The Tao of Treliving: Boston Pizza's Boss on 'Decisions' and How He Makes Them

Jim Treliving had always avoided the strange Greek, family-owned pizza place known as Boston Pizza and Spaghetti House. He only lived two and a half blocks away from it, after being transferred from a RCMP detachment in Prince George, B.C. to one in Edmonton, but it never drew him in. In fact, he'd usually eat at the restaurant right next door, skipping Boston Pizza entirely and repeatedly.

"I grew up in the prairies of Virden, Manitoba outside of Winnipeg and there was no pizza up there," says Treliving. "We were lucky to have two or three Italian families in our group. It was just an Anglo-Saxon area and basically there were a few Italians and a few Polish people who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway, so I never had a pizza and never knew what a pizza was. No one had ever brought the word up to me."

That was until a cold night in December 1966, when his partner Don Spence suggested they go for pizza at the end of a long nightly patrol and for for some inexplicable reason Treliving said, "Sounds good, Don."

It was "the smallest big decision" of his life that put him on the path toward quitting the RCMP, becoming an entrepreneur, co-owning Boston Pizza and Mr. Lube and being one of the longest-sitting members of the Dragon's Den panel.

"When I walked in and saw pizza for the first time it was like, 'Oh my God!" Then, the food grew on me, so we'd hang out there and the next thing I knew, Gus [Agioritis, the original Greek founder] started asking 'Why don't you come in this business? You love this business. What's a matter with you? and that's when my whole world started to change."

He opened his first Boston Pizza franchise in Penticton, B.C. in May 1968 and now he and his partner, former accountant, George Melville own 334 restaurants in Canada, 51 in the U.S., under the name Boston's the Gourmet Pizza, and 3 in Mexico. The thing was, he did love the business. He loved that Pizza was about friends and family getting around a pie and digging in with their hands. Pizza was fun and above all, it was simple.

"I thought, gee, I could do this, it's pretty simple: flour, water, mix it. I watched them to do it and it wasn't a hard business. The pizzas didn't have names. They were numbered one to twenty, so to me it was simple," says Treliving.

"I've talked to guys like George Cohon [founder of McDonald's of Canada] and he talked about the simple business of McDonald's. If you talk about Ron Joyce and Tim Horton's, he was a policeman. He walked the beat in Hamilton. It's a simple business and when he and I sat down to talk about the business -- he made donuts. Who would've thought he'd be making a billion dollars in donuts? I think we were the same, none of us thought that we were ever going to get to this stage. What we thought is can we survive with one place and then when I got the first place, I realized I didn't want to be pounding out pizza dough all day. I wanted to figure out how to get out of that business and by building more restaurants I could get out of it."

Every decision that went into getting him there and beyond is chronicled in his new memoir, Decisions: Making the Right Ones, Righting the Wrong Ones (HarperCollins Canada) and, for the entrepreneur in you, he not only goes through every significant decision that lead to his rise, but breaks them down, so you know the exact thought process behind them.

At the heart of it all, is Treliving's proven formula for successful decision making. He finds that if you make vocational decisions with your heart, money decisions with your head and people decisions with your gut you will rarely, if ever, go wrong. Of course, this system didn't just come to him fully-formed, all at once.

"I sort of learned as I went along and I didn't realize I was doing some of those things until you sit there and you start talking about what you're going to do. I think, when I was younger, I would make more snap decisions with the gut than there would be with the head. But, once I met my partner, and George and I were together, then he was the accounting side of me and he'd get me thinking with my head more than I did at that time," says Treliving.

"I've often said that my mother was a big influence on my life, not because she gave me anything, but because she treated everybody as an equal. There were no different people in my life, they were all human beings. That was the heart piece for me and I still treat people the same way. When someone walks into the room I judge them on who they are, what they are, not what they wear or what they do. It developed over time -- it wasn't like I woke up one morning and the stars were aligned in all three areas."

His over a decade in the RCMP also came in handy because like any good interrogator, he knew how to get inside people's heads and started applying that to the business world.

"In the police force, when I was there, you had to make snap decisions because, as we use to say, 'You don't have time to think or your dead,' so you couldn't use my analogy until you got a little older and you'd start doing techniques for solving a crime. If you were doing a murder or you were doing a business, you had to follow all the rules and started to think with your head. The best detectives were the guys that got in your head and once I got in your head, I would start to think and act like you. In the movies it's good cop-bad cop and we played that role, but it was how you played the role. Sometimes I was the good cop and sometimes I was the bad cop. But, once you got in their head, you could start asking questions and empathizing with their point-of-view, so I think you learn that and that's what I did."

The book itself offers a checklist after every chapter with decision making tips like, "Retreat is Not Defeat" and "Only Listen to Someone Who's Been There", which follow examples of each from that chapter. It's smart, straight-forward and can be easily followed by anyone with even the slightest entrepreneurial tendencies. The book even gives insight into what goes into one of Canada's most enduring business partnerships and advice on how to preserve your own.

"George [Melville] and I have been partners since 1973 and he was my accountant for five years before that. We've never had a harsh word. We've never once said, 'You're full of bullsh-- and walked out ever! We'll have a discussion, he and I will talk and he has a different personality than mine. but I think it comes down to one word -- respect. No matter what you're doing as a partnership, respect what the other guy's opinion is. When I told my dad I was hiring an accountant he said, 'You listen to him because sometimes you don't listen' and I have. When I'm going to the moon and George says, 'Let's just go halfway and make sure it's okay' and he starts thinking like that, I back off."

But at the end of the day, with all of his royalties going to several charities, including the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, there's only one thing Jim Treliving wants readers to take away from this book. It's his theory that common tastes, mannerisms and habits among people do not run east to west, but across the same time zone because work schedules are similar and lifestyles are similar.

"If other people can take anything from this book, it's that you can make lots of mistakes -- and we made them because we weren't prepared for some of the stuff we did and we weren't ready -- but you don't make the same mistake twice and if you can get people to look at this book, read it and say, 'You know what? I understand that theory. Maybe I've got a business. Maybe I'm building oil tanks for somebody. Well, I don't have to go east to do that and I don't have to go west to B.C. to do that. If you look at the middle of the United States and you look at the middle of Canada, both never had a recession. You shouldn't build out successful formulas from coast to coast, you should build them across time zones first."

'Decisions: Making the Right Ones, Righting the Wrong Ones' is available in stores now and 'Dragon's Den' premieres on Wednesday, Sept. 19 at 8 p.m./8:30 p.m. NT on CBC.