Joseph Calvano was middle-aged before he became an entrepreneur, but it didn't take him long to reveal a Midas touch.
At age 47, Calvano co-founded Dollar Giant. He took nine years to build the venture to 86 stores and more than $100 million in annual sales. He then sold the company to Dollar Tree Inc. (Nasdaq:DLTR) for $62 million in 2010.
That sale enabled Calvano and his two partners to pay off $10 million in debt and split the remaining $52 million three ways.
Calvano, now 60, harboured entrepreneurial ambitions for decades before he finally took the plunge.
His 2001 dismissal as an executive at Superstar Group of Companies, which dissolved, was the domino that finally pushed him to act. He was out of a job and wanted to stay in Vancouver instead of taking an executive position in Canada's retail hub, Ontario.
It was the third of three dismissals.
In 1998, Army & Navy owner Jacqui Cohen abruptly fired Calvano as the president of her department store chain.
"I understand why she did it," Calvano revealed to Business in Vancouver while sitting in what is now Dollar Tree Canada's Burnaby head office.
"I just didn't appreciate how she did it."
Army & Navy CEO Garth Kennedy had died suddenly, and Cohen was keen to become more hands-on.
Calvano said that instead of explaining the situation, thanking him for his work and suggesting there needed to be a change, she bluntly told him that "you're fired."
Cohen refused to provide her version of events to BIV.
Calvano, his wife and son had taken a big leap when they moved to B.C. from Ontario in 1995 so Calvano could become president of Army & Navy.
They all enjoyed living in Coquitlam and did not want to return to cold Ontario winters.
"I always wanted to start a dollar store or to be in retail on my own," he said. "I had a passion to do something different."
By 2001, the time was right. Calvano borrowed $40,000 from brother Tony Calvano and $40,000 from former Army & Navy trustee Graham MacKenzie. He added his own $40,000, and Dollar Giant was born.
His game plan was simple: price everything at $1 and sell products that people need for daily use.
Other so-called dollar stores were selling mostly liquidated items, often for more than a dollar and in dark and dingy premises.
His concept took off.
The first store was a successful 2,100-square-foot operation in a small strip mall at Cameron Avenue and North Road in Burnaby.
A good deal on a lease for a 2,800-square-foot store in North Vancouver prompted him to open a store there nine months later.
"Right away we were doing three times the business of the store on North Road," he said.
He and his partners gambled on opening a store in Surrey that was more than twice the size of the North Vancouver operation. That, too, proved successful.
Steady growth continued with the chain opening about six stores a year. As profits grew, that pace doubled. The peak year was 2007, when Dollar Giant opened 17 stores.
Quebec-based Dollarama Inc. (TSX:DOL) offered to buy the company in 2005. It was around the time that Dollar Giant first expanded outside B.C., to Ontario.
Calvano did not bite at Dollarama's offer because he was still far short of achieving his goal of $100 million in annual sales.
He hit that goal in 2010, but he was unsure how to take the company to the next level.
Would he have to take his first bank loan? Would he and his partners bring in a new equity partner?
He consulted Capital West Partners co-founder Gerry Bellerive, who helped find Dollar Tree as another potential bidder for Dollar Giant.
Dollar Tree did not offer as much cash as Dollarama, but Calvano said he immediately liked Dollar Tree CEO Bob Sasser and believed that a sale to Dollar Tree would allow all his staff to keep their jobs.
Dollar Tree rebranded all Dollar Giant outlets and has added 103 stores in Canada since the transaction closed in October 2010.
"Joe is one of the true Canadian retail leaders in the discount sector, and he has accomplished this while being a genuinely nice and honourable man," said retail analyst and Dig360 CEO David Gray.
"[Dollar Giant's] sale to Dollar Tree in 2010 marked the third and last significant B.C. retail growth story after Lululemon and Aritzia."
The main reason it took Calvano so long to embark on his entrepreneurial passion is that his career had been going so well at large retailers.
The Italian-born Torontonian dropped out of college when he was 20 to work as a stock boy at K-Mart's small-footprint subsidiary Kresge. He quickly worked his way up to be the store manager and soon he was promoted to be manager of a big-box K-Mart store.
He jumped the normal career progression path of being a regional manager when he was offered a job at K-Mart's Canadian head office, in Brampton, Ontario, as a buyer.
By 1985, he was president of K-Mart subsidiary Bargain Harold's.
He tripled sales in little more than three years.
K-Mart sold Bargain Harold's, but Calvano was able to stay because the new owners lured him from K-Mart by doubling his pay and providing other perks.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the operation was now highly leveraged and bank interest rates had soared past 15%.
Debt interest bled away all the profits. That forced the company into receivership in 1992 and Calvano into unemployment – the first of his three dismissals.
He has no plans to climb the Dollar Tree ladder and take an executive position at the company's Virginia headquarters.
"I wouldn't want to leave Vancouver," he said. "I have a grandson now, and he is here. My wife and I enjoy going to sporting events such as the Canucks and Lions, going to the theatre and just enjoying local life."
