Nelson Skalbania: Vancouver’s mythic deal-making tycoon
Fame, fortune & wisdom from 11,000 mistakes
The next Goodman Report podcast, an interview with the unstoppable Nelson Skalbania, is one of the most entertaining – and absolutely the most fun – of any that we have done so far.
Nelson Mathew Skalbania was the prototypical Vancouver tycoon – and the only guy in town who my mother would let smoke cigars in the house when he was doing deals with my father.
Born in Regina to Polish immigrant parents and raised in relative poverty in East Vancouver, Nelson found success as a structural engineer and made his fortune – really, many fortunes – first in real estate and then in any other business that caught his eye.
He’s the guy who, admitting that he knew nothing about hockey, signed Wayne Gretzky for $50,000 only because the 17-year-old Great One beat the then-38-year-old deal-spinner in a six-mile foot race.
At his peak, Nelson was sitting at the big table with Vancouver icons like Jack Pool, Peter Brown, Bob Lee, Sam Belzberg and Jimmy Pattison, rubbing shoulders internationally with people like the up-and-coming Donald J. Trump, and doing 1,000 deals a year, totalling $500 million – in 1970 dollars.
That’s an unimaginable pace – almost three deals every day, often for millions of dollars each. That demands a combination of intelligence, nerve and stamina that absolutely deserves to be celebrated.
Back in the day, the larger-than-life Skalbania was such a character – so brash, so unlikely in the grey Canadian outpost that was then Vancouver – that the media made him a caricature, and a target. And sure enough, the critics and the regulators took him down. But this interview will make you forget the caricature: at age 87, Nelson is still the real deal – sharp, shrewd, oddly modest about his accomplishments and surprisingly forthcoming about his indiscretions (at least one of which landed him in jail for a day and under house arrest for most of a year).
Frank, philosophical, insightful – full of the wisdom earned from “11,000 mistakes” – Nelson’s stories are great, and his advice is very much worth hearing.
This podcast is a blast. Don’t miss it.
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