When Tim Vipond joined the fast-growing Shoes.com in March as the company’s vice-president of corporate finance, he immediately oversaw the completion of a $45 million, non-brokered private placement – the largest such private placement ever completed by a Canadian e-commerce company.
Vipond had been working for the company’s owner, Roger Hardy, on a consulting basis. He helped Hardy get into the online shoe-selling business in mid-2014, by working on the transaction that saw Hardy buy both Shoeme.ca and Seattle’s OnlineShoes.com for an undisclosed amount.
Other acquisitions followed.
“We have a few more potential acquisitions in the pipeline, and I’m working on one seriously,” said Vipond, who came to the company with experience helping handle major corporate transactions.
When he worked in strategy and corporate development at Goldcorp Inc., the gold miner made a $2.6 billion unsolicited bid to buy Osisko Mining Corp.
“We approached management several times to try to buy the business but they were not interested, so we bypassed management and the board and went directly to shareholders,” Vipond said. “We wound up being outbid so the deal did not close.”
Vipond left his native Victoria in 2001 to earn his BA in sociology at Dartmouth College.
“I was recruited by the school and went to play there for the varsity [squash] team during all four years of my degree,” he said.
Degree in hand, Vipond yearned to return to Canada’s West Coast. He joined CIBC World Markets in Vancouver in 2005 to work as an investment banker.
That led to joining Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets in 2007, when he managed portfolios of high-net-worth clients who, combined, were worth about $120 million.
He left that job a few years later to pursue an MBA at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.
Outside of his current role at Shoes.com, Vipond has worked on side projects such as Mathers Pacific Capital Inc. , which he founded in 2013. He still runs the venture, which provides practical training for students and financial professionals.
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