CEO of the Year 2010

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Somewhere in the vicinity of 4:00 am, a handful of mildly ‘preserved’ twenty-something siblings and their barely legal age sister return from a night on the town. As they enter the darkened family home, joshing and jostling in the foyer, their attention is drawn to a muted glow in the living room. There they find their father, silently commanding attention from a wing back throne. The severity of his facial expression is made even starker thanks to the harsh illumination of an overhead lamp. The festivities? Over. The lecture for having kept 19-year-old Maria out so late? As another of the seven Coleman children, Maggie, puts it: “he made sure we knew how he felt.”

What he also felt, though the kids didn’t know it until later, was incredible joy at seeing how happy they were together. He’d barely been able to hold back the hugs. He would have loved to join in their exuberance, to bask in their sibling revelry, but a fatherly point had to be made and (regardless how hard it was on him) he was going to make it. In doing so, he inspired Maggie to forever dub him, ‘The Godfather’.

It’s an apt sobriquet. Frank Coleman has much in common with the iconic character Marlon Brando made famous. Both head the most influential families in their communities. They are each preternatural prognosticators, evincing gifts of strategy that Napoleon would have envied. They are entrepreneurial, insightful, forceful, and growth-oriented. They are wise Solomons whose audience and counsel are sought by many. They offer deals whose refusal comes with not-so-pretty consequences. And both are surrounded by a defensive circle of informants and gate keepers.

But Coleman is equally the anti-Corleone. What was sinister and threatening in one, is endearing and even sometimes quasi comical with the other. Vito’s armed inner circle is Frank’s loyal coterie. The Don’s immoral justification that “it’s just business” is flipped with Señor Frank to whom everything is personal. And where one is completely bereft of moral compass, the other overflows with decency. Frank Colemans people will never have to take a bullet for him (as if he’d ever let them), but they would eagerly agree to–and even request–the opportunity to praise their champion. Be thankful: it’s a story well worth the telling.

In the beginning

Frank made his grand entrance into the world in 1953, the eldest of eight children (three boys and five girls) born to Eugene and Lorraine Coleman. Though Eugene and his brothers were second generation owners of the Colemans retail business, Frank says his wasn’t a particularly privileged childhood in the financial sense. “We didn’t live in a glam house or anything, but we thought we were well off as a family. We were very close. We had opportunities to work, to go to university.” Indeed, he describes growing up in Corner Brook as a delightful idyll of summer vacations driving around in the family station wagon (yes, all 10 of them) and salmon fishing with his younger brothers.

Bill, eight years his junior, recalls one particular occasion when the two of them headed off to the lake before dawn. Hours later, fishless and fly-bitten, Bill had had enough. He curled up in the bottom of the boat and went to sleep. Frank, meanwhile, fished on, landing not one but two impressive salmon.

Formative years

It was apparent that between the fly fishing and back seat sing-alongs, Frank was unconsciously absorbing the Coleman code of conduct, an informal prescription of moral fortitude best articulated by father Eugene’s favorite poem (‘If’, by Rudyard Kipling): “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you… If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…”

At 10, however, Frank hadn’t yet developed the anger management skills that would become his trademark in later years. When a neighbour smacked one of his friends for some now long-forgotten misdemeanour? Young Frank repaid the lady’s too quick hand by spray painting her brand new car. “Of course, she grabbed me the next day in my backyard. I got in a lot of trouble for that one!” he laughs.