Family Business

After passing through the steel gate that guards the front entrance of the squat building on Buffalo Place in Southwest Winnipeg, I entered an enclosed foyer where a receptionist greeted me over an intercom, and asked my business. On the other side of the glass, Lawrence “Lawrie” Pollard, dressed sharply in dress pants and matching argyle sweater, is busy with some paperwork at the reception desk. He puts down the pen and pulls the door open to greet me. “I’ve already signed you in,” he says as he shakes my hand. “Here, let me put this on you.” We both fumble a bit to try to affix the “Visitor” badge, before he says with a laugh, “Forget it. Just hold it,” and ushers me into the wood-panelled corner office where the chairman of Pollard Banknote oversees the family business now run by his three sons.

Pollard Banknote was actually born in the spring of 1907 when Lawrie’s grandfather Oliver and colleague George Saults purchased the printing arm of the Manitoba Free Press as it was then called, and rebranded it as Saults & Pollard Printing. Before moving to its current location in 1968, the business operated out of the old Free Press building on Carlton, with Lawrie’s father eventually taking the reins and–in a dramatic sequence of events worthy of a Hollywood potboiler–wrestling control of the company from some underhanded investors who had attempted a hostile takeover.

This drama played out one day in March of 1947 with Lawrie just two months into what was to be a temporary stint with dad’s company after flunking out of second-year commerce at the University of Manitoba. Although he had intended to re-enroll that fall, his dad came back to the office fresh from the meeting that gave him control and told Lawrie flatout, “You ain’t going anywhere.”

A career in printing was born. Eventually, Lawrie and his twin brothers took over and ran the business together before his brothers retired and Lawrie carried on solo. Lawrie, as it turns out, is not the retiring type. “I don’t know what I’d do if I was retired,” he mutters. “It’s the most terrible thing to think of being at home seven days a week. I’m convinced
I would die earlier.”

The brothers steered the company along nicely, with profits steadily rising until 1972, when Lawrie was at a convention and a speaker told the crowd, “You have all got to get with it. Computers are coming, and the whole world is changing. You had better find out how your business is going to change and get with it–find your niche.”

As Lawrie tells it, he took the warning back to his brothers and they set about looking for that niche, trying a few things, none too successfully, until Lawrie got a call one day from some people who wanted Pollard’s plant to print some break-open tickets. They had been bootlegging them into the country–this kind of gambling was illegal at the time–to sell them at the legions by the millions–a practice that authorities had turned a blind eye to because the customers were legionnaires. “I told them that I couldn’t get involved, obviously,” explains Pollard, “but these guys were making a ton of money. Ultimately, I went to the politicians, who initially said that there was no way that they would let us get involved, until they found out from the RCMP that these tickets also had legitimacy issues. Finally, the political guys said that if we could come up with a foolproof ticket, they’d ban these other guys, and let us print these things exclusively. After much trial and error, we were able to do that, and that’s how we got into the lottery business.”

“The lottery business” as Pollard puts it was actually securities printing, the niche the Pollard brothers had been looking for, and meant a wholesale shift into the production of stamps, stocks and bonds, and other government documents.

Business was good, and getting better. As governments across Canada and around the world began to recognize gambling as a reliable way to stay in the black, Pollard Banknote grew. Today, the company boasts six facilities with approximately 1,300 personnel serving over 45 lotteries, and an annual capacity of 13 billion instant tickets and four billion pull-tabs.

As the business mushroomed far beyond what anyone would have dared to imagine back in its humble beginning, Lawrie Pollard–always aware of the potential pitfalls of a family-run business–was left with a dilemma. “My father always said, you guys have got to have a deal whereby two of you can’t gang up on the other guy, so the shares are locked in. My two brothers and I each owned a third of the company and we worked there, ran the business and never really worried about the future. It bothered me, and I finally said to my brothers, someday, we’ve got to find a way of passing this thing along or selling it.”

Years later, with his three sons now at the helm, Pollard’s problem was solved for him by his boys when they took Pollard Banknote–a private, family-owned business since its founding–public in 2005; a change that strengthened the company’s commitment to the lottery industry, and enhanced its ability to continue to expand and compete.

Now, the funny, gregarious and energetic 81–year-old patriarch can relax and enjoy the successes of a company run by his sons, and co-founded by his grandfather, knowing that, as he puts it, “if someday we all get cheesed off and want to quit, or someone makes us an offer, we can sell the place.”

More than that, Pollard can concentrate more on his philanthropy. As a former United Way campaign chair, he is constantly in demand to spearhead other fundraising efforts, most recently for the new headquarters of the Winnipeg Humane Society and currently for the Manitoba Children’s Museum. He’s particularly proud of the Pollard Family Foundation set up by his sons. Among the contributions made recently by the foundation are those to FortWhyteAlive, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the West End Cultural Centre, in addition to ongoing contributions to the Winnipeg Foundation and the United Way.

“You’ve got to be active in your community,” emphasizes Pollard. “If you’re going to work here, you’ve got to give something back. You’re a better manager if you’re involved in the community. You meet all kinds of people. It’s partly a networking thing, but it also gives you a better understanding of people and you learn from them. That’s really what it’s all about in business. That’s the way I was raised, and it’s a win-win situation.”

Like a lottery, but better.

On doing business
in Manitoba:

“I’m a firm believer in Canada. I’ll take Canada over the U.S. anytime in terms of work ethic, and Manitoba in particular. It’s a great a place to do business, and I don’t think we salute that enough. It’s an inferiority complex–everything is about Toronto, and Alberta is booming–and that’s too bad because Manitobans should be a lot more proud than I think they are.”

On philanthropy: “I joined The Winnipeg Foundation 16 years ago. That was the best thing I ever did–the most rewarding thing–because they were an amazing organization. You got an insight into hundreds and thousands of charitable groups–people who had fine ideas and needed money–and that was a labour of love; you got far more out of it than you put into it.”

On chairing fundraising for The new Humane Society complex: “I didn’t know anything about the Humane Society, I’d never been in the door–and it was a big deal. I loved it. It was a different experience. I’d never met cat lovers in my life before, and they’re a strange breed. You’ve got to pay respect to these people or they’ll blow you right out the door (laughs), so it’s a wonderful experience to meet those people. You couldn’t ask for anything more. Now they’ve come along and talked me into chairing the campaign for the new Manitoba Children’s Museum. It’s a struggle when you’re doing it, but it’s a wonderful experience.”