Twenty-five years ago, a teenaged Glenn Bailey, tormented by his difficulty in reading, made a pledge to himself.

He would take the beast by the horns. He would not let dyslexia or his failure to complete high school stand in the way of his entrepreneurial dreams. He would excel.

It wasn’t long before Bailey was flourishing in business.

His first major business venture, Canadian Springs Water Co., was a smash hit that was the launching pad to catapulting him into becoming one of Vancouver’s most astute entrepreneurs.

Bayne Stanley photo, Business Edge
Glenn Bailey quit school but drew a line in the sand and decided to change his future instead of his past.

Bailey, who sold Canadian Springs in 1995, is now the mastermind behind a revolutionary water company, the WA-2! Water Co., while also running a diverse portfolio of companies in commercial and residential real estate, furniture retail and product distribution.

The dynamic 42-year-old is projecting revenue of $100 million this year from his companies.

Surely, nobody needs to remind him again that he is a high school dropout.

1. What was your boyhood dream?

“To be a rock star. That’s funny, huh? Then, I also wanted to be an architect. To be brutally honest, I probably would have picked the rock star over the architect.”

2. How did your entrepreneurial career get started?

“In actual fact, I had friends who were very entrepreneurial at a very young age. In my youth, I would do things like sell pops on the beach, wash cars, have a lemonade stand or whatever to prosper and to capitalize. My parents (Jill and Ron) were incredibly entrepreneurial. They worked really hard. They both cut hair for a living and owned beauty salons. They owned real estate and did other things. My mother had her own dance company as well. My parents were important role models.”

3. Why did you not attend university?

“Actually, I’m not very proud of it, but I left school during my second semester in Grade 12. I needed three credits to graduate and I couldn’t handle it anymore. Unfortunately, I had dyslexia so it was hard for me to keep up with the class, plus I had a very active mind. I was also way too distracted with life and so on. It’s something I’ve regretted all my life, but I got to a point after high school where I sort of drew a line in the sand. I said, ‘There’s nothing I can do about the past but there’s a lot I can do about the future.’ I got a job in a carwash in Vancouver, then I got a job in a ski store and then I started up my own ski business at 17. I just wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started with nothing, right? I had zero to start with. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, so the effort I put into it was huge. I worked long hours, continually trying to succeed.”

4. How did you cope with the dyslexia during your grade-school years?

“I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was in Grade 5. For some reason, I just couldn’t process the words as fast as other kids. It took a phenomenal amount of effort to overcome the difficulty with reading. I get over 100 e-mails some days. So sometimes I’ll get my wife, my administrator, my assistant or any of the GMs to help me with the e-mail. I’ll say, ‘You know what? Just read it out loud.’ I’m very open about my issue with dyslexia. In actual fact, intelligence has nothing to do with processing and reading. It’s phenomenal the people that have dyslexia. I mean, Einstein had dyslexia. They thought he was a dumb kid when he was in school. The list of people with dyslexia would blow your mind – Walt Disney, Charles Schwab, Richard Branson, Winston Churchill, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Stewart, Tom Cruise. At one time, I was not very confident reading in front of people. But I am who I am and I just put extra effort into it and my intellectual thinking is totally in tune. Society grades you basically on your intelligence, and if you’re a quick reader you’re deemed as being really smart. But in actual fact, reading is just an input mechanism. I had this incredible insecurity about my ability to read really fast. But I finally went to face the beast and I got myself tested. I had an IQ test and I found I’m not stupid.”

5. What trait has had the most to do with your success in business and what do you need to learn to become a better entrepreneur?

“It’s effort and attitude. So if there’s a word that means both of those, that’s the word. I focus on positive results in any situation. Win-win. I like it where we all win – the customer wins, the employee wins and I win. We all win together. You’re going to lose in business, but the important thing is just going for it. Hank Aaron set the home-run record, but he also struck out a lot. As long as your losses aren’t colossal, you’re going to do OK. I need to learn to achieve results in the most simplistic way. In corporations, there are duplications and all sorts of ineffectiveness. It’d be great to be like a conductor and have everyone sort of singing from the same song sheet.”

6. What motivated you to start your first major business venture, Canadian Springs Water?

“At the time we (he and a partner) got started, there were only a couple of little companies in Vancouver doing it, but no one was really successful. I went and met with the guy (owner of a bottled water company). I asked him, I said, ‘You know, excuse me, sir, why haven’t you done well with this?’ He said to me, ‘Son, son, no one will ever buy bottled water in Vancouver.’ So right then and there, right in that spot, I knew we were standing on a huge gold mine. But getting the market turned on to bottled water was a struggle. You really had to push it. We were the first in Western Canada (to market bottled water). At first, we were like a match in wet grass. It was like a lot of work to get it going, to get it burning, to get the smoke going, to get the flames going. When we sold the company, it was like we were standing in an incredible forest fire of growth. It was unreal. When we started, there were zero competitors. When we sold it, there were 270 registered bottled water competitors in our sector.”

7. Why did you sell the company (of which Bailey owned 50 per cent) when it was doing $14 million in annual sales?

“No.1 was the money. There was a phenomenal offer. No. 2, the technology was starting to take off in the purification sector and that scared me. My feeling was that the consumer would eventually get educated enough where they would understand the business and would stop buying bottled water because it just doesn’t make sense. In actual fact, most of the bottled water companies out there use reverse osmosis to purify their water. They’ll take municipal water, they’ll purify it and they’ll put it through a reverse osmosis process and then deliver it to your home. So we (the WA-2!

company) have developed a small little osmosis system. We install it into people’s homes and people get the exact same product without all the hassles at a way cheaper cost.”\ 8. Did you jump right back into business after selling Canadian Springs?

“I took three years off after that. I ran. I ran a lot. It’s amazing how much energy your brain can consume and when I stopped using it, I was just filled with energy. I had nothing to do. I was going bonkers. So I started exercising and I went from about 195 pounds to 180 pounds. I went on some nice holidays. But I was too young to retire.”

9. What sold you on the prospects of WA-2 (a company that installs water purification systems)?

“Being an entrepreneur, I knew it was a great product in a great industry making people happy. It’s also very good for the environment where we don’t have these big trucks running around and the customers don’t have to lift the bottles or wait for deliveries. We started selling the product more than a year ago and in our first year we grew by about 500 per cent with 200 accounts. Now we’re between 1,300 and 1,400 accounts. There are a lot of ma-and-pa operations out there trying to do this, but they’re not making it because they need a big mass of customers to support them.”

10. What’s your vision for WA-2!

“Our first milestone is to grow to 5,000 accounts a year and a half from now. The next milestone after that is 10,000 accounts. Then, after that, it’ll be 30,000 accounts. Our ultimate goal is to get up to about 100,000 accounts and do it nationally.”

11. Which of your businesses do you enjoy most?

“I enjoy them all, but I absolutely love the residential development because I’m a visual thinker. It’s like building a little micro-business almost. It takes you about a year to do it and then you get to sell it, capitalize on it and hand over this product to someone who just loves it. It’s a great feeling to create a structure that will sit there for centuries, hopefully. It’s just a neat, cool feeling.”

12. Do you have partners in most of your businesses?

“I have partners in some of my businesses. My rule of thumb is that I own at least 50 per cent of my businesses but most of them I own 100 per cent.”

13. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in business?

“If there’s one thing that helps me excel, it’s surrounding myself with great people.”

14. What kind of a boss are you?

“I expect results. I’m very generous in giving people bonuses and incentives. I think I’m really good at communicating and I love to communicate with my employees. I think I really want to put everyone in a situation where we can all win together.”

15. With all your businesses, how do you manage to balance business and personal life?

“I like to really, really focus hard on my work and then I focus really, really hard on my personal life as well. I like to concentrate on my work, my personal life and my exercise.”

16. Who’s the business leader you admire most?

“I really admire Jimmy Pattison (the Vancouver billionaire). I admire the way he manages so many different businesses and mostly all of them succeed.”

17. Do you think you’ll have more money than Pattison some day?

(Laughing) You know, I doubt it because, you know what? I won’t work as hard as he does. I take weekends off, for the most part (Pattison is known for working weekends). I still work on the weekends but, although the engine is still running, I’m in the pitstop. I never turn my brain off. The only time I turn my brain off is when I go away for two or three weeks on vacation. Then, it takes me about a week to get ramped up again when I get back. I’ve got so much I want to accomplish. I’m not much of a TV watcher. You know, I’ve only got only 350,000 hours left in my life.”

18. What’s going to be your next entrepreneurial home run?

“It’s to focus on what I have and to make those companies excel. The three things that are really taking off are WA-2!, my home development company where we’re building eight high-end homes in Vancouver and Liberty (retail store), which is just starting to rock.”

19. Are you investing in the stock market these days?

“I lost a lot of money in the meltdown (in 2000), but I’ve now been investing in gold and mineral stocks. I’ve talked to a bunch of advisers that are involved in the stock business and it just seems there’s an alignment of positiveness toward the lack of gold and precious metals in the world. Do you think I’m crazy?”

20. What’s your most important life goal?

“It’s to excel and become a better person, a better boss, a better friend, a better husband, a better brother. I’m sort of shooting for 100 per cent. Before I turn 50, I’d like to be in a position where I’m working with my team of people that I have now and they can continue to run the businesses so I can basically step down from my role in the companies but still have the companies progressing and succeeding and prospering. But you know what? I can’t lie on a beach. I’m digging sand castles. I have to keep myself active. I’d like to explore British Columbia and the world more.”

IN PROFILE: Glenn Bailey

* Title: President/owner, Bailey Capital Corp.

* Born/raised/age: Vancouver, 42.

* Education: Grade 11.

* Career: Bailey has owned a broad range of companies. In the mid-1980s, he co-founded Canadian Springs Water Co., which grew to annual revenue in excess of $14 million when it was sold in 1996. He is now the owner or part owner of: WA-2! Water Co., an invention that combines water purification with self-filling, bottled-water cooler systems; Hudson Furniture; Liberty; Guinness Business Centre; CGS Web Holdings Inc.; Harbour Marine Products; and Third Storey Holdings.

* Statistics: In 22 years, Bailey's companies boast almost $1 billion in sales and have developed about a half-million square feet of residential and commercial property.

* Accolades: Bailey was Canadian Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990.

* Pastimes: Travel, swimming, running.

THE COMPANY: Bailey Capital Corp.

* Brass: Glenn Bailey, president/owner; Debra Guenther, general manager.

* Profile: Bailey Capital encompasses the Bailey Group of companies, including WA-2! Water Co., Hudson Furniture and Liberty (home furnishings).

* Websites:
www.baileycapitalcorp.com
www.wa2.ca
www.hudsonfurniture.ca
www.libertyinside.com
www.guinnessbusiness.com

* Head Office: 304,1110 Hamilton St., Vancouver. V6B 2S2.

* Phone/Fax: 604-686-3461/684-8766.