To call Rod Bryden’s career “varied” would be an understatement. This is a man who has taught law, owned and operated an NHL franchise, and who is currently revolutionizing the waste industry and the energy industry (simultaneously, of course).

The President and CEO of Plasco Energy Group started his journey humbly enough, on a farm in Port Elgin, NB, on the border of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. After obtaining degrees from Mount Allison University, the University of New Brunswick, and the University of Michigan, Bryden went on to teach law at the University of Saskatchewan. After a stint in government in Ottawa during the early 1970s, Bryden began his official entry into the world of business, where he continues today. After founding Systemhouse Ltd. and the Paperboard Industries Corporation, he became the principal owner of the Ottawa Senators, serving as Chairman and Governor of the club until its sale in 2003. But even during his time with the Senators, Bryden was not idle. In 1996, he co-founded the World Heart Corporation, serving as president and CEO until 2004. He also serves as the chairman of the cancer drug developer PharmaGap, Inc., of SC Stormont Inc., and serves on the boards of Clearford Industries and Gallium Software Inc.

It might just be impossible to predict what the 65-year old businessman is going to do next. In conversation with Bryden, one gets the sense of an entrepreneurial imagination roiling and boiling beneath the surface. Still, over the course of his career, a canny observer will note Bryden’s profound interest in providing “needed” services or products. His time with Plasco has been marked by many of the trials and tribulations of an emerging technology – in this case, the production of energy using the plasma gasification of household waste. Challenges with bringing the “waste into green power” service towards commercialization have plagued the Plasco project, but success seems imminent with recent announcements in cooperation with Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Getting investors onside, whether private or public, is part of Bryden’s job, and he seems to be accomplishing his task.

Mr. Bryden opened our discussion by noting that the “East Coast” topic was “a pleasant diversion from the usual sort of questions” he normally gets asked. Eager to talk about Atlantic Canada as a unique place, Bryden nonetheless demonstrated a global awareness and a sense of that place in a larger world of business and “need.” He emphasizes an uncompromising attitude towards being “the best” in business – this is a proud Atlantic Canadian who refuses to measure himself only on the scale of the Atlantic provinces.

ECC’s Alex Willis spoke with Rod Bryden in late October.

Alex Willis: What did growing up in Atlantic Canada teach you about business?

Rod Bryden: I am happy to be from Atlantic Canada – rural Atlantic Canada, specifically. I come from a small, mixed farm in New Brunswick.

Growing up there caused me to recognize, very early on in business, that the relevant market is the world. If you’ve got a product that isn’t competitive with the best in the world, you won’t sell anything for long, at home or elsewhere. The best in the world is available to everybody. Going back years ago, I could sell potatoes from the end of my driveway for a good price in the spring, because there weren’t any around other than what was left of last year’s crop. That was before somebody remembered you could fly them in from god knows where, and have new potatoes all year. So I saw that changing even then, when I lived in New Brunswick.

AW: Taking risks is obviously an important part of any business venture. You have shown yourself willing to enter into risky situations, and then to move forward if they don’t pan out. Atlantic Canada is an area that has a long history of entrepreneurship, but it’s also an area that could be described as “risk averse.” How do you think the Atlantic region could think differently about developing a culture of risk?

RB: At the individual level, many people in the Atlantic provinces would say that the risk they take in their business every day is significant. Now, there are a lot of businesses in those provinces that are focused on the national and international marketplace. But a very high percentage of people, and small businesses in particular, are focused on business which is local, or perhaps provincial or regional. Their challenge is to meet the payroll, and they find their market is constantly squeezed on costs, and they are upset by competition from all over the world, with very small volumes with which they can compete. So I think that the people themselves who are trying to be successful in business in Atlantic Canada would say that their businesses themselves cause them to be in very stressful and higher-risk positions than most.

What we tend to develop is pools of wealth in Atlantic Canada where the wealth has come from careful management of local and regional business, and it’s hard-earned. So it’s often focused on preservation rather than expansion once a pool is established. So the local wealth pool in Atlantic Canada is in fact risk averse. In fact, if you looked at what financial managers advise their clients, it’s that you should assess your objectives, and then assign your risk tolerance to your portfolio according to your objectives. Most of the people in Atlantic Canada, in managing their savings, would fall into the group that the financial adviser – from anywhere in the country, or even in America – would say would be in low-risk investments. So the real problem in Atlantic Canada is not that individuals are not prepared to take risks in their daily lives, or in their businesses. It’s that the local pool of capital – taking the percentage of people who might be applicable to high-risk investment – is relatively small. The absence of risk capital, as compared to somewhere in Ontario, doesn’t change the fact that the dollars needed to be competitive on the world scale is the same in Ontario as it is in Atlantic Canada.

AW: You have a long history of being involved with technologies or services that help people lead better lives. You mentioned in a Globe and Mail interview that you usually prefer to be occupied with something that, as you said, “you’d be proud to tell your kids” that you worked on. What draws you to innovation and entrepreneurship in these areas?

RB: I have a background as a lawyer. That’s a profession that, if you practice it effectively, can earn you quite a bit of money. So I never felt that the reason I should go into business was simply to make more money. I quite enjoyed law, and quite enjoyed teaching it, actually, but what I particularly enjoy in business is that you can choose the issues that you want to address, and put your energies into creating an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. Of course, business is all about providing, for value, a product or a service that is an answer to someone’s need or wish. I believe you can have a deeper market if you’re meeting a need, rather than a desire. Of course, you can make a lot of money meeting desires, but they tend to be much more cyclical.

AW: Do you ever find it a challenge to convince the public – as opposed to investors – that socially beneficial technologies or services are part of the business landscape?

RB: What one needs to do is select business activities which have been identified as priorities for public policy. If they are priorities, then you need to develop a method of delivering those things at a cost which is better than the best alternatives available. If you do that, you’ve got an excellent business proposition, because here’s something which is virtually certain to be required because it’s going to be legislated around the world.

Let me give you an example. If you can get rid of greenhouse gases that arises out of a pile of garbage, that is going to be legislated all over the world. If you’re allowing garbage to sit in a landfill and rot, well, that’s going to be heavily taxed (as it is currently in the UK). That’s tax in addition to the tipping fee. In addition to that, every community has a limited amount that they can put into a landfill, and that amount reduces every year, which you’re penalised if you exceed. So what you’re doing is not banning landfills, just taxing them out of existence. In North America, legislation has imposed standards on landfills – they have to be lined, piped and pumped, and treated. There’s huge costs associated with these activities. On top of all that, all over North America, landfills are being required to collect the methane that is being generated by rotting garbage. To do this they have to install piping and apply suction to the pipes. That further increases the cost.

These facts have opened an opportunity where our system can take that garbage that would have gone to a landfill and turn it into energy and useful aggregate. The charge to the community is no more than it would be to bring it to the landfill and letting it rot.

If those dynamics are behind you, then doing something which the world is legislating can make you a very large business.

AW: Getting Plasco’s technology off the ground has largely been a result of securing investment. The big job now, as you gesture towards, seems to be getting government and the public on side, whether that be in terms of government funding or raising policy-shaping awareness. How are things going on these fronts?

RB: You’re right to point out that policy, and government’s response, is key to our business. The competitive environment that has been generated by requirements of very low air contamination, and the value ascribed to the elimination of methane from organic waste – those values are public policy-set values. And because of those set values, the returns to the private sector attracts private capital. So in our case, we’ve had a total of $14 million in public capital – $4 million as a very soft loan with no interest for the first five years, from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment; and $10 million in grant contributions over the last three years towards building our demonstration plant in Ottawa – but we’ve raised $120 million in private common share equity. So while we have had significant public dollars, it’s only been about 12% of the total capital we’ve raised. The real area where the public affects our access to capital is by opening the door to orders and by decreasing the value of the power we produce, and increasing the cost of those who we compete with, to meet our air quality standards. If nobody cared about whether the air was clean or not, we’d all be paying 3 cents for our power – you wouldn’t be able to breathe, but you’d have lots of power. But we do care, and in Ontario, the feed-in tariff for energy-from-biomass is 12 cents, which is where we expect to be. So it’s the public policy aspects of this which make this a sound business, and with that, the capital can be provided by the private sector.

AW: You’re somebody who could be described as a “serial innovator.” How do you generally help the public to really understand the value of products and services?

RB: First, I select areas where the public interest is already established. What I need to do is explain to the public how it is that I’m going to meet that service. If you try to be a missionary to create need, you should be concerned about this subject. You might do that, and a generation later, have a hell of a business. But if a decade ago I spent my energy trying to convince the world that global warming was a problem, I might have improved a little bit the rate the world accepted these facts, but you could never build a business out of it, at least until it became a big subject. So what we attempt to do is identify those areas where the public is already recognizing the service or the product, and move forward from there.

AW: You’re not the only Atlantic Canadian involved at Plasco. Edmond Chiasson of Cheticamp [VP Public Affairs] is Plasco’s “government go-to” man, and one of your first major investors was Newfoundland’s Mark Dobbin. What’s it like working with fellow Atlantic Canadians at Plasco, and what do they bring to the table?

RB: It’s excellent. There is in fact a natural attitude amongst the people I know from Atlantic Canada that is very, very constructive. They tend to be quite frank with what they have to say, which is great since you don’t have to guess with what they’re trying to tell you. They tend not to go into the corner and sulk when something goes wrong, or whine about the fact that “it isn’t right.” So I’ve found Edmond, as an executive, to be welcome in the offices of governments anywhere, whether he’s representing us in Sacramento, California or in Washington, D.C., or at City Hall in Ottawa, or wherever. Like many other Atlantic Canadians, Edmond tends to be tolerant of other peoples’ views, and as a result others tend to be tolerant of his. Mark Dobbin is the chair of our audit committee, and is certainly one of the most incisive and engaged members of our board. He’s a significant investor and is a large influence on the company.

AW: Do you ever get a chance to return to Port Elgin, NB?

RB: I do! My brother John and I each own half of the original family farm, and we bought up some of the property around that farm, and I own the old family farmhouse, which is where my daughter lives right now. I was only down twice this summer, as I was particularly busy. But I definitely maintain a very close connection with the area, and return as often as I can.

AW: Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Bryden.

RB: You’re most welcome.