Frank Sobey: The Man and the Empire

Ross Willmot is Executive Director of the Ontario Association for
Continuing Education.

This Halifax-based author of such books as Ra: The Story of Roy Jodrey has used his prize-winning journalistic and editing techniques to produce an eminently readable and useful biography of an even greater Nova Scotia entrepreneur.

The story of this still-active octogenarian tycoon is told against the background of his province’s development, a development in which he played a key role. Sobey had trouble graduating from public school because he found it alien to the working world, where he preferred studying and making money with boyish enthusiasm. The present period Sobey criticizes as being one of “deficit financing.” Frank Sobey, in competition with men more school-educated than he, has invariably been the first to see the bottom line. He taught his sons and grandsons the importance of negotiating, which he says is “the essential difference between government at its worst and private enterprise at its best.” With his family, he parlayed his father’s meat market to an industrial empire of 30 subsidiary business and investments, more than 60 supermarkets in the Atlantic provinces and Quebec, a score of drug stores, many movie theatres, numerous fast food outlets and wholesale arms that stretch all the way to Ontario. In 1984 the consolidated revenue of the Sobey holding company totalled $755 million.

Frank Sobey’s story, often told in his own homey, colloquial words and those of his partners and competitors, is similar to that of the founders of other great retail store chains in North America. His method of operating basically was getting along well with people, particularly those in control of business; seeing an investment opportunity; and quickly taking advantage of it, usually with borrowed money.

For 22 years Sobey acted as unpaid mayor of his home town, Stellarton, whose development he personally promoted along with that of his family “empire.” From 1957 to 1969 he performed the same development function for his province as unpaid President of Industrial Estates Limited. IEL helped rescue the ailing Nova Scotia economy but personally cost Sobey at least a million dollars. Some 5,000 new jobs were created by luring 25 outside firms to Nova Scotia. Nine new N.S.-owned operations were assisted and 20 going concerns were expanded. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of industrial development were created at a comparatively low investment. It was not Sobey’s fault that such industrial disasters as Clairtone and Deuterium of Canada spoiled the record. A grade-school drop-out, Frank Sobey has been given three honorary degrees and named a laureate of the Canadian Business Hall of Fame.

Harry Bruce deserves credit for bringing us the strategies and management philosophy not only of Frank Sobey and his family but of many business leaders he co-operated and competed with. Appendices give the names of the principal subsidiaries of the Sobey empire, its directors and officers, and a listing of IEL companies.