Growing old disgracefully

• Marguerite McKinnon
• 2 April 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Someone should tell Bill Pollock to slow down. The man known as ‘Mr HR’ is the sole proprietor of global human resources company Drake International; a chronic frequent flyer and workaholic who, at age 80, leaves those half his age struggling to keep up.

It's hard to know what to expect when you meet a multi-gazillionaire who runs a successful global company. But it was a pleasant surprise to meet Bill Pollock. He’s a friendly, unassuming gentleman who can just as easily dissolve into the throng of business people making their way to and from work in the CBD, as command a boardroom with cutting-edge decisions to alter global workforce policies.

Humble beginnings

Robert William Pollock was born in Canada, the youngest of nine children struggling to survive the Great Depression. The large family instilled an unshakable desire to not only succeed but excel.

“There was a great desire to come first at something most of the time as a lot of people had high expectations of you,” he says.

As a child, Pollock learned the value of hard work and not to take anything for granted. While at school, he entered the armed services under the national compulsory cadets scheme. He was set to enter the Royal Canadian Air Force when World War II ended.

Pollock was just 16 when he entered the University of Manitoba on a full scholarship. Life on campus was shared with mostly returned servicemen in their 20s. He established a university magazine called Enterprise before graduating in 1949 with a Bachelor of Commerce at age 20.

Like many start-up businesses, the seeds of success were born from failure. Pollock couldn’t find a job.

“I was working my first summer of university for a company that went broke and couldn’t pay my wages,” he explains. “By the time the company went broke, there were no more summer jobs left. I had no choice but to start my own business.”

That first business was mowing people’s lawns. By the end of his final summer at university, Pollock was employing 23 people. He was offered a job following graduation but negotiated to stay with his lawn-mowing business for another year. In 1950 he sold the business for a profit. It continued cutting people’s grass successfully for another 20 years.

Starting Drake

Pollock struck up a friendship with fellow Canadian, Jim Shore. The two met at the Burroughs Corporation (now called Unisys), which specialised in developing business finance booking systems. The two young men decided to set up their own outsourcing business that provided staff at peak load times; a business with the reputation for providing a crisp, clean, quality service. In 1951 Drake was born.

Drake is best known for changing the post-WWII landscape, by bringing housewives and mothers back into the workforce at a time when married women going back to work was seen as scandalous.

In an era where men set the agenda for the home, Pollock and Shore made a calculated guess that husbands might reason a little ‘hobby’ to earn some ‘pin money’ wouldn’t hurt. They were right.

“That was sort of our mission – to get them back into the workforce so we could have temporary workers we could contract out,” says Pollock. “As time went on, we very quickly started to promote women in business and management in our company and we had a preponderance of females running our business when other companies didn’t experience that. In the late 1950s, we were the only company in the business world at that time to hire female sales reps and put them out to sell to our clients and they were extremely successful.”

Pollock attributes his progressive – for the time – attitudes towards women to having older sisters.

“I had great respect for my sisters, I think they were a powerful influence in my life,” he says. “I recognised that women had a lot of talent that hadn’t been recognised in a long time. It’s very different today, but back in those days it was something new.

“In those days people were looking for good sales reps and they looked for males all the time and overlooked the females. We found so much talent in the females that nobody else was looking for that we were able to get outstanding people.”

Ups and downs

Business grew and Drake branched out into subcompanies such as Drake Industrial and Drake Technical. By 1953 Drake had offices in every city in Canada. Pollock and Shore alternated the role of company president each year.

In 1956, at the age of 27, Pollock joined the Young Presidents Organisation, a peer network for company executives to exchange ideas; a network that has grown to more than 20,000 leaders in 100 countries. In 1959 Drake Personnel was formed to help companies find the right people for permanent positions. In the early 1960s, Drake expanded into the USA, United Kingdom and Australia.

Tragedy struck in 1967 when Shore was killed in an aeroplane accident.

“It was a horrible surprise because he was flying his own aircraft along with two other members of our company when a very simple accident occurred but it ended up in the death of all of them,” says Pollock.

Drake was restructured and Pollock became the sole president of Drake International. He had lost his business partner and best friend but never lost sight of their dream to succeed.

Like almost all businesses, Drake has had its share of failures, notably during the dot-com era. Many seemed to have a great future but few survived; however, Pollock says the losses were comparatively small to other companies.

Today Pollock travels the world visiting his company outlets and keeping abreast of their developments. He lives in a luxury Monte Carlo apartment with a view of the city and beaches below. His famous annual invitation-only White Parties attract the successful, beautiful and famous.

In Australia, Drake has 27 offices across every state and territory, and pays the wages of tens of thousands of Australians every year.

Don’t ignore older workers

Pollock now has his eyes on reshaping Australia’s working landscape with a focus on the over-50s.

From 1982 to 1992, 32% of the working population was aged over 45. From 1992 to 2002, that proportion jumped to 72%. In the last five years, that figure has jumped to nearly 85%. Yet, somehow, some business owners still overlook older workers in favour of younger staff.

“If you’re looking for talent don’t go looking necessarily for the youngsters who still have a lot of learning to do but take a look at those older workers who’ve got all that experience and that knowledge because that’s an untapped market out there,” Pollock says. “Those people in the over-50 age group are some of the best people you could possibly look for.”