It’s no surprise when a graduate of the Richard Ivey School of
Business becomes a successful entrepreneur. But Kevin O’Leary, who
earned his MBA at Western in 1980, has become probably the most visible
entrepreneur in the country.
Since last autumn, he has been co-hosting, with business reporter Amanda
Lang, The Lang and O’Leary Exchange, a lively weekday program on CBC
News Network that debates the state of the markets and the economy. He
is also a regular on Dragons’ Den, the CBC-TV show in which aspiring
entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to venture capitalists, including
O’Leary. And he appears on Shark Tank, the U.S. version of Dragons’ Den
airing on ABC-TV.
O’Leary is certainly well qualified to
judge a start-up’s potential. He has had four entrepreneurial successes
of his own, including, most recently, O’Leary Funds Inc., a mutual funds
company he launched as the industry was consolidating.
O’Leary, 56, was born in Mont-Royal, QC, and educated in Cambodia,
Cyprus, Tunisia, Ethiopia, France and Switzerland, as his stepfather
worked with the International Labour Organization. “What I learned,
moving every two years, was that there’s a whole big world out there,
and Canada is just a small part of it,” he says. “Very little of my
money is in Canada today”
Following an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies at the
University of Waterloo, O’Leary pursued his MBA at the Ivey School
(where he now sits on the Executive Board). “The value of the degree was
in the credentials it gave me for raising funds for my business
ventures,” he recalls.
O’Leary’s fi st start-up was in television production. He became a
founding partner in Special Event Television, an independent production
outf it that produced original sports programming such as “Don Cherry’s
Grapevine” and “Bobby Orr and the Hockey Legends.” It was the beginning
of an ongoing love affair he has had with television.
Then, in the basement of his small Toronto home, he parlayed $10,000 in
seed capital from his mother into Soft Key Software Products, developing
software to help students with reading and math. He moved the
headquarters to Cambridge, MA and went on an acquisition spree before
selling his company in 1999 to Mattel Toy for US$3.7 billion dollars,
one of the largest deals to that time in the consumer software industry.
In 2003 O’Leary became co-investor and a director in Storage Now, a leading developer of climate-controlled storage facilities.
Through a series of development projects and acquisitions, it became
Canada’s third largest owner/operator of storage services. In early,
2008 he co-founded O’Leary Funds Inc., a mutual fund company focused on
global yield investing. He is the company’s chairman and lead investor.
The firm has $960-million under management across 11 different publicly
traded funds. O’Leary brought to the fund company a lesson he learned
from his mother: “She would never spend the principal, just the
interest. Everything I own has to pay a dividend,” he insists. “I looked
for money managers who would do the same thing. I just want to set the
investment style, not pick the stocks.”
Meanwhile, O’Leary also became a TV presence. He was a frequent co-host
on Business News Network (BNN), the cable specialty channel owned by
CTVglobemedia, and became the entrepreneur/investor co-host for the
Discovery Channel’s Discovery Project Earth, a program that explores
innovative ways to reverse global warming. But his highest visibility in
Canada has come from his roles on Dragons’ Den—where he has appeared in
all five seasons -- and the Lang-O’Leary sparring matches. He
acknowledges that his TV work has helped build his brand, as well as
introduced him to investment gurus and market movers.
O’Leary has an offi ce in Toronto and a cottage – shared with his wife
and two children -- in the Muskokas. He’s perpetually on the move,
though, seeking out new investment opportunities. He’s increasingly in
Europe and Asia, and fi nds the travel “just brutal.” While he says he
“has to figure out a way to retire,” he tried that for three years
following the sale of his soft ware company and got bored “sitting on
every beach known to mankind.”
Besides, he still has a to-do list. One goal is to take O’Leary Funds
public over the next two to three years; another is to “keep exploring
where TV takes me.”
