Jim Pattison, nicknamed ‘Canada’s Warren Buffett,’ drives his own pickup truck

Jim Pattison roars through rural Saskatchewan in his silver pickup truck, barreling down the prairie road that runs arrow-straight to the horizon. Tossed into the back seat is a sleeping bag and crimson pillow — the unlikely berth for Canada’s self-made billionaire when he can’t find a motel.

Observing the speed limit appears optional, using the turn signal an afterthought. Not that there’s much in the way of obstacles — only shimmering fields of wheat stretching across a terrain so flat that if you lost your dog, as the saying goes, you could watch it run away for three days.

It’s here in Canada’s vast breadbasket that Pattison was born and where, at age 90, he’s overseeing one of the newest arms of his $7.4 billion empire: Pattison Agriculture, a string of John Deere equipment dealerships serving 21 million acres of farmland.

“We’re seeing more opportunities than we ever have,” says Pattison, steering confidently, his diminutive frame overwhelmed by the cavernous, black leather seats of his Ram 1500 Laramie truck. “There are still lots of opportunities with all the changes going on in the world.”

The road trip offers a rare glimpse of the intensely private Pattison, Canada’s third-richest man, who created his iconic business group in seeming defiance of modern empire-building. He eschews emails, carries a cell phone but barely checks it, and can count on one hand the number of times his group has used an investment bank in recent memory.

Pattison is often dubbed Canada’s Warren Buffett — a trope that underscores how relatively unknown he remains outside Canada despite a conglomerate that operates in 85 countries across a dizzying array of industries: supermarkets, lumber, fisheries, disposable packaging for KFC, billboards across Canada and ownership of the No. 1 copyrighted best-seller of all time, the “Guinness World Records.” Believe it or not, he even owns the Ripley Entertainment empire.

“Back in Omaha, I’m known as the Jim Pattison of the United States,” Buffett quipped this month when he surprised Pattison onstage in Toronto as the Canadian billionaire was inducted into the country’s Walk of Fame. Pattison dismisses the comparison. “Warren Buffett is in a class all by himself,” he insists.

Pattison has driven 1,000 miles from the Jim Pattison Group headquarters in Vancouver, across the towering Canadian Rockies to the prairies where he’s acquired four farm equipment companies to create Pattison Agriculture. He likes to drop in unannounced on his holdings, including his supermarkets and dealerships, but word quickly gets around.

“You’re the man we’ve all been waiting for,” says the receptionist at the dealership in Moosomin, Saskatchewan (population 3,100). “You got a call, did ya?” he says with a grin as he shuffles into the shop, helping himself to popcorn as he quizzes employees.

He listens intently as they share their pain points — the dearth of mechanics, narrowing margins on new equipment sales, and the intolerable noise in the cab of a new tractor that has farmers complaining. He occasionally pulls out a pad and an array of colored pens but mostly relies on his still razor-sharp memory.

Pattison’s rags-to-riches story recalls a different era. Born in Luseland, Saskatchewan, during the Great Depression, he wore clothes stitched together from the castoffs of other children because money was so tight. The family moved out west when he was 6, settling in Vancouver’s gritty east side. In the summers he’d return to the family homestead in Saskatchewan, where the land was still plowed by horses. A natural salesman, he was touting seeds door-to-door at age 7 and within a few years was trouncing grown men in a competition to sell the most subscriptions of the Saturday Evening Post.

His path to fortune began with a Pontiac Buick dealership in 1961. He bought it with a Royal Bank of Canada loan after persuading the local manager to exceed the branch’s lending limit fivefold. He keeps the yellowing, handwritten financial statements from that first year in a clear plastic folder.

Pattison says his favorite job is still being a used-car salesman. “If I had to, I could always go back.” He parlayed that into a global business empire over the next five decades, completing hundreds of acquisitions to create Canada’s second-largest private company.

Pattison’s folksy approach belies the tectonic shifts facing some of his businesses. Magazines in their heyday were his best business of all, he says, but people aren’t reading print anymore — the group agreed to sell its U.S. magazine distribution business last month. His car dealerships have seen ride-sharing and autonomous driving threaten to accelerate the potential demise of vehicle ownership.

One of his biggest stakes in an outside company is Westshore Terminals Investment, North America’s biggest coal export facility, in Vancouver — a cash cow with a shrinking life span in an era of tightening emission standards. His biggest public holding is a controlling stake in Canfor, the lumber company that has plunged about 35 percent this year as the U.S. housing market slows.

“Some businesses — we’re exposed like heck,” he says. “But we make the best of what we got. This is part of why I’ve got a job.”

Behind that stodgy image are businesses navigating technological disruption.

The Pattison Agriculture dealership in Yorkton is a newly renovated hub in a region of 60,000-acre farms, some bigger than Lichtenstein. Most of the equipment inside costs half a million dollars each; some customers will drop as much as $29 million a year in purchases.

“See what it costs to be a farmer these days?” Pattison asks as he walks around the warehouse, his 5-foot-6-inch frame dwarfed by the tires on some of the machines. “They’ll be less and less small farms. What’s happening is consolidation, consolidation, consolidation.”

Historically, he’s kept the existing management in place after takeovers, and he gives his deputies a long leash. “He trusts people to do their job,” says his son. The organizational hierarchy is as flat as the surrounding prairies.

For a company with 45,000 employees, it’s still run a bit like a startup. To this day, the corporate headquarters on the 18th floor overlooking Vancouver Harbour and Stanley Park doesn’t have a human resources department. The most important hiring decisions over the years have been made by Pattison and Maureen Chant, his executive assistant of more than 50 years.

Chant may have the most understated job title in corporate Canada. With her shock of snow-white hair and round face, she looks more like a kindly grandmother than the invisible hand that’s kept Pattison and his incongruous empire running.

Chant advises the group’s nearly 30 business divisions and has influenced who runs them. She oversees Pattison’s $25 million, 150-foot yacht, the “Nova Spirit,” which has hosted everyone from Princess Diana to Oprah Winfrey. She also looks after his private jets, his Vancouver office condo and a Palm Springs property (previously owned by Frank Sinatra) where Pattison gathers his top lieutenants once a year. For most of her career, Chant has worked seven days a week.

Asked if he’d ever considered giving Chant, 79, a more prominent title, Pattison seems surprised-it’s never occurred to him, he says. “She’s been a major influence,” he says. “She can retire anytime she wants, but she works because hopefully she likes it.”

Asked whether he himself ever takes a vacation, Pattison says, “Well, I get 365 days… If you like your work, it’s not work.”

Jim Pattison

Age: 90

Early days: “Most of the time, I didn’t have the money to buy anything that was any good, so I had to buy stuff that nobody wanted.”

Jim Pattison Group: With 45,000 employees, it’s based in Vancouver B.C. and ranks as Canada’s second-largest private company. Includes car dealerships, supermarkets, farm-equipment dealerships and Ripley Entertainment. Board members include the CEO of Albertsons, Robert Miller and Blake Nordstrom. (Update: Blake Nordstrom died Jan. 2, 2019, after this story first published.)