Charan Sethi’s long journey from his humble beginnings in India to success in his adopted home of Canada took a few twists and turns along the way but was kept on track by hard work, strong ambition and a clear sense of personal destiny.
Sethi, founder of Richmond-based development corporation Tien Sher Group of Companies, was born in 1951 in Jalandhar, India. He left the country at the age of 13 to join his father in England.
His dad, a carpenter by trade, had moved to the U.K. after first emigrating to Kenya in 1953. Sethi, who was living in India with his mother, brother and sister, said the idea behind his journey to England was to bring the family closer together.
“However, just before we got our immigration papers, our mom passed away,” he said. “We had spent more time with her than our father … and so, of course, we were devastated.”
In 1963, Sethi and his brother and sister took the leap north, joining their father in Southall, a small town on the outskirts of London. The four shared a small house with another family.
Sethi and his father and two siblings slept in the one room they had, and each morning his dad would get up early to bike into the city for work.
Sethi said the move was an enormous culture shock, but he looks back on the transition fondly.
“Thinking back … we have really good memories,” he said. “We laugh about it a lot when the three of us get together.”
Neither Sethi nor his siblings spoke English initially, and there weren’t a lot of Indian families in Southall. He remembers taking beatings from local kids, but he said the experience ultimately shaped who he is to day.
“There was a lot of discrimination, so that was probably a rougher time,” he said. “But the rough time brought a lot of good things out of us. It taught us how to fend for ourselves. It taught us how to look at the positive side of things.”
Sethi graduated from high school in Southall in 1968. He bounced around different jobs before gravitating toward a career in trades.
“My dad wanted us to be doctors and engineers, of course. I wasn’t the type who wanted to go any further in my studies; I just wanted to work. So I had quite a number of jobs and I ended up becoming a machinist.”
Sethi worked in a few factories as a machinist and in a foundry plant that produced metal casings. However, he said, he knew almost from the beginning that it wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He moved on to work for a medical company and worked his way from the ground floor up to foreman of an entire department.
In 1970, Sethi headed back to India at the urging of his father to get married and to see his grandfather. He was reluctant to get into an arranged marriage and refused. His family persisted, introducing him to a number of women, but Sethi stood firm.
He noted he considered himself half English at that point.
He told his grandfather and father, “Look, you gave me a choice,” he said. “And then one day I met a girl, and then I said, ‘OK, that’s the girl I want to get married to.’”
Sethi married in 1970, and with his new wife, Raj Sethi, began raising the first of their two boys in 1972. His career trajectory, however, wasn’t anywhere near as fulfilling as his family life.
“I thought, ‘There’s got to be something better than this. I’m reaching my ceiling, I’m the foreman of a department, running a shift, but there’s got to be something better.’”
Raj Sethi’s sister lived in Richmond at the time, so Charan Sethi made a trip to visit in 1975, thinking he would scope it out as a possible place to move. Sethi was hooked at once. The up-and-coming community seemed to hold out the promise of a brighter future for himself and his family.
“So I went back to Raj, and I said, ‘I like Canada, and I think we should emigrate to Canada.’”
Sethi applied for permits to move his family overseas but found the immigration process confusing and cumbersome. So when, in 1976, the general manager at the company he was working for in England got wind he wanted to move to Canada, and offered to help him transfer to a factory in Toronto, Sethi jumped at the chance.
But while the money was good, Sethi was unhappy in Toronto and felt isolated. He took his family back to England after a few months.
Yet he held on to the idea of moving to the West Coast. In 1978 he made another trip to Vancouver and hit the ground running looking for work. Sethi landed a job as a machinist within 10 days – working for free for the first week to prove his worth – and then brought his family over.
Though he was happy with his new home, Sethi still felt being a machinist wasn’t his calling.
“That thing inside me kept saying, ‘There’s got to be something better.’”
Backed by enough savings to float him and his family for a year, in 1984 he trained to become a real estate agent and got his licence. On April 1, 1985, he took the plunge and became a full-time realtor.
He said the thing that excited him about real estate was the opportunity to be a self-starter.
“There didn’t seem to be any ceiling on how much money you could make,” he said. “You can make whatever you want, depending on how hard you work.”
Sethi had found his calling. He quickly cemented himself as a successful realtor, and by the late 1980s, he had started dabbling in development projects all over Metro Vancouver. In November 2004, he went through another career change and launched the Tien Sher Group of Companies. Sethi has now overseen projects all over the Lower Mainland, specializing in low-rise wood-frame condominiums and townhome projects.
James Stewart, a lawyer with Surrey-based law firm Hamilton Duncan, said Sethi is remarkable for his commitment to things outside of the bottom line.
“He’s intent on making his community a better place,” Stewart said. “He seems to be invested spiritually and mentally and emotionally in making things better. It doesn’t discount making profit, but I think he’s genuinely interested in helping the community and aware of the responsibility of people who can invest in change.”
Looking back on his career trajectory, Sethi said his resolve paid off in the end, and he’s thankful he stuck with both moving to Canada and leaving his career as a machinist.
“I always say to people, ‘I really don’t know when to stop, and I don’t really have that barrier in my mind.’ I’m the sort of guy if I can imagine something, I can do it. I always look to the end result and not the pitfalls in between.”
