Strange things happen in the business world. Just ask Sean Durfy.

The 41-year-old Newfoundland native was fired from his first full-time job after graduating from university, but he flew through the corporate ranks to become president of Calgary-based WestJet Airlines.

He replaced WestJet's legendary founder, Clive Beddoe, who remains as the company's CEO and chairman.

"I followed my brothers and my dad (into business)," says Durfy. "My dad ran a grocery wholesale-retail company and was a successful businessman and worked hard.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
WestJet president Sean Durfy, left, and Don Bell, one of the airline's founders and still a pilot, share a laugh during WestJet's recent annual general meeting.

"On Saturday mornings, we would go with my dad to his office so he could do some work. Because it was wholesale-retail, it was always stocked full of stuff like a big warehouse. We were so ingrained (in business) at an early age and then my brothers got into it and I sort of followed suit. Really, it was in the bloodline - and I just kept going."

So has WestJet.

As you might have heard, the airline that features joke-cracking (and sometimes singing) flight attendants was involved in little corporate-espionage lawsuit with Air Canada a while back. WestJet eventually agreed to pay the former Crown corporation $15.5 million last year and Beddoe later stepped down as president.

If you haven't heard about it, don't worry. The flying public hasn't given it much heed anyway.

WestJet recently reported first-quarter net earnings of $29.9 million - a 132-per-cent increase over the same period a year ago, when it reported a $12.9-million profit. Earnings per share more than doubled to 23 cents from 10 cents.

Under Durfy, the former Western Canadian regional airline has also become a bastion for business travellers. They now account for 45 per cent of all WestJet passengers.

Scandal? What scandal?

1. What was it like growing up in Corner Brook?

"It was an awesome place to grow up. When I grew up, there were about 30,000-35,000 people. It had everything you needed. I grew up on a ski hill - Marble Mountain - so I learned to ski early in life. Winter was taken up with skiing and basketball and in summer, it was baseball. We had great swimming holes. All the families sort of knew each other and the education system was very good. It had several high schools and a very good university and college. My dad was a businessman and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. We had four kids in our family. I'm the youngest, our sister is the oldest, and then two brothers. My sister's still in Newfoundland and both brothers are in Toronto and I'm in Calgary."

2. At what levels did you play sports?

Sean Durfy

"I played provincial baseball. I skied somewhat competitively and I played varsity basketball for our high school. I played (in) all the major tournaments (in) Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada, so I was a pretty good athlete. I was Athlete Of The Year for my high school and all that good stuff. I mean, we did it all, played everything."

3. What was one of your memorable sporting events?

"It was fantastic. It wasn't the Harlem Globetrotters, but it was sort of the Tier 2 Harlem Clowns - one of these Harlem Globetrotter-wannabe teams from the U.S. They played our high-school basketball team. It was a big game for us. We were playing these guys - fairly professional basketball players, or serious basketball players. We beat 'em! Jeez, they got mad and ugly and pushed and fouled and everything else. It was a lot of fun."

4. What type of business did you expect to get into?

"I thought I had this creative flair. I was going to be this big advertising guy, and I actually did do some advertising for a company called General Motors Super Group, MacLaren Lintas. That's where I met my beautiful wife, who was in the advertising industry. She worked for a sister company to the one I worked for. I always thought I would be the big advertising guy, the real creative mind and all that good stuff - and I just really wasn't very good at it. That ended abruptly. I think I spent maybe a year and a half at that."

5. How did you end up leaving that company?

"Well, I was fired. Yup. I was fired by this gal who was our boss at the time. I learned a lot. In my career, I still don't know exactly what to do as a good leader - but I really know what not to do. It was funny, because that particular case taught me great lessons on how not to lead and what not to do. When I was appointed president here, believe it or not, I got a note from that lady who fired me. Something to the extent: 'I've been following your career. Very proud of you. Congratulations.' And, I went: Wow! Fifteen years later and you get a note like that. I laughed. I thought it was quite humorous."

6. Why were you fired?

"I would probably call it personality conflict. Yeah. We didn't get along very well."

7. What were the lessons that you learned?

"I learned how not to treat people. I learned how to be an inclusive person out of that experience. I think I learned how to try to be more even-keel and not an emotive person when it comes to dealing with business. So those would have been two big lessons."

8. Where did you go after that?

"After that, I went to Honeywell. I really enjoyed that time and I worked for some great folks. My boss was a rough, tough cowboy who lived on a ranch down in High River, but just a great guy. I respected him immensely and that's where I really started to get my management experience. I did that for about five years. In my last year at Honeywell, I had another fantastic boss, who was out of Ontario. We actually still stay in touch. From there, I was headhunted away, and I went to work for TransAlta Utilities. I had a chance to go and work for a gentleman whom I respect quite a bit, Jim Dinning. He just ran for the leadership of the (Conservative) Party here in Alberta and, of course, (Ed) Stelmach won. I'm disappointed, because Jim would have been a fantastic premier for this province. Then, I actually got headhunted away from TransAlta to go to Enmax Corp. (Calgary's city-owned electrical utility.) My responsibility was to start up the Enmax energy subsidiary, which was a company that was going to buy and sell electricity in a newly deregulated market and compete against the Enrons and the Dukes and the El Pasos and all those guys that were coming into the market.

"That was a lot of fun and I did that for about six years. After that, I was again looking for a new challenge. At the time, my wife and I had really started seriously thinking of buying a small hotel in the Caribbean. My daughter was about a year and a half old and I wanted a little break. I had really built up my career and was having a lot of fun, but I just wanted a little down time. Actually, it's always been my dream to run a little beach bar. We were getting ready to try to sell off our assets, and I was doing the business plan and trying to figure out how much money I needed. It would be a great opportunity to really give my daughter a different lifestyle change - to run around on the beach and really get attuned with nature for a few years until she was old enough to be able to go to school. Before I had a chance to pull the pin on that, I got a call from a mutual friend to go and meet Clive Beddoe. It was supposed to be a 20-minute meeting. Three and a half hours later, I went home to my wife and said, 'Tracy, you know what? I think I'm going to go and work for WestJet.' The rest is history."

9. What's it like trying to replace Clive Beddoe?

"You'll never replace Clive Beddoe - and I will never try. He's a business icon in Canada. He's my mentor and a good friend. But, boy, that would be tough, man, to try and replace him. I'm who I am. I've got to be the best person I can be and the best leader I can be."

10. How would you describe your management style?

"I think I'm very inclusive. I think I'm fair. I think I allow people a tremendous amount of freedom to run their parts of the business. I will get in and mix it up quite a bit. I've got a million ideas. I've also been able to give the company some pretty good focus and strategic planning in where we believe we need to take the company over the next five years. By 2016, we think we will be one of the top five airlines in the world that people want to fly with and employees want to work with. It's a lofty goal. But if you look at our brand, our product, our people and the business model that we've deployed, it's one that can continue to grow and one that has a tremendously lucrative future in front of it."

11. When WestJet started, it was, basically, a no-frills regional airline. How would you describe it now?

"I would call us a low-cost carrier, but one that understands what the guest wants. One of (our goals) is to have the lowest sustainable seat costs in North America. Why satellite TV? Really, all we have to do is sell a fare for an extra one or two bucks and we will be able to pay back those TVs, and the way we do that is through our headset sales. We're able to give this great product that people want.

But we do it in a very low-cost manner. We understand how to do it effectively and efficiently."

12. I notice that 45 per cent of WestJet's passengers are business travellers.

How did WestJet become a business travellers' airline all of a sudden?

"Folks try us for their leisure - vacations and what not. They get on our aircraft and they say, 'Wow, you've got the most modern fleet of aircraft in North America.' The fleet is 2.7 years old. It's a Boeing 737 product. You've got good seat pitch from 32-34 inches. You've got leather seats. You've got live satellite TV. You've got cool stuff like web check-in. You've got products like Biz Link, which allow small-business folks to book online and manage their business travel online, that allows you to book your seat in advance. All sorts of good stuff like that. All of a sudden, we gave the business traveller what they were asking for. We know if someone tries us, nine times out of 10 they're going to come back to us again. So if you put our product against an Air Canada product, we don't have the business class, but there's a huge market of business folks who don't travel business class. So when they look at our product and Air Canada's product, they choose us. We've also worked very hard on commercializing our schedule, going to the places where people want to go at the right times and the right amount of times per day."

13. How has the corporate espionage case with Air Canada affected WestJet?

"You know, I think it's behind us. If you look at the 6,000 people who want to deliver the service every day to the guests, that never changed - and it made the culture of this company stronger. I'm very proud of the people who represent WestJet every day, because they are fine people."

14. How would you describe your company's relationship with Air Canada?

"We actually do not inter-line, or code-share, with anybody. We are competitors in domestic Canada or markets down in the U.S. How do Rogers Video and Blockbuster get along? How do any major competitors get along, or competitors in the industry?

15. Why don't you code-share with other airlines?

"Eventually, we will. One (reason) is, you have to pick the partners you want to code-share with and, two, you have to have the technology and deploy the technology to be able to code-share, because you have to share information between one airline and another. For example, you have to be able to share information on what seats are still available on one aircraft, and you've got to allow another airline, if you're doing this, to actually see those seats and potentially be able to buy those seats from that airline.You've got to be able to have technology and we don't have that quite yet. Also, we built our organization on a business model and we won't do anything to damage that. I'm sure it'll change over the years, but we won't do anything to harm the basics of the business model. So we have to be very careful when we go into these new types of opportunities."

16. How would you describe your business model?

"Ours is a closed system. We fly for ourselves and we fly our own aircraft and we have our own culture and we have our own brand. When you start doing inter-lining, you have to move people onto another airline that may not have a similar brand or a similar culture. But if they're buying and thinking it's a WestJet product - like when you buy an Air Canada product and you go there and you find out it's United Airlines - if they're not similar products and they're not a good product, then you've got a problem.On our system, baggage stays in our system. Through an inter-line system, it has to go through another airline's system. There's a lot of difference and a lot of things that could be very difficult."

17. What do you see as some new destinations for WestJet?

"I think you'll see us do more in the Caribbean and, hopefully, more in the Mexican market. We need (bilateral trade agreements) to fly into Mexico. I think we will continue to some destinations in the U.S., but eventually we'll start expanding to business destinations there. We still have tremendous opportunity for new routes in Canada. When I'm on an investor roadshow, I'll talk about some of those opportunities and show places that we don't even fly (to) today. There's plenty of opportunities for us to actually grow our airline from a capacity standpoint by another 30-35 aircraft. We have 65 today.

There's certainly room for another 30."

18. What are your plans for acquiring aircraft?

"Our strategic plan is to acquire at least 10-per-cent capacity ... or keep adding 10 per cent available seat miles per year. This year, we'll add about 13 per cent for the year. Next year ... It's up and down. I can't even remember what the numbers are, actually. But anywhere from six to nine (new) aircraft a year is really where we are."

19. WestJet has a history of flying into some of the smaller centres. What is the company's philosophy about that?

"We'll go and service markets that we believe need to be serviced, need capacity and we can make a profit. We put in Kitchener-Waterloo and Deer Lake (Nfld.). We also put in Nassau, Bahamas. We are the largest Canadian seat-carrier into Las Vegas. We'll look at opportunities anywhere and everywhere to fly and to utilize our aircraft."

20. If you couldn't be president of WestJet anymore, what would you do?

"I tell my wife, my belief is - my hope is - this will be the last stop in my career. Even though I'm 41 years old, I really feel this will be the last stop in my career. If it's not WestJet, then it's probably going to be playing soccer with my kids, watching them do all the neat stuff that kids do as they grow up.

I guess that's really where my head is right now. I'm lovin' what I do. I love the people that I work with, and I love the company."

Sean Durfy

* Title: President

* Born/raised/age: Corner Brook, Nfld./41

* Education: Bachelor of commerce in finance and marketing from University of Dalhousie

* Family: Wife Tracy, daughter Kennedy, 4, son Reilly, 3 months.

* Career: After graduating from Dalhousie, Durfy moved to Calgary and joined General Motors Super Group, MacLaren Lintas as the field account manager for northern Alberta. He moved on to several executive positions with Honeywell Ltd.'s home and building-control operation, joined TransAlta Energy Marketing Corp. as its director of energy marketing and then joined Enmax Corp. He rose through the executive ranks to become Enmax's president and chief operating officer before starting in 2004 with WestJet as its vice-president of marketing. About a year later, his duties were expanded to include airport operations. In September 2006, he was promoted to president, replacing legendary WestJet founder and CEO Clive Beddoe.

* Moonlighting: Former board member for Kids Cancer Care and Calgary Zoo.

* Passions: Baseball, basketball, skiing, other sports.

WestJet Airlines

* Brass: Clive Beddoe, chairman, CEO and founder; Sean Durfy, president; Vito Culmone, executive vice-president of finance and CFO; Donald Bell, executive vice-president of culture; Fred Ring, executive vice-president of corporate projects; Hugh Dunleavy, executive vice-president of commercial distribution; Bob Cummings, executive vice-president of guest experience and marketing; Ken McKenzie, executive vice-president of operations.

* Profile: WestJet, now in its 11th year of operations, started as a low-cost regional airline in Western Canada but has expanded to 38 destinations within North America and the Caribbean. It is often touted as a David to Air Canada's Goliath. It has tried - and often succeeded - at making inroads in the market through such features as in-flight satellite TV and extremely friendly staff. It was recognized as having the best corporate culture in Canada in a 2005 study conducted by Waterstone Human Capital Ltd.

* Stats: WestJet has 6,000 employees and 65 aircraft with plans to purchase an average of six per year.

* Recent Stock Price (TSX:WJA): $16.45, 52-week range, $9.18-$17.23.

* Website: www.westjet.com

* HQ: 5055 11th St. N.E., Calgary, T2E 8N4

* Phone/Fax: (403) 444-2600/(403) 444-2301

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