Getting ahead of yourself is supposed to be a mistake. But tackling challenges far beyond what's considered achievable by a given age is what Dino Magnatta has been doing nearly all his life.

The results have made him an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. At 42, he owns several prime real estate properties scattered around Toronto, including his own home in posh Rosedale. Magnatta also owns an exotic furniture emporium called Kuda Furniture and Homewares, and Zelda's, the third in his string of popular restaurants that until recently also included Living Well and Whitlock's.

"Dino has always had an amazing instinct for recognizing business opportunities and then trusting himself to act on that instinct," says real estate broker Rob Burton, who recently sold his longtime client a $2-million commercial building in the up-and-coming King and Dufferin streets area.

But what makes Magnatta's story a real corker is that it began when he was just a kid growing up in downtown Toronto as the son of an Italian immigrant father and a French-Canadian mother. He jokes that he got into marketing as a baby, when his parents hung his Jolly Jumper in the window of their Yonge Street hair salon. "People would see me hopping up and down, then spot the shop's sign and maybe come in for a cut."

Ken Kerr, Business Edge
Magnatta shows off a framed Buddha head. An Asian adventure sparked his new career as a collector, importer, wholesaler and retailer of exotic furniture, artifacts and accessories.

Even before hitting his teens, Magnatta began racking up what eventually would become a dazzling track record of self-generated careers. Starting out as a professional child actor, he moved on to lawn care, dairy farm work and senior citizens' odd jobs assistant. Lying about his age when necessary, he then became a cook in a series of restaurants.

By 17, he had acquired a real estate licence and was already a property owner and landlord thanks to his father, Rocco Magnatta. The elder Magnatta was so determined that his three sons would get a good grounding in business that he bought each of them a fixer-upper house.

"We did all the renovations ourselves, learned plumbing and everything else we needed to know to get our houses in shape so we could rent them out," explains the younger Magnatta. He sold his house a year or so later and then, in true real estate mogul fashion, invested his handsome profit in another house, renovated that one, sold it and then repeated the process several times.

The next step was to have been university and then law school. But just two weeks before Magnatta was scheduled to begin his studies, his 21-year-old cousin Vince Freda talked him into a partnership that would see them buying a Yonge Street restaurant called Living Well is the Best Revenge. "Vince said I could always go back to school, but an opportunity like that doesn't fall in your lap very often," Magnatta remembers.

Although he declines to disclose the restaurant's purchase price, he does say it would have exceeded the partners' ability to pay if they hadn't come up with the kind of creative financing that - like getting ahead of yourself - is generally considered foolish. But, says Magnatta, "we knew the owner wanted to just walk away, so we clinched the deal by saying we would assume all his business debts. We never regretted it."

So before his 18th birthday, Magnatta became half-owner of the first of the three restaurants he has owned to date. The partners shortened the name to Living Well and, over the next six years, grew it from a casual, 40-seat, single-floor cafe where they had to wash dishes by hand to a sophisticated two-storey spot, plus patio, that doubled the number of diners.

In his mid-20s, feeling that the daily grind was "stunting my creative side," Magnatta decided to spend a year in Europe. He says he heeded the advice of fellow restaurateur John Black, original owner of the fabled Greenjeans restaurant. "He said don't just party and blow your brains out, go to learn."

Thus Magnatta, who by then could speak English, Italian, French and Spanish, embarked on a self-designed immersion course, crisscrossing France in an old Peugeot. Offering his services for free, he worked in an abattoir to see how animals are slaughtered and then in a vineyard. There, he not only learned about, and "developed a passion for," wine, but impressed the owner sufficiently that the man pulled strings to get Magnatta into a coveted French cooking course at the University of Bordeaux.

After graduating, he wangled private tours of a number of prestigious wineries, spending time in North Africa, Spain and in his father's Italian hometown of Puglia. Then he sold the Peugeot for exactly what he'd paid for it and flew home "with a much richer knowledge of the food industry."

It was now 1988 and cousin Vince wanted to move on. So Magnatta bought him out, took on sole responsibility as Living Well's chef and manager, and operated the restaurant until late last year, when he sold the business but retained ownership of the property.

Ken Kerr, Business Edge
Magnatta shows off a framed Buddha head. An Asian adventure sparked his new career as a collector, importer, wholesaler and retailer of exotic furniture, artifacts and accessories.

While still operating Living Well, Magnatta bought a historic property in the Beaches district, restored and renovated it extensively, and opened his second restaurant, naming it Whitlock's. Six years later, he sold it as a turnkey operation but, once again, held onto ownership of the building.

While still running both restaurants, Magnatta partnered with a friend to buy the three-decades-old Costume House on King Street, renaming it Theatrics Costume House. A couple of years later, when the partners stopped seeing eye to eye, Magnatta sold his half of the business.

He was all set to embark on his first lengthy trip through Asia when his friend and Living Well manager Michael Swan spotted an empty restaurant in the heart of Toronto's gay community at Church and Wellesley streets. Magnatta says he had "thought for years that if I ever opened another restaurant it should be there because the neighbourhood really needed a good place."

So in 1997, Swan and Magnatta became the owners of Zelda's. It quickly became so popular in the increasingly gay-friendly city that its eclectic cuisine, goofy events and witty paraphernalia are constantly in high demand. There's even an art gallery where the work of Canadian artists - whom Magnatta says he has supported for 25 years - is on display.

When Magnatta finally took his postponed trip, his Asian adventure sparked a whole new career as a collector, importer, designer, wholesaler and ultimately retailer of exotic furniture, artifacts and home accessories.

In 1999, he opened Kuda Furniture and Homewares in a then-nondescript factory district on Carlaw Avenue south of Gerrard Street, gradually expanding it from 15,000 sq. ft. to 21,000 sq. ft. After his shop was discovered by customers, interior designers and the media, several other businesses followed him to the strip, which is now considered Toronto's east-end decor district.

About four years later, Magnatta made what he now concedes was a misstep, opening a second Kuda shop north of the city in the much-hyped Vaughan Mills mall. "I've now realized that my sort of stuff doesn't really go over that well in that kind of a suburban area," he explains.

He plans to correct his error by closing that store in a few months, vacating his leased premises on Carlaw and consolidating his Kuda operation in his newly purchased King Street West building when renovations are complete early next year. Meanwhile, Magnatta devotes what time he can squeeze out of his restaurant and furniture businesses to acquiring more real estate and giving back to the first industry in which he excelled, as president of the Toronto chapter of the Ontario Restaurant, Hotel and Motel Association.

Asked to explain how he has managed to accomplish so much by such a relatively youthful age, Magnatta chooses not to toot his own horn, saying only that he believes "we all have opportunities that tap us on the shoulder, but too often we just push them away or come up with reasons why we shouldn't pursue them. And sometimes that's the real mistake."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)