The Storytelling Project: Issy Sharp

Good, thank you, thank you Ian, and it's a pleasure to be part of this evening's event. I understand later on they're going to have a Q&A which I'm pleased to respond to anything that might interest you. But first, I've written a few thoughts about my parents, Lil and Max Sharp, that I'd like to share with you. You asked me what were my early memories of the Shaarei Shomayim. When I had my bar mitzvah, the synagogue was on Sinclair and it was only a basement — you didn't see a building, you saw a concrete roof. We walked downstairs to the sanctuary. Later the building was built and my dad was part of the building committee that built that Sinclair synagogue and as well as the one we have presently, the Shaarei Shomayim of today. We've got many wonderful memories of our parents. To Max and Lil, anything was possible. And when Max met Lil, that's when it all started. They were married June 12th, 1927. They told us that for their honeymoon Max stayed home until 9:00 a.m. — but their honeymoon never ended. It was a bond for life, mutual love and respect. They produced four children, 20 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren, and with husbands and wives, a family of almost a hundred. Lil Sharp had an exceedingly strong character with no self-doubt, no vanity, and little use for a sense of humor. She spoke her mind — not always tactful — but all was forgiven because the lady just didn't know malice. She ruled the house with an iron hand and probably invented the phrase tough love. She even made the business decisions, because Lil came from a long line of matriarchs where women were the breadwinners and men studied the Torah. She felt that women were the smarter sex and men had to be humored and handled. So even though I was the only son, I was not given any special regard. Once when I was about five years old, I came home with blood dripping down from my face from a cinder fight with anti-Semitic kids in the neighborhood. Lil took one look, saw that I wasn't hurt, gave me a slap across the face as she normally did, and said, "Look what you did to your shirt. Now just go out and play." With my three sisters, however, they were indulged with women's lib privileges. My sister Bea went to Israel alone when she was 16, and my older sister Edie once brought home a boyfriend she met while working in the Catskills, and my mother made up the living room couch for him. No questions were asked — she just trusted us without any doubt. And speaking of taking charge, when our cocker spaniel Blackie gave birth, Lil stayed up with her all night and then cut the tails of the five pups. Of course the legendary Friday night dinners — we were all obliged to show up for dinner no matter what, and over the years it grew to a cast of over 40. She did everything by herself with a one-oven stove, and we were all sent home with fried wings and chicken soup and liver, enough food to last until the middle of the week. Lil didn't have to repeat herself very often for us to listen. She had a very definite way of expressing herself. But Max — Max never raised his voice or raised his hand to any of us, but we all listened and learned. Max Sharp was born in 1902 in a small town in Poland called Oswiecim, now known as Auschwitz. His brother Nathan traced the family tree back more than 200 years to 1784. Max's great-grandfather was a scholar, a chief judge who wrote a book called Paths of Propriety — propriety, integrity, respect — a family value system handed down for more than 200 years. Max's father was a pious Jew and was called the wise man of the village. They were a family of ten, six boys and four girls. The family was forced to separate because of World War I. Max, age 13, moved to Czechoslovakia with the grandparents. After the war, Max left home and got a visa in Vienna to enter Palestine. He arrived in Palestine on April 18th, 1920, age 18. He was among the first of the first kibbutz in Degania. He worked in the fields by day and helped defend against air raids by night. But looking for a new challenge, he set out again. On October 17th, 1925, he arrived in Canada. He met Lil, and that was a challenge. He had competition — a wealthy suitor — but Lil saw in Max his vitality, his strength, and his love. Lil chose Max, the pioneer. Max worked as a plasterer for fifteen dollars a week. He wanted a raise; they said no, so he decided to work for himself. On his very first job, he lost everything he had plus the next few years' earnings — a struggle through the Depression of 1929. Then in 1938 he started as a builder with a horse and plow. He broke his shoulder but kept on working. We moved a lot over the next ten years. Max would build a house and they would sell it. Sometimes Max would build and then Lil would say, "Let's move in," and she would sell our house. Sometimes Lil would sell before Max had built anything, so we just moved wherever it was convenient. We moved 15 times before I was 16. Max was a man of great inner strength. He had a remarkable faculty for understanding and tolerance. He truly bridged the generation gap to his children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. I'd like to read a short paragraph written by my wife Rosalie for Max's 90th birthday: "You look at Max Sharp — the mettle of the man. What kind of a man is he? It is a life molded out of the indomitable spirit and courage of a true pioneer. In the brutal existence of Israel in 1920, fighting the English and the Arabs and the malaria, raising forests from deserts, rescuing fields from swamps — did Max see these battles as hardship? His strength propelled him towards a collective goal, heedless of risk or discomfort. From such harsh beginnings, Max gained strength to face adversity with evenness of mind. He has fashioned a life of many facets, lived to the hilt, and has earned the highest tribute that can be paid — and that is that Max Sharp is a man of honor, and to know him is to love and respect him." My sisters Edie, Bianetti, and I all had the precious privilege of a wonderful childhood — a home where all our friends were always welcomed, where we learned by example the values and ethics of life. As we matured, we understood and appreciated more and more the true values of the principles we inherited from our parents: integrity, trust, and fairness. That is the legacy that my sisters and I were privileged to inherit from our parents. To have known Max and Lil Sharp is to love and respect them. Thank you. And now I'm open to answer any questions. Ian, I see you've prepared a few, but go ahead.

Growing up with hard-working parents, during the summer we worked. As a young teenager I grew up on construction sites, working with hard-working immigrants. That was an experience you can't duplicate anywhere. Growing up in a construction family — that was my life and that's what I had planned as a career. So the lessons learned during the course of a young kid doing the grunt work — slowly you gain an understanding of what life is all about, working with people who are so grateful just to have a job. Growing up was a learning experience not just about construction but about people, and that was going to be my life. Going into the hotel business was not a career choice. I built a motel for a friend of ours — it was just a job, but I was surprised by its success. It was built in the middle of nowhere, off the Queen Elizabeth Highway. It was going to be a 14-room motel, seven rooms on each side, literally looking like a house. I told my friend Jack Gould, "I don't know how people are going to see and find this place. Why don't you build it bigger, make it twice as long? We won't finish the rooms — we'll just build the outside, the windows, and a roof, and on the roof you can put a big sign saying 'Motel 27.' People five miles away will see that there's a reason to get off the highway." He did, and immediately after he opened, he said, "I gotta come back and finish — I'm selling out every night." The idea occurred to me: if something like that can work in the middle of nowhere, wouldn't it be better if it was downtown? That started a five-year excursion of me knocking on doors and trying to convince people that this is an idea that I think will work. Those five years of skeptics and negativity — but it's interesting how a spark of an idea that doesn't go out, those days, weeks, and months turn into years. That belief and conviction gives you the reason to continue, to persevere. Eventually it worked, and that became the first Four Seasons Motor Hotel on Jarvis Street. That was the beginning. But I didn't build it to go into the hotel business — it was just a real estate deal, and my intent was to sell it as you would with any real estate. I started thinking about building that in 1955, just when we got married. It opened in 1961.

The experience that crystallized my thinking about making the hotel industry a career was not until 1972. We had built a hotel in London, England — the Inn on the Park. That was our third hotel: first was Jarvis Street, the next was the Inn on the Park in Toronto, and the third was this new hotel in London. We opened it in 1970, and in the first year it won the award as the best hotel in Europe and the best hotel in the UK. I understood how and why we won that award. It wasn't that we had a beautiful building — we were competing against palaces — but it was how we ran the hotel. At the same time, we had built and opened a 1,600-room convention hotel called the Four Seasons Sheraton, where we had a 49 percent interest. The contrast of how that convention hotel ran and how we were operating our boutique hotel gave me an insight that became the first strategic decision of the company: we would only operate medium-sized hotels of exceptional quality, and we're going to try to be the best. To specialize and only run one type of operation — that's no big deal. But to say we were going to be the best — that was a stretch. We only had three hotels. I didn't say we were the best; I said that is what we're going to try to become. That set the path. When we reconstruct the history of the company, that was the first of four key strategic decisions that has become the foundation we still rest upon to this day.

As you say, it's part of our Jewish culture, it's part of every religion's culture. Many years ago, when we first used this principle to write out our mission statement, I asked Rosalie to do some research — where did this start, who were the scribes, who wrote out this profound statement of the Golden Rule? She came up with a list of ten religions, and the heading was that every religion is demonstrated by their first writings, and each religion's scripture described in their different words the principles of the Golden Rule. So it's a universally understood concept. When I mentioned that first strategic objective — to be the best — I said, I think we can make our quality of service our distinguishing factor. It can't be about architecture or décor; you have to do something sustainable. An intangible like service — if we could be better at it than others, that could be our competitive advantage. But that is only going to happen if our employees can deliver on that promise of exceptional service. So we had to give our employees the tools and the backup, and the way to do that was to create a work environment that they enjoyed coming to, with the respect and dignity they're entitled to. How we treat them is how we wish them to treat our customers. That's where the Golden Rule came to be the mission statement of our key strategic decision number three. The person who wrote that comment about the Golden Rule — I think that is the single most important decision we've ever made in this company.

I guess it's chance events — the luck of who you meet when you meet them. I was fortunate very early on in our lives to meet — when you're young, you're immature adults — and you develop a relationship that depends upon many, many things. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my success is directly related to having married Rosalie, because she's always been unconditionally supportive. She was never ever negative about any of the things I talked about doing. In order to succeed in anything, we all need support, and there's no more valuable support than from that one person — your partner, the person you're living with — because everything you do is going to affect both of us. It was her willingness to accept whatever I was doing which really demonstrated what a true partner is about, because she was willing to accept all the consequences if things didn't work out. And believe me, there were no guarantees that many of these things I tried to do wouldn't end up becoming a disaster. Having that kind of support gives you the ability to persevere, to believe in your convictions. That spark of an idea doesn't go out — it's because somebody's there to help keep that flame alive.

There are many, and there's some that I can't even imagine today how I would have thought of trying to make that deal. Let me think about it — I made a deal with ITT, the world's largest conglomerate. Just the idea of making a phone call to see whether they'd be interested. When you think of risks, the question is: does it cause you to think of failure? I think that's part of the makeup of individuals. You look at risk, but you don't really relate to the failure. You think, "I think I can make this work," and the fear of failure doesn't enter your mind. There are many risks along the way, some that don't work out, but that's the nature of business — you can't foresee everything. There was one risk that wasn't intended as a risk. We were building a hotel in Vancouver, following the same business model we had already used very successfully before — hotels in London, hotels in Calgary. But unfortunately, this was the mid-'70s, and inflation went sky-high. We were responsible for the construction cost and it just didn't make any sense. I said to the landlords, "Look, there's no way — I don't have the money and there's no way I can arrange to finish this hotel. Here are the keys." They came back and said, "Look, why don't you go ahead, you finish the hotel, do it the way you agreed to do it, and we'll talk about it after." On a handshake, I went on spending money I didn't have. Now that is what you call risk. If things didn't work out, they would have the keys to the kingdom. After the hotel was open and we finished it the way we promised as a first-class hotel, they restructured the deal to allow me to be able to survive. It became very successful. So was that a risk — on a handshake, believing that they would live up to an unknown bargain? A lot comes down to your belief in people and your conviction that you don't have a fear of failure.

From day one, you have to figure out how can you compete in a very competitive industry. I didn't know anything about the hotel business, so I approached it from a customer's perspective. What to build and how to operate was really thinking from what would they consider to be a value, what would be important to them. All the ideas you refer to as our innovations were just simply thinking through that way. You'd all think of the same thing. No one else did? Perhaps because those who did have understanding of the hotel industry thought, "You can't do that, it's going to cost too much money." They said, "You're crazy, you're going to go broke doing these things." But I believed people would pay for value. It's not a question of what the price is — the question is, is it of value to them? By giving people things they consider important away from home and office, they would pay a price that would support it. All these innovations happened over the years from that simple thought — being customer-centric, thinking about how do you attract and retain a customer. It's Business 101. A good example: when the pandemic broke out and business crumbled and fear stepped in, our president of hotel operations, Christian Clerc, who's been with the company almost 25 years, came up with an idea. He approached Johns Hopkins Hospital to ask them to act as our consultants on what we should do in operating hotels to assure our guests' comfort and safety. They drew up a program for us which we incorporated into every hotel — called Lead with Care. That's the way innovations start: people understanding what's the next best thing to do. Yes, we're the first to do many things, but they all become copies as part of the industry, which is good — if it's a better industry, we all benefit. But the one thing that cannot be copied is a corporate culture. That is what we have built — the Golden Rule has allowed us to create a corporate culture that cannot be copied. A culture grows from within over many years based upon the actions of its people. The one thing that holds us different is the culture of the company and our people.

This culture is universally understood, and therefore we can go anywhere in the world that can support a Four Seasons hotel and bring together people from that community who understand what Four Seasons is trying to do. When we hire, we don't hire by experience necessarily — we hire by attitude. Our training programs aren't special; our hiring is special. Each person hired for any job — whether a manager, assistant manager, or someone in the steward department — will go through five different interviews. The last one will be with the general manager of the hotel. During those five interviews, each department has the veto right to reject. You're going through a very strict, controlled interview process, and through that you usually end up with a core of people who really understand the company's principles. It's not a perfect situation, but we end up with a core of people who become truly committed, and that's been our success and strength — our retention of people over the years. That gives us the opportunity to go anywhere in the world and bring together people from the local community. When we opened a hotel in Italy some years ago, we had many Italian people working in the company. We said, for promotions, going back — they said, "I came from there, I don't want to go back now." But many of them went back during the pre-opening to help open the hotel. We only had one person with Four Seasons experience working in that hotel, yet when it opened, it achieved the highest ratings of service from people we hired in the local community.

Like all previous downturns in the economy, we've faced them all. Nothing has been as dramatic or as far-reaching as what this pandemic has caused, because it's worldwide. They talked of 2008 as the Great Recession — well, that's just business, and we knew over time that's going to correct itself. But when this hit, there was no way of knowing anything about it. If we were running at 50 percent, we'd be very happy — so many of our hotels closed. It is now under some kind of control, and therefore we will reach the next new normal, hopefully by the end of this year. When that occurs, people will get back to the way life was before. Human nature is such that nobody goes backwards in lifestyle by choice. I think there's pent-up demand — when this is all over, people will get back to what they enjoyed doing before, and the hotel industry is rock solid. We've taken our knocks this year. Next year it's going to take a couple of years to get the rebound. Three years from now, the pandemic will still be in people's minds, but they'll be more comfortable with it because the world will deal with it in a manner that doesn't allow it to cause the trauma it did. When you build a hotel, it's going to be operating for the next 50 to 100 years, so you can't make business decisions based on what's happening one or two years during any cycle. You're going to go through the good, the bad, and the ugly. You manage your financial affairs to be able to get through those times without undermining the strength and viability of your company.

A lot has to do with the support you get when these problems occur. We all have our principles and values. It's only in the difficult times that your principles are really tested — do you manage to stand up for those principles when it really counts? As a company, we've been fortunate — that's when our people come to be tested and measure up, and that's when support is needed the most. That's how we get through these things, and that's what's being demonstrated within our company. The support we've received from so many people who've been there to help. Nothing is more difficult than when you have a situation where you have to lay people off — that's the most difficult issue for any senior executive, having to deal with people's livelihoods. In that process, having the compassion and sensitivity to understand what the person might be going through and how you can help them through that — that's what principles are all about. Fortunately, in our company, we've had so many people who've been able to rise to the occasion during this pandemic.

Much of the real estate here in Toronto, but I know elsewhere around the world, was developed by immigrants. When immigrants came to this country, they came from oppressed places where they were restricted — they couldn't own a building, they had no access to capital, they were always shunned and kept under, whether through anti-Semitic issues or just the nature of the locale. When they came to North America and they knew there was a place where you could go to borrow money and actually buy that corner store, they saw opportunities everywhere. We might be driving by a place that looked like a farm — they would see a city. Their imagination gave them this dream of what was possible. It happened not just here but much more so in North America, because Europe was again held back by historical discrimination. The real estate industry having been developed by many Jewish entrepreneurs, Italian entrepreneurs — when they looked at it, it was just a golden opportunity. Where local people were hesitant, they just pulled ahead.

There will be. We've been working on a site in Jerusalem for 20 years, but like Israel, there's so much politics involved in every step. I'm not sure that's going to go ahead. But we are working on a project in Tel Aviv with a major developer that I believe will sometime in the future go ahead. It's a major condominium as well as hotel. So yes, one day in Israel.

Clearly, technology has taken over in terms of what the opportunities have been and will continue to be. Listening today to artificial intelligence taking over the world and China leading in that capacity — technology is clearly a field worth being prepared for. But there are always existing types of industries that will continue to flourish. The hotel industry covers many things — not just hotels. It's the largest industry worldwide, encompassing food and beverage, travel, hotels. Whatever education you can get will be crucial to your ability to succeed. Having the understanding that it doesn't have to be some great new idea — you can build on existing ideas that can make for a good way of life. But is there going to be another Google? Is there going to be another Amazon? Sure.

Yes. We're here on Zoom doing this now because we have no alternative. But years ago there was video conferencing, and at that time people said, "Why would you travel? You can get on a screen and talk." You cannot do business without dealing face to face with individuals. Yes, this is a good form of communicating because we have to, but in order to really get an understanding of who you're working with — body language, getting a sense of an individual's style — that will always be the case. You can't think of doing business in Indonesia talking on a screen like this. You have to go there to get a sense of the people — what are they doing, what do they really mean. We might speak and understand the language, but there's an understanding of how that language is spoken, what does it really mean. I remember making some terrible gaffes when we were working in Japan — I didn't know it was not correct to do certain things. I think it will improve our way of doing business, but it will not take away the necessity of eye-to-eye contact and being able to shake hands.

The first was what I said — only operate medium-sized hotels. The second strategic decision was to make service our competitive advantage. It wasn't going to be about the architecture, décor, or location — it had to be something sustainable over time. That was decision number two. Decision number three was the culture — the Golden Rule. The fourth decision was about the brand, and that was set up beginning in 1986. The problem we had in Vancouver also caused me to change the business model. At that point I said we will no longer continue to own 100 percent of the real estate — we'll own a piece of the equity. That's when we decided to become a management company, and that is exactly what we are to this day. Being a small company, you had to figure out how do you get people to know who you are, how do you break through the morass of advertising. The way was to create a brand name that would be synonymous with what we represented. In 1986, when we went public, I said to the general financial community that I believe within 10 years we would be as well known for what we represented — a hotel company synonymous with quality and luxury — as Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott were for what they represented. That was the beginning of building a brand name synonymous with luxury hospitality. I'm not sure we achieved it within that 10-year period, but I think today we are known worldwide as the gold standard of luxury hospitality. That was decision number four.

Let me finish one thing. I can't tell you how pleased my wife Rosie and I are to see so many young people who've taken over and now are committed to preserving the life cycle of the Shaarei Shomayim. It really warms our heart that you are able now to preserve something that meant so much to so many people when they first built that Shaarei Shomayim. So thank you all, and it's been a pleasure to be part of it. Thank you.