Built to Last: Calvin Polet on Family Business and Neptune Properties

That's great advice.

Before we wrapped up the conversation here, I just wanted to ask too, like you've operated your whole career here locally and you own properties, kind of other provinces in Canada and a little bit in the States as well too.

But what is it about doing business in Manitoba that you find is underrated by people who look in from the outside?

I think that Manitoba is a great place to do business and it's the people that I think one of the reasons why people here are, there's something special about it is I think our cold weather helps make it that way.

With a climate that can be inhospitable for a good portion of the year, You better get along with people.

You better get along with friends and neighbors because life will become very lonely if that's not the case.

We don't have the ability to just every weekend decide to go mountain biking by ourselves in the middle of January.

We're getting together for house parties and socials and we become lonely.

very friendly.

We maybe have to push each other out of a snowbank or shovel an elderly neighbor's sidewalk, you know, so it creates some of those opportunities to serve each other.

And then, because not everybody can handle a climate like this, you tend to grow roots when you stay here.

And when you've grown some roots, there's an interconnectedness within the community that We are not a transient community.

You go to some other cities across North America, for example, and you go to a reception or a dinner party and a significant portion of people don't have roots in that community and they've gone there for opportunity or whatever.

And that's not good or bad.

That can be very exciting and wonderful.

And you've got a spirit of adventure in communities that maybe is more prevalent there than in a place like this.

But the best description I've ever heard of Winnipeg, and I wish I could remember who said it, but somebody once said, in Winnipeg, you have to round up to get to one degree of separation.

And there's this concept of six degrees of separation.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up.

It's a fairly well thought out, documented thing.

But in Winnipeg, if you are talking to somebody that you have never met, and if they have roots in this city, it's very, very rare that within one minute you would not be able to find some common connection, a common relation, or you both know the same individual, or you worked at the same place, or anything like that.

And when you have that, if I'm allowed to use a certain colorful language, it's very difficult to be an asshole in a community that is that tight knit because it will come back and bite you because somebody will say, oh, I'm trying to do business with so-and-so and right away, lo and behold, somebody will know them and go, oh, you know, you can't do that.

They're not a good person to deal with.

So it keeps us honest, keeps us friendly.

And part of where I started learning, discovering this phenomenon is when we started doing business in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities in Minnesota about a dozen years ago.