Champions are hard to build, harder to replace, and the wisest ones know in their hearts when it is time to step aside.
Next June, as he approaches his 60th birthday, Charles Gauthier will take his leave from an organization – the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) – he will have spent nearly three decades fashioning.
On his own terms. Entrusting a team he has built. Lessons learned. Much accomplished. No role in picking the successor. Books to read; he is stalled at page 322 of Lord of the Rings. More sleep. Lots of travel with wife, five years ahead of him in retirement. Guitar to play, songs to sing in leisure. Still something to give back to the city. Maybe a board or two eventually.
But retirement first. Zero rush on any next chapter.
Gauthier was a 30-year-old former city planning student when he was hired in 1992 as general manager of a beleaguered association. Office vacancy was nearly 20%. The association had a half-million dollars in the bank and a half-million-dollar annual budget, which meant it was not exactly teeming with activity to place-make the downtown.
It was being operated remotely by a Minnesota consultant, who told Gauthier upon arriving not to panic and move quickly, but to listen. He smartly spent six months doing so, then sprung into action that has not stopped since. Today the DVBIA is a $5 million agent for the thousands of small and large enterprises in the district, and Gauthier is its CEO and president and in no minor way the equivalent of its guardian and advocate. He fights to keep the streets safe, for renewal and vitality, and in a city with councillors elected at-large with no wards to minister, he is a good kind of the district boss.
He has a learned style of speaking, frank enough but not incendiary or exaggerative to gain attention. He is driven and focused – at the downtown Terminal City Club that holds an annual challenge of 45 workouts in the first two months of the year, I think he finished the challenge first.
He also has a practised method of collaboration that he acquired the hard way. “I wasn’t a natural born lobbyist,” he recalls.
When he spoke out early in his term against a Burrard Bridge bike lane, then-mayor Philip Owen wrote his chair a how-dare-you letter Gauthier still has – “Oh my God, we’ve pissed off the mayor,” he thought – that serves as an object lesson about the value of courtesy in advocacy. “It is a lesson that stuck with me,” he says, so his method now is to discuss matters more discreetly. If he has to step it up publicly if things aren’t going his way, at least everyone knows what he thinks before he does it.
But by and large, this isn’t what Gauthier needs to do. He has a broad, common reputation as someone who works well with others. By the time he speaks out, he is almost always speaking for a lot of others, too.
Even if he is the visible face of the association, he won’t play a role in choosing his successor. He demurs when pressed about what qualities that person should embody, except to note that he has been focused on external relations. If that can amplify with the next leader, he’d be happy. “We have a voice.” When he leaves, he insists he will truly leave. “I don’t want to be that former employee.” Meantime he will devote much of his time to an economic recovery task force.
“I’m still bullish and hopeful,” he says of how the city will emerge from the pandemic.
It is evident that the office won’t be the populated hub of old any time soon, and Gauthier is particularly concerned about the tourism and hospitality businesses intrinsic to the lifeblood of the downtown.
He also worries about the supply of affordable and accessible housing to feed into the city core, but I suspect he won’t entirely miss that never-ending debate and can likely return to it in his 70s, 80s and beyond. •
Kirk LaPointe is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and the vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
