Chad Wasilenkoff: Overall Winner | 2010 EOY

The judges: “From selling used golf balls as a kid to salvaging paper mills across the country, Chad is a true entrepreneur with a vision that equates to success and profits.”

The 2010 Overall Entrepreneur of the Year: Chad Wasilenkoff
, CEO, Fortress Paper Ltd.

Perched above the McDonald’s restaurant at Lonsdale Quay, the offices of Fortress Paper are separated from the throng of commuters and shoppers below by a metal gate. Atop an unassuming stairway sits the office of 38-year-old Chad Wasilenkoff, who oversaw the production and sale of $198.3-million worth of specialty paper last year.


The low-key premises match Wasilenkoff, a straight shooter who recalls gathering golf balls at Silver Springs Golf & Country Club in Calgary when he was 10, banding together other kids to help him and then deploying the earnings in the then-lucrative trade in Atari video games and consoles. Trading in BMX bikes, cars and artwork followed. By high school, Wasilenkoff was an honours student despite being absent more than 70 per cent of the time amassing what he describes as “a small little nest egg.”


After graduating from UBC in 1996 with a BA in urban geography and economics, Wasilenkoff worked as an investment adviser and financial planner at Canaccord. Duped like so many other investors by the Bre-X scandal, then the dot-com bubble, Wasilenkoff vowed henceforth to do his own research rather than rely on analysts’ investment reports.


“It forced me to do that much more research, dig that much deeper, work that much harder to try and do it on my own,” he says. When he left Canaccord in 2001, he was determined to eschew investment trends. “Whatever’s hot I have no interest in. Find me something that everyone hates, they don’t want to invest in, they’re shying away from,” he says.


Buying cheap meant limited risk, but he saw opportunities in acquiring poorly performing private companies and taking them public. The change in valuation by going public and the funding available through the public markets opened doors that led to good returns in the long term.


Wasilenkoff cycled through gold and uranium before finally, in 2006, encountering an opportunity to buy two struggling specialty paper mills from Mercer International Inc., in Dresden, Germany, and Landqart, Switzerland. The price was two to three times earnings before interest, taxes and amortization, at a time when similar properties were selling at nine times EBITDA.


“They had strong profiles, great reputations,” he recalls. “What they needed was a more focused management team and some of the growth capital.” Wasilenkoff took the mills public under the Fortress banner in 2007, a move that garnered the cash needed to upgrade the Dresden mill to produce special non-woven wallpaper. Upgrades to the Swiss mill that are scheduled for completion in November this year will equip it to handle a new counterfeit-resistant substrate for the Swiss franc and transform the Swiss mill into the world’s biggest banknote producer.


The recent acquisition of a kraft paper mill in Thurso, Quebec, for $1.2 million, follows a similar model. Fortress will retrofit the mill to produce cellulose-based rayon fabric, which is projected to add more than $200 million to Fortress’s annual profits.


Aside from Fortress, Wasilenkoff maintains interests in real estate, community newspapers and fibreglass-reinforced plastic.


As one judge who backed Wasilenkoff’s nomination for Entrepreneur of the Year noted, “From selling used golf balls as a kid to salvaging paper mills . . . Chad is a true entrepreneur with a vision that equates to success and profits.”