Jim Estill, President and CEO of Danby Appliances.Kyle Scott/The Globe and Mail
I don’t need to work. I’ve made my money, and I have modest needs. I sold my first business when it had about $2 billion in sales. I retired for five years, moved to New York and did a bunch of angel and venture investing, and sat on some boards. Then my dad got sick, so I moved back to Canada and joined the board of Danby. When the CEO resigned, I took over and bought the company a year later.
This is what I like to do, but I also believe we can use businesses to make the world a better place. I prefer to support what I call base needs, so the Salvation Army and ending homelessness—that kind of thing. And refugee resettlement is another base need. You’re basically helping people through a hard time, and they become self-sufficient contributors to Canada and society. When we started the Syrian refugee project, I said I’d sponsor 50 families, but we just kept going. For our new Afghan project, we’ve asked the federal government to let us bring in 300 people, but they’ve only given us 10 so far.
Initially the pandemic was bad for Danby. Everyone was afraid the sky was falling. That was one of the reasons we launched the ventilator project at our factory in Guelph—to ensure continuous employment for my people. That coalition assembled 10,000 ventilators. As it turned out, I didn’t need the extra work (though we ended up hiring the 100 people we’d brought on to build them). Now people want freezers again because they’re worried about food not being in the grocery store. People are buying wine coolers and second fridges because they’re eating and entertaining at home. So sales have gone up.
From a leadership point of view, the pandemic dramatically changed how I lead. I like to visit factories and talk to people and eat in the lunchroom, but I now have a lot of employees I’ve never even met because they were hired during the pandemic. I almost feel like an absentee owner. It’s tougher to be personal with people by phone and video, and so you have to work at overcommunicating. And even that has its limits.
Because logistics are backed up worldwide and there are shortages of everything, it’s making us rethink just-in-time delivery. The whole world was heading that way. Now it’s like, gee, maybe we’d better have a little more safety stock because we might not be able to get it or, if we do, the shipping cost is going to be double. And if I had more inventory, I could sell more.
In the end, we’ve had to increase prices to cover some of the increased costs, and I see that continuing for a while. That’s just the new reality. So from Danby’s point of view, the outlook is pretty positive. I am worried about inflation, because that erodes purchasing power. But 2022 will be a good year for us. I even think 2023 will be good, because the logistics backup is that long. We’re not going to catch up on orders for a year.
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