“I get criticized sometimes by analysts for being too predictable or being too boring,” he says. It doesn’t get to him. “Banking is a business where you should work hard at being boring. Boring is good.”
Forty years ago, back with Industrial Acceptance in Saskatoon, boring was a tougher state to achieve. On one repossession run in the late 1960s in Assiniboia, 330 kilometres south of Saskatoon, an angry contractor put two bullets through the windshield of the half-ton Pollock had come to collect. On a trip north of the city, a blasting specialist blew a vehicle to pieces in anticipation of Pollock’s coming to reclaim it. Another contractor took it relatively easy on the young financier, merely hiding a D6 crawler deep in the bush rather than letting it go to auction.
Pollock today isn’t quite the same person who wrested heavy equipment from hostile workmen in the wilds of Saskatchewan. But, just as he’ll argue his side of the climate change issue, he’ll still stand his ground in a way that reminds friends and colleagues of his days in the WHL. “Larry can be a little edgy, like all hockey players,” says Jack Donald. The chairman laughs. “Get him in the corner and give him a thump the wrong way, I think he can, on a hockey rink, be capable of getting the gloves off.”
Pollock won’t argue that. “I can be as tough as anybody,” he says. But, he counters, “I’m more patient, I think, now.” For him, the passage of years has distilled his experiences into what he refers to as “character and ambition and resolve.” Find yourself in a debate with him and you might call it stubbornness. Either way, in the financial sector, it’s Pollock’s brand of confidence that has some analysts convinced CWB’s profitable streak will continue for the foreseeable future.
“The steady-as-she-goes approach worked for them,” says Gabriel Dechaine, financial services analyst with Genuity Capital Markets in Toronto. Pollock, he adds, has been instrumental in that. “His vision and his strategy permeate the culture of the bank. [The founders] envisioned this to be the best bank in Western Canada catering to companies operating there and they’ve been very successful growing with that strategy.”
“I think we’re realizing the dreams of our founders,” says Pollock. It’s one of the few subjects he seems to approach with uncertainty. But that dream included continued growth, making an ultimate goal too abstract to give Pollock the feeling that his work is done and that it’s time to retire to the cabin in Kelowna. That’s never been his style anyway, even from the beginning.
Looking back on the days when, as friends would argue, he was choosing between divergent futures, the one that led him here to his role with CWB and the one that might have sent him to the NHL or at least to a few more years of making a mark in the minors, Pollock offers a confession. “I was a grinder because I didn’t have a whole lot of skill,” he says with a chuckle. “But I was the kind of guy that would still be givin’ ’er in the last minute of the game. Because I know we’ve got to play another one, and I want them to remember how competitive we are.”
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