The closer

Jon Ferry | Image: Paul Joseph | Published: May 01, 2008

The way former Conservative Party of Canada leader John Reynolds tells it, he was 27, living in Vancouver, married with three kids and vying to become the youngest-ever Canadian manager for Ethicon Sutures Ltd., a subsidiary of U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. He was explaining to some of the company’s senior executives and top salespeople at a J & J convention in Hollywood, Florida, why he had been so successful in selling medical products in B.C., knowing that getting the job he wanted depended on his presentation.

“Why am I successful? Well, this company has a book,” Reynolds told the convention. “It tells you how to sell, and I follow it 100 per cent. I don’t believe I have any better ideas than the person who put that book together.” Reynolds got the job.

As the six-foot-three 66-year-old relates the anecdote from his modest Vancouver office at the blue-chip law firm Lang Michener – where Reynolds works as a “senior strategic advisor” – his point becomes clear: you don’t have to be especially creative or brilliant to be successful in life. You don’t even have to have gone to university. (Reynolds never did and says he doesn’t regret it.) What you do have to be is smart enough to learn from those who figured it out before you.

Indeed, if you want to work your way up the power ladder, you could do a lot worse than take a tip or two from the former salesperson turned MP, talk-show host, MLA, Speaker of the House, Environment Minister, MP again, Opposition House Leader, best buddy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Privy Council member. Reynolds says many politicians are like salespeople who don’t know when to close a deal: they keep on gabbing just because they like the sound of their own voice. “How many politicians get up and talk for an hour and a half when they should talk for 10 minutes?”

John Douglas Reynolds was born in Toronto on January 19, 1942, the son of a Woolworth's manager. When he was five, the family moved to Montreal, where Reynolds would live until he was 17, working part time at a Birks jewellery store. Reynolds returned to Toronto in 1959 and got a job in a Woolworths store, where he was eventually promoted to assistant manager. But after two years he decided the job was not for him and he

quit. “I wanted to be out more and doing something a little more sales-oriented.”

His parents had since moved to Winnipeg, where his dad had found a job working for Marks & Spencer. Reynolds, who had no clue what he was going to do with his life, decided to drive out and visit them. “I arrived in Winnipeg late one night,” he says. “My mom and dad were having a party with a bunch of their friends. One of the men worked for a company called Tuckett Tobacco, owned by Imperial Tobacco, which sold cigars. And he said, ‘You should come to our office on Monday; we’re looking for people. You get a car and everything else.’ So I visited them on the Monday and I got a job.” Reynolds became the company’s advertising representative for Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

But Reynolds quickly tired of the Prairie cold and returned to Toronto within the year. It was there, in 1962, that he met his first wife, Margaret, with whom he had five children (including Paul Reynolds, the London-based CEO of Vancouver securities firm Canaccord Capital). Reynolds worked for Rust Craft Greeting Cards for five years – first in Toronto, then in Winnipeg and Edmonton in senior sales positions – before finally making his move out to the West Coast. Reynolds had taken up a suggestion from his father-in-law that he get into the booming medical-supplies business, securing a job with Ethicon Sutures as its B.C. rep. He and his family arrived in Vancouver on Remembrance Day, 1967.

Reynolds’s conservative streak revealed itself even then. “You had to wear a hat from September until March, and an overcoat and a scarf. And suits had to be blue and shirts had to be white. They had a dress code,” he remembers fondly. “They did things you can’t tell people to do now. If you wore a beard or a moustache, you’d never get hired.” Reynolds recognized early on that the best way to deal with rules was not to rail against the system, but to use it and become part of it.

It was in the 1968 federal election campaign – the one gripped by Trudeaumania – that Reynolds got his first real taste of politics. He worked for losing Tory candidate Warren Lohnes, a mink rancher, in the Fraser Valley West riding. Two years later, after leaving Ethicon Sutures, he went to a Christmas party where he met Tom Goode, the Liberal MP for Burnaby-Richmond-Delta. “Some of us were giving Tom a hard time because of Trudeau and why things weren’t happening from a Western Canadian point of view,” he says. One of the other men at the party, insurance salesman John Copeland, approached Reynolds the next day and suggested he join the Conservative Party and help build up its membership. Reynolds agreed, becoming first the president and then the candidate for the riding. In the 1972 election, Reynolds won Burnaby-Richmond-Delta by 1,440 votes over NDP candidate Ken Novakowski; Goode came in third.