Asper School of Business

Calvin didn't start out in real estate.

He began his career as an entrepreneur, running a dairy queen and a car wash, before pursuing his MBA at the Asper School of Business.

In early 2002, he partnered with his father, a lifelong entrepreneur who had built contracting and construction materials distribution companies, and together they started Neptune, which Calvin has spent nearly 25 years growing.

We start our conversation with what a family office actually is and why Calvin treats his tenants as customers, then spend much of our time on family business and what it takes to pass one on.

So maybe I can illustrate with maybe a little bit of the history.

I had started my career as an entrepreneur with a dairy queen with my cousin and then with Car Wash.

We got out of the Dairy Queen and had the car washed, but I was looking to find work, employment elsewhere, and decided I needed to go back and upgrade my education by getting a master's in business, which I did from the Asper School of Business, the University of Manitoba.

And upon completion, it was summertime when that program wrapped up and it's tough to find decision makers who were maybe looking to hire people in the management field at that time.

Why and how did you know that commercial real estate was the career for you?

Yeah, so I started at the Asper School of Business here in Winnipeg, and I majored in finance.

And during that time, it just so happened that I was studying finance through the global financial crisis, which is a really interesting time to study the theory of finance and how markets work or don't work vis-a-vis everything that was going on in the world at that time.

And so you're studying all this financial theory, and I underscore theory, not theorem.

He added that investors who operate the airports will have other ways to make money, including retail at the airports where proficient and experienced operators can derive revenue and therefore hold down the raw cost of flying for passengers.

Barry Prentice, a professor at the University of Manitoba's Asper School of Business, said restraining airport fees still leaves many areas where private investors operating airports can increase costs to fuel shareholder profits.

These include parking fees, costs to rent concessions, and even fees seen in places like the United Kingdom that charge people to drop someone off at the airport.

It's really hard to accept the notion that everything is going to be fine, he said.