Peter Naylor does not consider Tippet-Richardson Ltd.

(T-R) to be simply part of the transportation industry.

Never mind that Toronto-based T-R is one of Canada's oldest moving and storage firms. Naylor, the firm's 73-year-old chairman and former president, believes he is in the service business - and transportation just happens to be part of the company's offering.

And Naylor, who has been with T-R for 51 years and still goes to his office every day, while also pursuing athletic interests that he first chased as a child, has no shortage of ideas on what companies should offer in today's deregulated relocation sector.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge
Tippet-Richardson chairman Peter Naylor is a veteran of the moving and storage business with 51 years "in transit".

1. What was it like growing up in north Toronto?

"We had a strong family life, a good, happy growing-up period. It was typical. We survived the Depression. We survived the Second World War, and went on from there."

2. How did you survive those periods?

"That was life, so you didn't know anything different. You just grew up and put a smile on your face."

3. What were your interests when you were growing up?

"My interests included a ball of one type or another - whether it was a football, baseball or a hockey puck. I also enjoyed music and played in a local band. That was part of my education after high school, too. I played the double bass ... (and today,) it stands in my dining room waiting to be plucked. I don't get around to it."

4. Was your family in the moving business when you were growing up?

"My father worked in the moving industry, yes, most of his working life, from 1923-1973. That was always a part of our life."

5. Who were your mentors when you were a youth?

"I looked up to my father. I respected him a great deal, I think, although there were lots of challenges along the way - which are typical in families where you have a strong-willed child who doesn't do what he's told all the time. There was always an independent streak in me, I guess, and that's one reason why I ended up working for myself. I have continued to work for myself long past the point that a lot of people would have gotten out of business, for one reason or another."

Peter Naylor

6. When did you start with Tippet-Richardson?

"I started in 1956. I worked in the Hamilton office as the branch accountant. That was a very good learning experience. It was a smaller branch and you ended up doing a little bit of everything. You were able to learn the whole business, rather than just one aspect. The word 'accountant' is likely a little misleading for the role that I played, but that was the title and I got lots of experience. You had to get through the sales and the operations before you ever got to do any accounting. The accounting process is minimum compared to getting the work through the sales department and then operating through the operations department. It was only a three-man branch. The branch manager and the sales person were the two other significant people, and then myself."

7. Where did you go from Hamilton?

"We went to Ottawa and spent two years up in the Ottawa branch - a larger branch. My role there was assistant operations manager and my work consisted primarily of organizing and running the warehouse. From there, we transferred back to Toronto, where my responsibility was with the branches of Tippet-Richardson around the province (of Ontario), other than the main office in Toronto. My brother Bruce joined us shortly after that, around 1965. There was lots for both of us to do. He ultimately became president in 1986. He worked in Hamilton first, as I did, and then he came to Toronto after that."

8. When did you become president?

"I became president in 1971. I did what my father told me to do."

9. What was that transition like for you?

"I think I'd been well-geared and trained for it. My father had a saying: Inch by inch is a cinch. Yard by yard is hard. He taught me by the inch. When it came time to take the last step, it was quite natural."

10. How would you describe your vision for the company after you became president?

"Well, the role of business in my life is to make money. That's our role in society. I stuck to that and made sure that we did make money - and through making money, we survived. The good times. The bad times. It's a pretty simple interpretation of what business's role is in a community."

11. What did you do to make sure the company always made money?

"I made sure that we always developed sales and controlled costs. The growth was more outside Ontario, because when I became president, we were only in Ontario. But we weren't in Quebec and Western Canada. Our growth was outside our traditional base, and that was partly because our society changed. We cannot create a market in the moving industry. We have to react to what society wants relative to moving and storage. You have to understand your market and your role in the marketplace."

12. How did that market change?

"In the course of those years, corporations decreased the transfer of corporate executives as a stepping stone up the ladder. There was also a significance relative to a working spouse, and the lack of wanting to transfer from Halifax to Winnipeg if, in fact, it meant doing without one salary in the home. Thirdly, we went through a period of high inflation in the late '70s and early '80s and it discouraged the selling of one's home that had a mortgage rate of six to seven per cent attached to it for the sake of buying a new home that had a mortgage rate of 12 or 14 per cent. These economic factors, although they're well known in Canada generally, affected everybody in one way or another - and that happens to be the way they affected us."

13. What was the effect on your company?

"The long-distance moving part of our business, which had been the bread and butter of the business from the end of the Second World War through to, say, 1975, gradually became less significant. We had to develop other aspects of the business, which included overseas business, storage business and office-moving business. All of which had been there for all the years in total, but gradually parts of it became more important than other parts."

14. What do you see as the biggest driver of your business and the moving industry today?

"Within our company, I think storage is going to still be a growing and important part. Industry-wide, I see fragmentation as the long-distance moving industry becomes less and less significant. Although people will always relocate, there is not the relocation by corporations of personnel, which was by far and away the biggest growth area in the '60s and the '70s. That continues to be minimized, because of the three factors that I mentioned earlier. I don't think inflation is significant today, but certainly working spouses and the total cost of relocation (are), although the word relocation means something quite different than the moving of a family from one location to another. It means the setting up of systems of school. It means getting a job for the spouse who works as well. It means buying a home that may not have been marketable in the first 60 days of the real estate market, or any number of things that are quite different. But all of that, of course, has a cost attached to it, and the moving company itself may only realize 25-30 per cent of the total cost to a corporation of a transfer of (an executive.)" 15. How significant is the relocation of a business to your firm?

"That's very significant - and it always has been. But when you look at the number of new (office) towers that have been built in downtown Toronto in the last 10 years, you can count them on one hand. How does that affect us? There's just less moving."

16. What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the moving and storage industry?

"I was a great believer when deregulation came in the early '80s to the industry, along with all transportation (sectors.) But we have not had good years since then relative to what we had prior to that. In other words, regulation appeared to help us make money. But I'm quite sure the Bell telephone company and the turmoil that some regulated industries - in particular airlines - have gone through has been the same for many of us. I don't know how this (deregulation) is going to wash itself out through the system. I can worry about it quite a bit, because we shoot ourselves in the foot day after day. We just keep lowering prices. The best way to get more moving business next month is to drop the price. But you know, sooner or later, that you drop past the point at which you can survive. It's a struggle. But I'm still a free-enterprise person. So I will work within the framework of what we've got."

17. How did your independent streak help you in business?

"That happened to be my personality. I'm stuck with it. I liked to figure things out for myself in the way that we should get things done. It's a service industry. It's related to transportation in a way, but it's very dependent on how our company treats our customers - and how our company treats our customers depends upon how I treat my employees. If I want them to look after customers properly, I better look after them to see that they get job satisfaction with a fair remuneration and enjoy coming to work every day. I try to create a climate that is going to be beneficial to them as individuals. It starts with a paycheque every Friday. But there's more to it than that. I just try to create a climate so that they will enjoy coming to work. The job that we do, although maybe not glamorous, by having the right attitude, you can get satisfaction from it.You have people getting themselves relocated from one home to another. As a person who's moved, and most of us have moved at one time or another in our life, it can be a very upsetting time. So it's up to us to try to iron out the rough edges of those days and react to when they want to do things. If a person sells their house and the closing of it is the 29th of June, that's when they want to move. Just because we may have a special on the second of June that year, that has little or no appeal to them. In other words, we have to be reactive to the marketplace. You just have to make sure your employees understand that. That means talking, training, encouraging.

"But that is the reality of what we do, and if we're going to survive and succeed, we have to understand that. It's up to us as management to ensure that our employees are properly trained in those areas. We try to develop an attitude. That is so key, the word attitude, in the kind of people that we employ, that you just can't minimize that at all."

18. What do you do now in your role as chairman of Tippet-Richardson?

"In my role as chairman now, I'm arranging for the sale of my shares in Tippet-Richardson to my four children as part of the estate-planning process. Now, I'm guiding my children. (I still go into the office every day), because I have fringe business interests that I do. But my hours of work are not a full eight hours a day at all. They're quite a bit less."

19. What other businesses have you been involved with?

"Well, 50 years with Tippet-Richardson didn't leave me too much time for other businesses. For 25 years, we owned a travel agency. It was affected significantly by transportation deregulation in the early '80s, which included both moving and storage companies and also airlines and, ultimately, travel agencies. These things have affected us. In the '60s and the '70s and the '80s, I spent a lot of time working within the industry in (Allied) Van Lines. Our role as a member or an agent meant that an awful lot of time was given to Allied Van Lines during those years. (I served as) director, president, chairman at different times. That was an alternating type of position. There were agents that belonged to them in those days and we all gave time. Allied Van Lines is (now) part of a public corporation in the U.S. called SIRVA (Inc.)" 20. If you weren't involved with Tippet-Richardson, what would you be doing instead?

"I would likely be looking at the grass from the brown side up. I've always really enjoyed (T-R.) Otherwise, I'd never have survived. (When not working), I still do what I did when I was a child. I play golf, hockey - have fun playing games. I play (hockey) once a week. Have you ever heard of a decorative piece along the blueline?

I don't move very fast anymore."

Peter Naylor

* Title: Chairman (former president).

* Born and raised/age: Toronto/73.

* Education: One year of commerce and finance at the University of Toronto. High school diploma.

* Family: Wife Dolores, four adult children: Brenda, Kevin, who manages T-R's overseas moving service, Scott and Mark.

* Career: Naylor worked at the Bank of Toronto (a predecessor of TD Bank) for a few months before returning to high school and later served with the Bank of Nova Scotia for two years before joining T-R in 1956. He started with T-R's Hamilton office, moved to its Ottawa location and then Toronto. He served as president from 1971-2004.

* Volunteer Pursuits: Held executive posts with the Toronto chapter of the Rotary Club.

* Passions: Hockey, golf, music, reading biographies of political leaders such as Winston Churchill and Pierre Trudeau.

Tippet-Richardson

* Brass: Peter Naylor, chairman; John Novak, president; Bryan Dougherty, vice-president of finance; Brenda Naylor (daughter of Peter Naylor), president of wholly owned subsidiary T.R. Wescan Inc. (responsible for Calgary and Vancouver offices.)

* Profile: Tippet-Richardson (T-R) provides moving and storage and records-management services in North America and overseas. T-R is based in Toronto and has branches in four other Ontario cities (Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Windsor) as well as Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.

* History: The company was founded in 1927 by Basil Tippet and C.A. Richardson, who sought initially to serve Toronto-area customers. In 1934, Tippet bought out Richardson. A decade later, in 1944, brothers Russell and Walter Naylor acquired part of Tippet's ownership stake, while he remained with the firm. Russell Naylor, Peter's father, had worked for the company since its inception. During the rest of the 1940s and '50s, the company started moving household and office items to Western Canada and expanded within Ontario to Hamilton, Ottawa, Stratford and Waterloo. Tippet died in 1959, leaving the Naylor brothers and Russell's sons Peter and Bruce, who joined the firm in the 1950s and '60s, to expand T-R further. Russell Naylor passed his shares to his sons in 1974. (Peter would later acquire full ownership.)

* Growth: In the 1970s, T-R acquired Anderson Van & Storage in London and King Moving & Storage, which had branches in Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray. Peter Naylor became president in 1973, three years before his father died in 1976.

The company opened an office, under new wholly owned company T-R Inc., in San Jose, acquired firms in Windsor and Halifax, and opened an office in Vancouver. In the 1990s, T-R scaled back its operations and sold off, closed or merged other operations.

In 2001, the firm opened a Montreal branch and acquired now 164-year-old Fisher Express Lines of Toronto.

* Moving on: On Feb. 15, 2007, Peter Naylor passed all of his common shares to his four children, who have equal stakes while he retains some preferred shares.

* Stats: T-R generates revenues of $30 million annually while completing approximately 8,000 moves per year. The firm employs 200 permanent staff and up to 500 in total during the peak summer moving season.

* Website: www.tippet-richardson.com

* HQ: 25 Metropolitan Rd., Toronto, M1R 2T5

* Phone/Fax: (416) 291-1200 or 1-800-268-6753/(416) 291-2601.

(Monte Stewart can be reached at monte@businessedge.ca)