My first boss was my best boss...

My first boss was not a graduate of any business school. As a matter of fact he had to quit school when he was only 15. The Second World War was terrorizing Europe and he had to flee his homeland. He never apprenticed at a big corporation but, in his quiet and unassuming way, without even realizing it, he taught me more about how to sell, manage employees and run a small business, because he showed me how to be a good human being.

He did menial work trying to survive during the war and his first real job was farming on a kibbutz in Israel where his innate ability to delve into a task and be a quiet yet effective leader was noticed by the other members who elected him as field manager, quite an accomplishment for a young man in his early twenties who was never formally trained at anything.

After 10 years in Israel he brought his young family to Canada where he had to learn his 6th language – English. Eager to be master of his own destiny he mustered up his gumption and looked far into the future. He found a partner and they opened a modest 'new and used furniture and appliance store' on Queen Street in Toronto, long before it was the retail fashion district it is today and when it was still the clothing manufacturing hub of Canada along with Montreal. Low end furniture was also being manufactured in these two cities and they filled the needs of the wave of immigrants that flowed to Canada after the upheaval in Europe and were being exported to the USA as well.

My first boss was my Dad and I learned more from him than I could have ever learned in business school and, it was because of his encouragement, that I did go to university and eventually had my greatest professional success when I also ventured out on my own.

My Dad was one of thousands of talented European immigrants who were hurled out of their homes when Hitler invaded the smaller countries around Germany and attempted to apply his monstrous final solution in the warped thinking that this would rebuild his country’s past glory. These displaced people brought their skills to this country and were unafraid to risk starting new businesses. They helped revive and rebuild cities like Toronto and Montreal with their strong work ethic and hope for a better future in their adoptive country.

My father was a good boss because he had that rare ability to feel empathy for others and to remember what “he felt like” when things happened or were done to him and he therefore tried, at every turn, to be kind and not to hold himself higher or consider himself better than others. He also appreciated the life he was building in Canada and, grateful to have survived the horrors of the war, he lived those feelings every day and demonstrated them to us, his children.

He once told me that when things got rough for him and he felt down he would think back to the work he did in a labour camp in Russia during the war where his duties were to fill up a wheel barrow with dirt and dump it in another part of the yard – and then repeat the task again – all day long. He used to tell me that after that experience anything was a step up.

One day he decided that he needed a janitor/cleaner for his store. I had no work experience but he felt that I had the right qualifications anyway so he made me an offer. He had observed how well I had learned to polish furniture, make beds, wash dishes and mop floors under the tutelage of my mother. I was the oldest of three sisters and she needed my help, so I got trained first. So it happened that when my Dad asked me, at the age of 14, if I wanted to spend Saturday mornings at his store dusting the furniture, cleaning the appliances and washing the floors, I had both the practical skills and the experience. But it was the life lessons I would learn on the job watching my Dad that proved to be the most valuable skills I would take away from my first job.

The offer was 4 hours of work for $5 plus lunch. In 1964 that was a good offer. I even got a lift to work in his truck and that’s where the lessons began. (Two years later when I landed my first “real” part time job as a cashier in a supermarket I was paid $1 an hour. My Dad had been fair with me).

Before the days of welfare people who were looking for temporary or part time work would stand on street corners on the major streets of Toronto – like Spadina – and if someone needed a worker for the day or week they would stop and pick them up. It was my father’s habit to do this on the way to his store in the mornings when his business got busier so he could have an extra hand or two to help him lug around the heavy furniture and repair the appliances he bought second hand to fix and re-sell.

Soon it seemed that it was the same men time and again who were jumping in the back of his pickup truck and before long he didn’t have to slow down at street corners anymore – the "usuals" were waiting for him in front of the store. They had become his unofficial permanent crew. One had a drinking problem, one was a gambler and the other had a mental disorder that was never diagnosed or treated. They all lived in rooming houses on the margins of society and in their torn and dirty clothes – they looked lost and forlorn. But they were loyal to my Dad and soon I began to understand why. He never shouted at them. He paid them at the end of every work day and bought them coffee. He spoke kindly to them and asked them about their lives. He explained to me that just because someone was down on their luck – even if it was caused by their own actions – they deserved to be treated with the same dignity with which he treated his customers, his partner, his friends and his family. He said that it’s easy to be nice to people who are like you but much harder to be kind to those who society has not accommodated because ‘but for the grace of good fortune’ that could have been me.

It’s always amazed me that a man who had survived so much hatred hurled in his direction, plus the slaughter of his immediate family, still had the ability to be so generous to others. I came to learn that, despite everything, my father had always felt well loved growing up and that sustained him his whole life and gave him the ability to love others, never ashamed to wear his heart on his sleeve.
I remember sometimes when he used to take me home after my “Saturday shift,” and he would take one of the helpers with him to make a delivery to a customer afterwards. They never rode in the back of the truck – even in the summer – always in the cabin – next to me. And I was instructed to listen to them and to talk back nicely. Our conversations often didn’t make much sense but I was polite and didn’t think it strange or uncomfortable at all. These were my Dad’s workers and I respected that fact.

As I scrubbed the refrigerators and stoves, polished the furniture and thoroughly washed the long expanse of the floor with a bucket of water and a heavy mop, I had the privilege of watching my father deal with his customers and I learned how to be fair and honest.

The style of shopping in those days was to barter for goods, a European tradition. You only refrained from this in the fancy department stores downtown where everything had a price tag and you knew the price was the price. So shopkeepers and their clients played a little game with each other. The owner asked a higher price than they expected to get and let their client haggle with them until they reached the price they wanted to charge all along. It seemed that everyone was satisfied with this way of conducting business transactions. My Dad had a different sales approach, even though he never studied sales and marketing or got his MBA. He had a simple no nonsense style he devised by applying a simple criterion. ‘How would I like to be treated if I were the customer?’ He concluded that if you treated people fairly they would come to trust you and you would never have to haggle with them and they would still know they got a good deal. So he made it his policy to give his best price first - and last. It proved to be a powerfully effective strategy and the proof was that people would come to him time and again over many years and recommend him to their friends and relatives. He especially gained a good reputation among new immigrants who were told that they don’t have to worry about being overcharged by the proprietor of this store and no haggling was needed.

I think I realized even then how wise a person my father was and how much I loved and admired him for all those qualities. Perhaps because of his missed opportunity at higher learning he knew how important it was for me and my sisters to aspire for a university education even though it was not fashionable in those days to educate daughters after high school. He wanted us to become independent people. That’s how he saw us - as people - not girls.

More than my formal education, it was the things I learned getting to know him while I was growing up in his household and working for him in his store that have stayed with me more than all the things I learned in books or from bosses I have had since then. I recall regularly the gentle wisdom he imparted to me and I know that my success in life began the day he gave me my first job.

Today I and my two sisters are all self-employed. I guess the old adage “like father, like son,” also applies to daughters and it is remarkable that things worked out that way – but not surprising.

My first boss finally closed his store and retired when he was barely 60 years old and spent the next 25 years doing the Florida thing with my mother and helping us raise his six granddaughters. Three have already graduated university and are building strong careers. The other three are following right behind.

My first boss turned 85 years on January 1, 2010. Happy Birthday Dad.