McQueen stopped by the Empire Club on November 29th, 2001 to deliver a speech entitled “Can’t Buy Me Love [more Beatles music!!]: How Martha Billes Made Canadian Tire Hers”, the store had reached such an iconic status in the minds of Canadians that people associated with managing it, especially if they were related to the founders, were followed with a fascination usually only reserved for Hollywood movie stars. And yet there were extremely serious challenges that were already emerging which, if not properly managed, risked the very existence of this icon that had become a part of every Canadian’s shopping experience:
“As for Martha’s beloved Tire, the way ahead is murky. So far, the company has survived the onslaught of American competitors such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot, but for how much longer? In 1999, Martha and the board told Tire’s chief executive officer, Steve Bachand, that the company needed a new vision. Bachand disagreed, saying that Tire should continue to focus on improving the core business through its well-established renovate-and-build plan. Martha and the board said that wasn’t good enough and Bachand resigned.
Two years later, Tire has a new CEO, Wayne Sales, the man who had been Bachand’s number two. The company spent months working with consultants at McKinsey, and this fall announced its new strategy: build new outlets, renovate and expand old ones and improve service in the stores. The plan sounds a great deal like what Bachand had proposed. That’s a lot of running just to stay in the same place.”
Our guest speaker at the Empire Club this week certainly has a strategy not just to keep Canadian Tire perched in the same place, but to continue its renewal and revitalization as an organization that will allow it to continue being a part of every Canadian’s shopping experience. Incumbent CEO Michael Medline is extremely sensitive to the intensely competitive retail landscape that he is now responsible for navigating his company through, and the need to fully understand the new challenges of the digital age and to master them so that “the Tire”, as it has been lovingly called by all those close to it, will celebrate its centennial year of operations in less than a decade as a perennial Canadian success story. He likes to say that as a business leader if you are not tracking it head-on, there will be no catching up. His address to the Club this week will be a call for business leaders to be at the forefront of change, and to be able to demonstrate to the world that Canadians do in fact excel at innovation. Keeping an icon alive is not the goal…it is rather to grow that icon in the context of our own age so that it is not only a terrific Canadian achievement from the past but rather an ever-changing, dynamic and responsive business operation that will also make it one of our great Canadian success stories in the future. In so doing, future generations of Canadian kids may well start their professional lives by assembling bicycles in one of their many hundreds of outlets across this great country of ours.
