While dishing out advice on how to avoid mistakes through a successful career in mining, Ian Telfer elicited startled silence from his audience with this tidbit: don’t listen too much to your shareholders.
“I know all you shareholders in Goldcorp love to hear that,” chuckled Telfer, chair of the company’s board of directors, during a Jan. 16 luncheon hosted by Laurentian University’s Goodman School of Mines in Sudbury.
It wasn’t the sort of pep talk you expect to hear from the chair of the world’s third largest gold-miner. But Telfer’s guidance is gleaned from more than 25 years of experience in the precious metals business, including the last eight at the helm of Goldcorp’s board and six chairing the World Gold Council.
Everyone has an opinion on how a publicly traded company should function, he said, but shareholders just have temporary interest in the company, whereas a company’s employees and the communities in which they operate are its more permanent beneficiaries.
“You have to keep that in mind when they’re trying to advise you as to what you should do.”
It’s difficult to suggest an appropriate avenue to reach a goal, Telfer said, but a good barometer for success is regret: try to make the best decision that has the least potential for regret, he said, and worry less about what other people think. Instead, focus on what you get excited about.
“There is no reward without risk,” Telfer said. “Anything you’re going to do in life that’s meaningful to you, there’s going to be a risk to it, and you identify that risk and have to decide whether you’re going to go ahead or not. So don’t use fear of failure as a reason not to do something you really think you’d like to do.”
Everyone’s looking for opportunity, Telfer said, but it often knocks so softly that people don’t always hear it. When mining magnates like Robert Friedland or Frank Giustra or Rob McEwen heard opportunity knock, they recognized it and acted on it immediately, Telfer said.
“They were listening closely, they were watching the world around them, they would hear something, and then they would act on it,” Telfer said. “When people do hear opportunity knocking, they hesitate, they wait to see if it’s going to knock any louder, they’re not sure how they should approach it, and that’s a huge mistake.”
The most successful mining entrepreneurs greet opportunity quickly and with intensity, often working against the advice of critics who aren’t as attuned to what’s being presented. They ignore the noise around them, including taking advice they’re not comfortable with, a mistake Telfer said is all too common.
Telfer also cautioned against assuming your skills are transferrable to another industry. In the mid-1990s he started a tech company, raising capital and hiring a talented group of workers to bolster his new venture. The value of the company shot up to more than $1 billion, but when the tech bubble burst a short time later, “the whole thing collapsed and went to zero and went bankrupt,” Telfer said.
As a director of the company, he had to disclose the bankruptcy on his personal information file with every subsequent company in which he’s been involved for the last 10 years. That 10-year period just ended a few years ago, he noted.
The lesson was not to stretch his expertise into areas he was unfamiliar with, but to focus on what he was really, really good at.
“The other pastures always look greener,” Telfer said. “If you’re having success, even in a small way, in a small company, in your own world, don’t ignore it. Success is fragile.”
It’s also important to focus on solving immediate problems and stall worrying about potential future problems until they happen. Tomorrow’s problems may never arrive, Telfer advised, so “solve today’s problem today.”
Telfer said the biggest mistake he ever made, which many resource companies repeat, involves debt; companies are quick to accept financing to keep the company operating, but don’t think through to what happens when commodity prices go down. When you’ve made a decision to sell something, don’t change your mind, he urged.
Human nature, and the fluctuating nature of commodities, dictates that other entrepreneurs will make similar mistakes, he said.
But Telfer remains confident in Canada’s resource industry and its role in boosting the economy. Around the world, Canada is proving itself as a leader, earning the respect of other countries while providing work and experience for Canadians.
“We can’t seem to impress the NGOs (non-government organizations) and we can’t seem to impress the journalists, but to be in a career where you can meet a lot of fabulous people, travel to a lot of interesting places and then actually do some good as part of the process, it is a big bonus,” he said.
