It is June 2016, and the President and CEO of the CFIB is Dan Kelly, who was hired in 1993, during my time. I remember how easily he moved from policy to politics, which is difficult for most of the legislative people we have hired over the years.
Dan announced at the Annual General Meeting that the Board had approved the naming of the CFIB building, “The John and Mary Bulloch Building”. The photo is from the formal announcement the next day with all the staff in attendance. I was deeply appreciative that Mary was recognized for her role in building the organization.
I was honoured again to make a formal address, and I made a serious effort to leave behind stories of people, experiences and ideas that had influenced my life. But, even more important, was leaving behind an understanding of the basics of entrepreneurship and new venture formation, small business management, and the role of public policy in building enterprises. In a way, I was trying to put in a story format, the ABC's of what CFIB is all about.
Of course, the emotional element was my years as a child working in the family business when my friends all went to camp. Watching my father worry about his staff, seeing him bring his four brothers over from Ireland and into the firm, and observing how he could impact the lives of other people. I never forgot all the veterans who bought uniforms from my father during the war.
To quote from my address: The lessons of my childhood “point to the emotional glue that small firms spread throughout their communities, something economists cannot measure because every small business has its own history steeped in personal business and family relationships.”
Then as a lubrication engineer servicing large manufacturers, I began to understand that the rationale of small firms was differentiation because there were so many small specialty markets served by small competitors that I could not afford to call on if I was to meet my sales quota.
Academics that I met through the International Small Business Congress all influenced my life, but none like Dr. Takaturo Yamanaka who was the President of Hitosubashi University in Japan. His PhD research studied the differences in the small business communities of Japan, Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s. They were all different and the product of differences in culture and public policy. I could see, for the first time, how CFIB could become an instrument for changing Canada and the nature of its small business community.