Join us for Season 1, Episode 1 of the Better Tomorrows Podcast!
Quentin Gardiner (CEO of the HGA Group) sits down with local entrepreneurs and business owners every month to talk shop, tackle challenges, and share insights you won’t find in a textbook.
Take a listen to The Better Tomorrows Podcast for a no-fluff look at what it really takes to run a business in Alberta. Whether you’re in the game or just love a good success story, tune in for real conversations that fuel better tomorrows.
In this episode…
Quentin Gardiner, CEO of the HGA Group, sits down with Jim Rakievich to talk about how a small blacksmith shop in Edmonton grew into a company with global reach. They share stories about leadership, growth, and the lessons that come from building something real. It’s an honest conversation between two CEOs who’ve been through it and still keep showing up.
Transcript
Quentin 0:13
Jim, thanks so much for coming in today. I want to thank you for taking the time in the middle of a snow storm in Edmonton to come into the first episode of the Better Tomorrows Podcast. As a quick introduction, for the listeners, I’m Quentin Gardner. I’m the CEO of the HGA Group, an interdisciplinary professional services firm. And my guest today is Jim Rakievich, who’s the CEO of McCoy, Global, a publicly traded oilfield related company. And we’ll talk a little bit about what Jim’s role is, and hopefully get you lots of good takeaways today. So thanks Jim for coming.
Jim
My pleasure, glad to be here.
Quentin
So one of the things I’d like to dive into, if you’re okay, is just sort of going to your backstory. I know a little bit about how you started and became the CEO of McCoy Global, and I think it’s an interesting story, so I’d love to hear it from your perspective.
Jim 0:59
Well, I won’t go back too far, otherwise we’ll be here all day but I came to McCoy in 1996 as a manager of one of the business units that was underperforming. They brought me in to do a turnaround on the business. I achieved that, got it making money and they said, “What do you know about manufacturing?” And I said, “nothing”. And they said, “Good, we got a trailer manufacturing plant that needs help. You can go run that.” So I moved over there and started to figure that stuff out. And eventually, so for about six years at McCoy, it was really a lot of fun and challenging going into different business units to either do turnarounds or to in one case, I sold the business on the behalf of the owners, and then eventually became Chief Operating Officer, and then in 2002 when oil patch was coming out of probably one of the worst downturns of quite a while, from 1999 to 2001 they offered me the job as CEO, President and CEO, and just took off from there.
Quentin 2:12
Yeah so McCoy started, obviously in in Alberta, and then it has become kind of global. You have global reach now. You’ve got operations in a number of different countries?
Jim 2:20
So you’re right. It’s got a lot of history in Edmonton. You know, McCoy started in 1914 as a blacksmith shop in Edmonton on Jasper Avenue. So it’s got a tremendous amount of history in Edmonton. We’re still here. This is our corporate office. People ask me, what do you have in what do you have in Edmonton? All I say is overhead guys like me, but operations wise, we’ve got operating facilities in Broussard, Louisiana, in the outskirts of Austin, Texas is where we produce and design all of our data acquisition technologies and our fastest growing market and well, head count and operations is in the Middle East. So we’ve been in the Middle East for quite some time. We’re just moving, as we speak, to a brand new facility in Dubai, because we’ve out grown ours substantially. And yeah, we ship product to 50 countries a year, and operate around the world.
Quentin 3:24
That’s amazing. So shifting gears for a sec. I want to make make sure we’ve got some content here for the people that are up and coming executives or maybe aspiring to grow their own company or maybe be a part of the leadership group of something like McCoy Global. If you were speaking to your younger self the first year you were a CEO, what lessons do you think you would give yourself, sort of looking back at Jim Rakievich, when he first took the leadership
Jim 3:48
Man, there was a lot, there’s a lot of learning. It still continues. But when I think back to what I’ve learned and some of the big lessons, I think the thing that I’ve taken away that the most important thing of part of my role, it was hard for me, because I came from operations. I was doing those turnarounds right inside the businesses and when I became CEO, I would honestly say I was a shitty CEO for three years, because I was still thought I was running the operations, and what I the biggest learning is that you got to step back. You become like the orchestra leader. You know you can’t play any instruments get, if you get the right people that play the instruments really well, my job is to make sure that the orchestra is making good music, and so getting the right people in the right places is absolutely critical, and then give them the room to do what they do best. But thinking I had to have all the answers was was a mistake early.
Quentin 4:57
I understand through the years, McCoy done a number of acquisitions and obviously you’re in a number of different business segments. So if you reflect back on some of those deals, what is it you think now, in hindsight, makes a great business partner? Like, what are you looking for when you, you know, consider getting into business with somebody or maybe doing an acquisition? What are the key things you’re you’re chasing?
Jim 5:15
Well, that’s a really important question, because I’ve done both what I consider really good strategic acquisitions, and then one in particular was a mistake. But the most important thing is, you know, what is the goal? So if you know, we’ve got a business. We operate in our business, we understand our markets. Is this acquisition going to add value, not just numbers, adding EBITDA and making the revenue higher, that kind of thing. Are you- is the is the incumbent company going to be strategically aligned? Does it make sense? What value can you bring to help that bring consolidating those businesses together? And are you bringing talent? Are you bringing some talent that is really going to add value to the organization? And then every, every deal is different. Do you want you know sometimes people are just selling the technology, but in most in the deals we’ve done that have been very successful, the the key people of the organizations have stayed on, some for many years past what they promised to do, which is a good sign and but getting in deep, making sure that you’re checking the boxes that does you know? Are we going to are we going to make our shareholders? Are we going to bring value to our organization and to our shareholders by doing this deal?
Quentin 6:53
So you touched briefly on one that seemed like a like a sore spot, an acquisition that maybe wasn’t a good idea in hindsight. Were there, reflecting on that in hindsight, were there signs that maybe it wasn’t something that should have, should have worked?
Jim 7:04
Oh yeah, there was lots, but I ignored them, because I had done two very successful acquisitions, three actually successful acquisitions in a row. So I thought I knew it all. And then I got, I got too confident, and so we decided we looked at another deal that came across. The numbers look good. I didn’t know anything about that business but because, you know, we’re smart guys and can do successful deals, went ahead and did that. It was a huge mistake. It wasn’t the fault of the sellers or their business. It just was that we didn’t know anything about that business, but it, it brought my ego down substantially. We ended up ultimately selling it again. And the hard lesson was, don’t think you know like you really you gotta make sure that you do all the things you did before to make a deal successful anyway. That was my lesson.
Quentin 8:06
I think some, I always say some, some tuition is really expensive.
Jim 8:12
Yeah, but we got out of it. We got some money back and but we never made that mistake again.
Quentin 8:19
Back to the leadership. I mean, I think it’s we talked briefly about leading leaders and how that took maybe a few years for you to figure out that that was maybe an easier path to success. Just reflecting on your leadership style as it’s changed over the years. Do you I mean, I imagine the people you lead have changed and all that, but I imagine your philosophy has also changed. How would you describe, are you a different leader now than maybe you were even 15 years ago?
Jim 8:46
I guess to some extent, yes, but I don’t think my style has changed at all. What I mean by that is, I try to make sure that the distance between myself and the people on the shop floor in any of our operations is short. I don’t ever want to be perceived as the corporate executive guy that leads the company and what I say goes and all that kind of stuff. It’s never been my way. And, you know, I hope if, if you polled our people from every level of the organization, that they would say that, you know, I’m approachable. That’s always been important to me. You can’t figure out what’s going on in your organization if people don’t talk to you, and so I think that’s important and small things, because people don’t feel like they’re respected or appreciated. And you got to do little things. It’s takes time and it’s things that you got to squeeze into your day, but little notes to people, or talking to people and making sure that they know that you’ve got their back. That’s critical.
Quentin 10:07
Are there some – speaking down that path – are there some specific things that you do to try and stay connected? Like, is it a matter of, do you make a point of getting on the shop floor and wandering around and walk the four corners?
Jim 10:19
I do. You know, I get down to our our biggest populations, or our biggest populations in Louisiana, and then second would be Cedar Park, Texas, and then our corporate office, and then the Middle East. But absolutely, like when I, when I go to Louisiana, or any of the operations, I talk to each and every employee. There’s no way I allow myself to do a visit without speaking to every employee. It doesn’t happen. At every machine they’re working on. We stop. We chat.
Quentin 10:54
Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time to come here in a snowstorm and be on the first edition of the Better Tomorrow’s Podcast.
Jim
My pleasure.
Quentin
Excited to see where you’re headed and where McCoy is headed, and I’m sure we’ll chat again.
Jim 11:06
Appreciate your time.
Quentin
Thanks Jim.
Jim
You bet.
