Wes Hall shares his inspirations, challenges in new book

TORONTO:

Jamaican-Canadian business leader Dr Wesley J. Hall has determined not to rest on his laurels as there is still so much more to do. Instead, he is inspired daily by a photograph of his late grandmother, Julia Vassell, on his desk at work, to constantly challenge his limits and keep building on his successes.

Vassell, a St Thomas native, passed away at the age of 97 and Hall remains indebted to her for the love and care she showed his siblings and himself after their mother abandoned them in their childhood.

Hall was the special guest at a luncheon organised by the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) where he was in conversation with fellow Jamaican-Canadian and communications strategist and philanthropist Donette Chin-Loy Chang about his new memoir, No Bootstraps When You’re Barefoot: My rise from a Jamaican plantation shack to the boardrooms of Bay Street, published by Random House Canada.

The book is dedicated to Vassell.

“The reason I keep on doing it is because I kept that picture with my grandmother on my desk at the office deliberately because it’s the first thing I look at when I get to the office. It tells me that that journey is impossible from there to here, so what else is impossible?” says Hall about his tenacity.

The executive chairman and founder of Kingsdale Advisors, who is one of North America’s most influential power brokers and Canada’s pre-eminent leader in shareholder advisory services, says his job is to find that next impossible thing, whatever that is, and accomplish it. He believes the word ‘impossible’ should not be in anyone’s vocabulary and, in fact, it should not exist.

“When people say ‘Wes, what you have done is impossible’, well, I just did it so it’s not impossible. So what else is there that I can do that you deem to be impossible? I think people allow other people to put limits on them and the impossibility language comes from somebody else telling you what your capabilities are. But if you take that limit away, then your accomplishment is limitless.”

He says the idea for a book was sparked by WES, a documentary produced by then 19-year-old Ryerson University (now TMU) film student, Samuel Lehner, in 2016. Both Samuel and his father, Ken, were in attendance at the luncheon.

“I didn’t really think I had a story that anybody could care about but he thought so and he came prepared. And I said, ‘okay, fine, if you can pitch my family and get them to say yes, then I’ll do the documentary’.”

Lehner visited Hall’s home and pitched his idea to the family and they all concurred that the documentary should be done.

“A lot of people over the years have been saying ‘you should write your book’ but, when you’re living your life, you don’t think it’s remarkable. You really don’t. You’re living it; it’s your life. It’s not like I’m sitting there going every day, ‘man, this is remarkable’.”

NEVER COMPLAINED

Hall said he spent 11 years living with his grandmother, who was the epitome of industriousness, love, joy and confidence. She raised 11 grandchildren on a plantation worker’s salary.

When his mother boiled a pot of porridge and left them – a four-year-old daughter Joan, an 18-month-old Wes, and his six-month-old brother Ian – at home, a neighbour went to get 60-year-old Vassell at her work on the plantation.

“She never said, ‘God, why me, why me?. And, keep in mind, she had all those other kids that she was looking after. And so there was never a sense of resentment that I saw in her. In all those 11 years of her struggling and working hard in that tin shack – no electricity, no running water, you have to go get wood and build a fire to cook for these kids, got to go to the river to wash their clothes because you didn’t have running water, and then she had to go to work on a plantation — and she never complained a day in her life.”

Whenever anybody tells him that he cannot do something, he channels his grandmother.

There is a photograph of Hall as a child on the cover of the book, which he told Chin-Loy Chang was taken in 1976 when his grandmother dressed him up in clothes for church that his father had sent from Canada. The clothes were kept in a barrel sent from abroad and would only come out on Sundays.

“We wouldn’t wear shoes normally but my dad would send shoes. What happens is, you would put a cardboard down and trace your feet and then send it back to Canada, says Hall, noting that his father would match the trace with shoes in a store, buy them and send the footwear to Jamaica.

The founder of the anti-black racism initiative BlackNorth said, although they lived in poverty, the confidence he displays in the cover photo was instilled by his grandmother.

Regarding the title of the book, Hall said people usually encourage someone down in the dumps to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but “what if you have no boots, how do you do that, how do you pull yourself out of the dumps?”

‘Bootstraps’ is also a metaphor used in relation to starting a business and, for Hall, it was also “for all the things that we go through in life”.

“That’s what black entrepreneurs go through. People tell you ‘in spite of the obstacle that you see around you, just do it, make it happen’. But it’s one thing to say that you don’t have the tools to make it happen, but what about when somebody deliberately takes those tools away from you?”

Hall, who is one of the investors on the hit TV series Dragon’s Den, said his story is “about people actually continually taking my tools away and then tell me to be successful. And then when I actually achieve success they go, ‘okay, fine, let me find some other ways to prevent that success from happening’.”

Reflecting on his trajectory, Hall recalled a series of painful experiences; from his mother abandoning him as a baby to eventually living with her and then being thrown out by her at age 13, to coming to Canada and living with his father for two years and having to do menial tasks.

He said they were all examples of people continually taking his tools away and expecting that he should pull himself up by his bootstraps and make things happen.

The business leader and philanthropist said he did not achieve success on his own but had an “army of people’ whose sacrifices he appreciates because they believed in him. As a result, he likes to ‘give the underdogs an opportunity to fail because a person learns from failure’.

Hall and his wife, Christine, are the parents of five children.