YouSaid · the spoken record

John Bragg

lines on the record
114
first
2024-10-01
most recent
2024-10-01
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Sometimes you think that that's what we should do, but when there's an opportunity to sell and get the cash, I guess you take it. And that's what we do. No, that's not to say we don't carry inventory over strategically, you know, if the market's too weak, we might carry some over hoping the market will firm.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Having built a factory and all and geared it up to run two million pounds and we ran, I don't know, a hundred thousand, there just was no crop. People could understand that. Our bankers, they knew it wasn't something we did wrong. It was Mother Nature. And so we got through it.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “In 67, we couldn't sell them, and if we did, we felt we were giving them away. Not a good base to go forward on if you're trying to grow the industry, but you can't sell them. I decided I should become master of my own destiny, and it wasn't easy. The first year we had a complete crop failure, the only one in the history. We've had poor crops and good crops, but that year we had a disaster.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “On the farming side the Department of Agriculture in Nova Scotia had some very good extension workers and a commitment to try and grow the blueberry industry in Nova Scotia, and so I kind of came along with that. It was truly a cottage industry at that time. And then the frozen food side we were fortunate to find some consultants in Pennsylvania that had done work in Maine, so we hired these consultants to design. We built plant with our own help, but really we're naive. There's no question we're naive. You know, if you're dedicated enough, you can make it work.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “came back to the small village and decided that my father and brother were in the sawmill business that I could help them, but that I could pay my way with the blueberry business, which worked out all right. Then in nineteen sixty eight we had a real turning point when there were big crops in Maine and the grower price went down and in some cases couldn't sell them on some days we had to stop picking. I had already made a decision I was going to be in the Blueberry business and I decided if I was going to grow blueberries I'd better have my own freezing plant. So I built a freezing plant in 1968 when I was 28 and didn't have any idea what it was doing. Just a focus.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “where it helped me was the principle of a fair deal on both sides of the table, we'd like to think that when we've completed a purchase or a deal of any kind that the other side's happy and were happy. You can't always do that, but it's a good objective.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Went to Dalhousie Law School, which was kind of interesting because I didn't ever plan to be a lawyer. A friend of mine was going, and so then I had to talk my way into law school at the last minute, but I was only there about three weeks when I realized it was for lawyers. But it was a great education. I met some great people, good friends, was probably my best education was first year law.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “a long while and finally when we were We're doing one of our major cable acquisitions, we said that we would sell some non core assets, and that was a noncore asset and went along with some other non core items.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “As I left university fellow student and I built an well informed, I forget about that, but it was a great venture and a great learning curve for us.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “My last year of high school I actually had Made $4,000 picking blueberries because that had developed, and it cost $1,200 to go to Mount A. The game was I could pay my way, and although my parents could afford to, and then by the end of university I was doing a lot better than that, had a choice to teach school for three thousand eight hundred dollars on an extra hundred if I'd coached the basketball team and I had made several thousand more than that picking blueberries that year so I knew what I was going to eventually do”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I did my very first year I was fifteen, so I had to hire somebody to drive the pickup truck and we had four or five pickers and pick four thousand pounds of blueberries when you think today we do one hundred fifty million pounds. It's quite a difference. It was the beginning of an entrepreneurial career, I guess.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “They were both very straightforward. My father grew up in a country store. You had to have repeat clients, small community, and people didn't travel, so you had to treat people with respect and honorably if you tell somebody you're going to do something, you're going to do it, and if you say you're going to be there at seven, you're going to be there at seven or before. Very straightforward values, you know, good base to build on.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I grew up in a village of three hundred or three hundred fifty people, as I remember it we had a sports event of some kind going all the time from time I was five or six years old we'd have a sponge ball game and so a lot of sports activity and skating on swamps and hockey games on swamps and in grade eight we had a new regional school in Oxford brand new school with a gymnasium which was just a wonder for us because we'd been playing baseball in hay fields and to get a gymnasium and a gymnasium teacher was just fantastic for us so that became a big part of our life I was a member of 4H and had a winning calf and all those little things that you know I guess you build on them through the years.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Why we succeed it is we tried to find a product we could run and run the hell out of it as we would say. We're by far the largest wild blueberry processing carrots. We're the largest carrot processor in Canada so we learn how to do it and do it well and then just run it as much as we can. And then we do battered products and we try to do the same thing there. So stick to your knitting, do what you can do and do more of it. And try and grow it. Don't try and do everything. So many people fail by getting successful one and then think they can do everything.”

    2024-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT