DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT…?
That’s how thousands of conversations in the Canadian cable, radio, television and telecom business have already begun and will continue over the next few days with the passing of Ted Rogers. The superlatives are flowing and believe me, I’ve worn out my thesaurus trying to come up some new ones. There aren’t any. All the really good ones have been used to describe Canada’s communications and media virtuoso who died yesterday of congestive heart failure at the age of 75.
Visionary. Leader. Genius. Passionate. Driven. Indefatigable. Unyielding. Fighter. Tributes from all across the Canada and from the U.S. poured into our in-box all day Tuesday, from Comcast CEO Brian Roberts to Prime Minster Stephen Harper.
I’ve worked in this industry for over 11 years now and have heard my fair share of tales and descriptions of Ted. I admire the man and what he has accomplished. It’s impossible not to. “The company, industry and country is lesser for his passing,” if I can use a few words from an admirer who e-mailed me Tuesday.
(Did you hear the one about “Quiz Air” where RCI executives who have to fly with Ted draw straws to see who has to sit with him and be peppered with questions about their corner of the business all flight long.)
From nothing – while pursuing an image of a father who died when Ted was just five years old – RCI is now the country’s largest wireless company (7.7 million subscribers), biggest cable company (2.3 million subs), one of the largest ISPs (1.6 million subs), a growing wireline voice competitor (a million customers), and a significant media empire with 52 radio stations, OMNI, Citytv, Sportsnet and other cable channels, 70 consumer and trade magazines, the Toronto Blue Jays and the Rogers Centre.
The elder Mr. Rogers was a visionary, too, an inventor who created the Rogers Batteryless radio tube, which allowed radios to be plugged into the wall, rather than run on great big batteries. But Ted’s father’s empire (which included radio station CFRB, the one asset the son always wanted back in the family fold but didn’t get, in the end) would be sold after his untimely death in 1938. Spurred on by his mother Velma and “second father” John Graham, Ted spent his life rebuilding what he thought was wrongfully taken away – and overtook his father by a long shot, building a company that boasts about $11 billion in annual revenue and 29,000 employees.
“He’s come a long way from when I first worked for him – when the offices were in a second floor above a restaurant,” Ontario Progressive Conservative party leader John Tory, remembering his days as a young lawyer working some regulatory files for the nascent broadcast and cable company in the 1970s, told Cartt.ca on Tuesday.
Years later, Tory would helm Rogers Media as well as Rogers Cable, before leaving for politics.
It wasn’t easy to be an executive under Ted. “Everyone who worked for him – he just drove them right to the bone,” former Rogers Cable COO Dean MacDonald (2000-2003) told Cartt.ca in an interview on Tuesday. “The only way he could judge someone was being legit with him, because he hated bureaucrats, was if he pushed them to the point where they would fight for their idea.”
That made for much conflict – which the famously quick-tempered Ted seemed to thrive on. “He was in constant conflict with everyone because that was the only defense he could use against having yes-men. And that’s why Phil (Lind, RCI vice-chairman) did so well with him for so long, because he always fought him,” said MacDonald. Lind has been Rogers right-hand man for almost 40 years.
“Ted and I fought like cats and dogs constantly, but we had this mutual respect,” continued MacDonald. “He was always trying to set traps or press Edward (Rogers, his son, president of Rogers Cable) to the limit – and he wanted me to kind of be his mole and I never would so that frustrated him a bit. But he loved it at the same time because that showed him Edward had his own loyalties.”
“It was 24/7 in the sense that he was inclined to phone you about a memo or leave you a voice mail or raise an issue with you any time of the day or night,” said Tory, “and that’s because he was always working. But he demanded nothing more of the people who worked for him than he demanded of himself.”
(Did you hear the one about how Ted and MacDonald were each suing the other over the closing price of the 1999 purchase of Cable Atlantic – while MacDonald was Rogers Cable’s COO? Ted told him not to take it personally, it’s just business, and he didn’t see why MacDonald couldn’t stay on, which he did. The lawsuit eventually settled.)
The best adjective to describe the man is “visionary”. It’s a word that get thrown around a lot about many people, but it truly applies to Ted Rogers. For example, he bought CHFI, an FM station with virtually no listeners (because almost no one had an FM radio) in 1960 because he knew it sounded better than what he’d been hearing on AM.
After radio came cable as Ted understood the power of being able to reliably deliver video from afar directly via a secure cable right into the back of your TV set, a technology that was still pretty new to Canadians.
(Did you hear the one about how Ted, when he was a student at Upper Canada College, built an antenna on the roof of his dorm so that he could get TV signals from Buffalo – and then charged his fellow classmates admission? That little enterprise came crashing down, literally, when the antenna did.)
Ted’s battles to grow the cable business were legendary, too, especially the fight over Canadian Cablesystems Ltd. when the smaller Rogers took out the larger CCL in 1979, and then years later when he took it up another notch in acquiring cable and media powerhouse McLean-Hunter in 1994. For a short while, Rogers was also the largest American MSO, too.
And when Ted became convinced cellular telephones were going to be the next big thing? His own board told him to take a hike and he instead invested his own money in what would become Cantel with Telemedia’s Phillipe de Gaspe Beaubien and Marc Belzberg.
At the time, Pelmorex founder Pierre Morrissette worked for Telemedia but would come to count Ted as “an inspiration and mentor” as Morrissette, whose company owns and operates The Weather Network and Meteomedia, sat on the Rogers Wireless board for 15 years before it was pulled under the RCI umbrella.
“I got to see Ted in action up close. He’s a builder and has been one of Canada’s greatest entrepreneurs. A visionary,” Morrissette told Cartt.ca. “For me he was a role model. I learned more from him during my 15 years on the board of Rogers Wireless than I did at business school or throughout my career.
“He had an uncanny ability to spot the next technological trend and get in position to be there early and capitalize it and eventually emerge as the segment or industry leader.”
The second-best word to describe Ted Rogers is probably driven. Driven to rebuild the family empire. Driven to “beat Bell” as he was wont to say. He worked tremendously hard to get there – and when the markets closed Tuesday, BCE and RCI’s market caps were virtually identical at over $17.5 billion.
But that driven nature meant the man was a notorious micro-manager, as well, busying himself during his 18-hour-days at the office with the minutiae of his company.
“He was just singularly driven – beyond belief,” said MacDonald. “It was nothing for me to go up to his office at 11 o’clock at night and have him tell me we need to move Sportsnet to channel 23 instead of 26 in Botwood – which had 400 customers in Newfoundland.”
“Just think of this guy, sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar corporation calling up his chief operating officer at 11 o’clock at night saying ‘hey, I think we should move the sports channel down three notches on the dial – in a 400-sub cable system – in Newfoundland’,” remembered MacDonald.
“That’s one thing about Ted, you couldn’t fool him on anything. He might play dumb sometimes but he knew it all.”
“There aren’t many like that who have the combination of vision, the absolutely massive drive that he had and the huge amounts of energy. I mean, he never gave up,” added Tory.
“When he was talking about high speed Internet, I think most people didn’t know what he was talking about. Most said well, there’s a nice little niche product maybe a few people will buy and today they have well over a million customers for that.
“I believe he will go down as the greatest Canadian entrepreneur of the 20th century.”
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Finally, here’s my “Did you hear the one about…” that conveys just how hard Ted pushed his people. Sometimes it was inadvertent.
Earlier this decade, the Rogers Communications media relations folks invited we reporters to enjoy a Toronto Blue Jays game in September in a luxury box. It was early in Rogers’ tenure as owner of the team (I think it might have been 2001) and the boys in blue were out of the playoffs.
As he did from time to time, Ted would wander through some of the boxes and chat. Most of the reporters’ questions were about baseball, a topic which Ted would readily admit, he didn’t know much about. I on the other hand, asked a few specific cable TV questions and the one I remember most was my query on when Rogers Cable would have a high definition personal video recorder to offer to its customers.
“Before the end of the year,” he proudly said. Quite a scoop for me because very few cable companies had any HD PVRs in their possession, let alone in the market – and answers like that is one of the reasons RCI’s communications VP supreme, Jan Innes, often worked hard to limit her boss’s contact with certain scribes.
Jan whispered to me almost right after Ted left that evening, that before I write the story, I should talk to Mike Lee to verify. Back then Lee, who is now RCI’s chief strategy officer, was the VP in charge of new products for Rogers Cable. I talked to him by phone the day after the ballgame to verify the comments from his CEO and I remember asking something like: “Ted told me last night Rogers Cable will have HD PVRs in the market before the end of the year. Is that true?”
Silence.
Then, from Lee, in verrry measured tones, and I’m paraphrasing here: “Well… If that’s what Ted said… then yes, I guess we will have them in the market by then.”
Ted had either given away a very big secret (unlikely) or just made Lee’s life a little more difficult. Rogers set top box supplier, Scientific Atlanta, had very few of the very new units at the time and the Rogers network wasn’t equipped to handle a rollout of that technology just yet, so Lee had his work cut out for him.
But the company had two units in the field right around Christmas that year…
We at Cartt.ca would also like to offer our deepest sympathies to all of Ted Rogers’ family and friends.
