How Former Hockey Pro Patrick Dovigi Created a Multibillion-Dollar Business
Many entrepreneurs will inform you that what they’re doing now shouldn’t be what they initially got down to do. Making main skilled adjustments—even mid- to late-career—can typically result in extra fulfilling and profitable outcomes. That’s what our sequence The Pivot is all about. Each month, we communicate to founders, business leaders and entrepreneurs about how—and why—they modified course and located success in a completely completely different business. Here, we communicate to Patrick Dovigi, the founder and CEO of environmental companies firm, Green For Life.
“In Sault Sainte Marie, playing hockey is like drinking water,” says Patrick Dovigi. The founder and CEO of Green For Life, a waste administration firm, grew up enjoying hockey in a rink his dad constructed of their yard. “I laced up my first pair of skates when I was two years old.”
But Dovigi wasn’t simply one other neighbourhood child enjoying shinny—he had the physicality and calm-yet-passionate manner befitting of a goalie, and on the age of 14 he left Sault Sainte Marie for Waterloo to affix the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey League’s Elmira Sugar Kings, dwelling with a billet household and attending highschool close by. By the time he turned 18, he was drafted to affix the NHL as goaltender for the Edmonton Oilers. He spent two years blocking pictures within the Gateway to the North earlier than he was shipped off to affix the Detroit Red Wings in 1999.
By 2001, after 15 years enjoying hockey professionally, Dovigi had misplaced his enthusiasm for the game. Between the fixed journey and the dearth of company in the place he lived, Dovigi started dreaming of a extra settled life. “I was a piece of meat,” he says, referring to being on the mercy of different folks’s drafting selections. “I wanted to get into something where I would control my own destiny.”
Dovigi’s father, a business instructor who owned a stake in a number of Northern Ontario sports activities bars, had an entrepreneurial streak, which gave Dovigi the inspiration to turn into his personal boss—one thing that may give him that company he so desired. So he enrolled within the business administration program at what’s now Toronto Metropolitan University.
His first job out of faculty in 2004 was at Standard Mercantile, a small funding financial institution the place he was accountable for aiding operations and accumulating data on numerous corporations the financial institution deliberate to spend money on. “Then one of the investments we looked after went horribly wrong, and I got sucked in to go fix things,” he says.
“Putting in the hard work and facing adversity are things you learn when you play sports that teach you how to be a better executive”
It turned out the corporate they invested in had violated quite a few environmental permits, inflicting a two-week-long hearth at a trash website. The proprietor of the ability was finally fined and despatched to jail. “He was only supposed to have 1,000 tons of waste on site, but he ended up having more than 100,000,” says Dovigi. “He collected a bunch of receivables and left us with a pile of garbage, literally. It was a total disaster.”
From this expertise, Dovigi mainly acquired a crash course on the ins and outs of waste administration. The clean-up took two and a half years, by the top of which he realized the business was filled with alternative for enchancment. He aspired to create an organization a lot greater than the one he had been aiding. His large concept: shopping for up and consolidating the quite a few mom-and-pop companies working within the class.
In the summer season of 2007, he based Green For Life with $10 million in seed capital from traders David Kassie and Barry Goldberg at Canaccord Genuity Group. (Dovigi had met Goldberg years earlier when he performed hockey together with his son, Sean.) From day one, the corporate aimed to be “a one-stop shop for all of our customers’ waste needs,” accumulating municipal, industrial and industrial waste, cleansing stormwater from underground parking garages and accumulating used motor oil from automotive dealerships and lube retailers.
While he by no means had ambitions of increasing past Toronto, the 2008 monetary downturn introduced a chance to maneuver into Western Canada by way of strategic acquisitions of corporations like Envirowest and Smithrite. Then in 2014, the corporate started increasing into the Maritimes, and in 2017 Green For Life entered into the U.S. market, which was like rocket gasoline for progress. Today, 65 per cent of the corporate’s business is within the U.S. GFL went public in 2020, which Dovigi described because the “next logical step” that gave them entry to incremental capital to fund progress.
“My initial goal was to build a business of $40 to $50 million in revenue and here we are, $7 billion in revenue later,” he says. Green For Life maintains over 20,000 staff and Dovigi’s web value is estimated at over $1 billion. He is now centered on giving again and supporting philanthropic causes, like a $5-million donation to create the Dovigi Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, the primary devoted sports-medicine wing at any hospital in Toronto.
According to Dovigi, constructing a business from the bottom up is quite a bit like enjoying skilled hockey. “It takes all kinds to make a successful team. From the coach, to the general manager, to the training staff, to the players, you’re all working together to win,” he says. “Putting in the hard work and facing adversity are things you learn when you play sports that teach you how to be a better executive.”
Does he ever miss enjoying professional hockey? “A little bit,” he admits. “But I’m pretty happy with the life I have now.”
