First Person: Four Seasons' Isadore Sharp
The National Post

It took time and hard work (not to mention the love of his wife) for Isadore Sharp to figure out the arc of his empire in the hotel industry.

I met Rosalie when she was a bridesmaid at my cousin’s wedding. She was strikingly beautiful -- I mean, strikingly. A kid at that time, what do you look at? A beautiful girl. My brother-in-law came up to me: “Have you seen this young lady?” I said, “Yes,” because I already had. We started going out and from that you find out if the person you noticed because of the physical attraction is more than just that. If I had to describe her beauty I’d say it was from the inside, which you learn over a lifetime. She has this curiosity of youth, which is a gift, but our first meeting? She was the most beautiful girl in the room, by far. She had something about her eyes, an innocence. Still has.

Growing up, my dad was a plasterer and I enjoyed working with him. Father-son relationships are difficult, but my father decided he was going to let me sink or swim. My dad’s an immigrant, no education, but well-educated. Street smarts. He left home at 13 and went to Israel at 17, one of the original pioneers, and since he took on responsibilities as a teenager, his way of looking at children was for them to get out and do. Right after I graduated from Ryerson, he allowed me to be in charge. I made ridiculous mistakes, horrendous mistakes, but he didn’t correct me. I was a joke, but I was learning, learning, trial and error -- when you were old enough in our household, you worked, and I worked construction. People worked physically hard -- hot sun, cold winter, it didn’t matter. They never complained. The men on the sites were thankful they had a job and food and shelter. These were qualities that you start to value.

I didn’t know anything about the hotel business. Building that first hotel was a real estate deal; I’d hire someone to take care of the hotel. To me it was a slam dunk, but why did it take me five years to convince anyone it would work? Time collapses in around you.

Building then wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today. You’d use a piece of paper for a contract and -- this was the ’50s -- I’d arrange with my subcontractors a deal where I didn’t pay them until we finished: I’d pay 70% and hold back 30%. My brother-in-law and his best friend invested $90,000 and my dad put in the same amount. That became my way of putting together a financial package.

But even if the deal hadn’t worked, I would’ve paid off our subcontractors. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. They trusted me, and that’s the way business was back then. Thankfully, the hotel was a success and got to a point where I could see where we could become something ... perhaps.

After we built the Inn on the Park in London, our third hotel, I found myself at a crossroads. I was still a builder, but I thought that by concentrating on that one thing -- a medium-sized hotel of exceptional quality -- maybe I could be the best. It was 1972, 11 years after our first hotel opened, and I decided this was what I was going to do. There’s no light that goes off, it’s an understanding: If I do it this way, it might work. That was the beginning of the Four Seasons, but life’s not always one straight path. We built the first hotel on a handshake. The way you’re brought up, that’s the way you are, the way you behave. It took 20 years for that to become meaningful. You think about what matters, what your company’s about, and a culture is formed.

We heard about this kid from the suburbs of Vancouver who was going to do the impossible and that’s how it sounded: impossible. I thought, fine, when he comes to a city where we have a hotel, maybe we’ll give him a good night’s sleep, a good meal. He had cancer and during the course of his recovery he’d seen a friend one day and the next day that friend was dead. He said, “Someday the hurt must stop.” I had somebody keep in touch, but people didn’t believe in him at first. It seemed so ridiculous to run across the country on one leg. That’s when I picked up Terry Fox. I had a dinner for Terry with 500 business people in Toronto and he was wearing his shorts and speaking to the audience, just speaking from the heart, flicking this paper clip. You could hear the flick over the crowd. Five hundred people -- everyone was in awe.

I said to Terry, this is bigger than you thought, you should prepare for Vancouver, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He knew his body was breaking down. That’s how we began the Terry Fox Run. Under his name, $500-million has been raised for cancer research.

I’m fortunate now to have choice about what I do. My time is my own. When you start a company, you’re one person -- you do everything, but as people have joined I’ve given up responsibilities and delegated. That’s the downfall of entrepreneurs: It’s tough to give up all this control, but I’ve found it quite easy. It’s very easy for me to give up opportunities so other people can take charge of things that I don’t know much about. This isn’t my industry.

--The Four Seasons of Isadore Sharp, a documentary about the founder, chairman and CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on Citytv. The 30th annual Terry Fox Run is Sept. 19. For more information, see terryfox.org.

As told to Ben Kaplan


Toronto Sun, Entertainment TV
BILL HARRIS, June 4, 2010

Sharp shooter
An intriguing documentary called The Four Seasons of Isadore Sharp airs Saturday on Citytv. It’s a biography of Sharp, the Canadian hotel tycoon, who turned his ownership of a single hotel in Toronto in 1961 into the international Four Seasons empire we know today.


The Globe and Mail
Critics Picks/ Highlights, June 4, 2010

PROFILE
The Four Seasons of Isadore Sharp
CITY-TV, 8 p.m.
Famous as the founder, chairman and CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Isadore Sharp recalls opening the first Four Seasons hotel on Jarvis Street in downtown Toronto in 1961. Fifty years later, the empire is a $3-billion business and includes 79 luxury hotels in 33 countries. This program touches on the highlights of Sharp's brilliant career and his philanthropic efforts with the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.