6 - Giving Canadians shelter

With Greenpark Carlo Baldassarra has become the boy wonder of home construction

This is the story of a boy who arrived in Toronto at the age of 19 and by the time he's 60 he's at the helm of Canada's largest home construction company. His name is Carlo Baldassarra, from Veroli (Frosinone), and the company is Greenpark Homes.
A few numbers suffice to give the picture of this phenomenon: Greenpark's yearly turnover reached one billion and 200 million dollars; it currently employs 90 people on its premises at 8700 Dufferin St., with more than 300 employees directly on its payroll and about 7,000 indirectly working for it.
It builds a house every 41 minutes, 14 per day, and since its creation it has built 38,000 houses in the Toronto area alone, with a diametre of 70 kilometres. A sea of houses, all of them of the highest quality.
"Nobody outdid us," proudly declares Carlo Baldassarra, Greenpark's chairman of the board. And he's got more than one reason to be proud: on October 19 he shall receive, along with his partners Phillip Rechtsman and Jack Wine, the "Ben Gurion Negev Award", a prestigious prize that the famous Israeli university, which specializes in environmental studies and research, awards to companies that distinguish themselves for the volume and quality of their work. It goes without saying that the boy from Veroli did not hope for so much; but what he did feel, right from the beginning, was that he would eventually succeed.It was clear to him since when, freshly arrived in Toronto, he was hired by a construction company as a carpenter, and 18 months later he had become not only the director of the section but also the owner's trustee who felt so confident of Carlo's surveillance of the sites that he took longer and longer stays in Italy.
A nice satisfaction, Mr. Baldassarra. But did you learn to be a carpenter in Italy?
"No, no. In Italy, after completing vocational school, I lent a hand to my father who owned a mill, and I helped him with the thresher at harvest time. I had never had anything to do with either construction or carpentry. I learned English here, taking no lessons. I worked hard, but at that time you had no choice. Let's say I was lucky; I will add, however, that I earned it."
Did you come to Canada alone?
"No, my father Ambrogio had already come here in 1957, one year before I did. He had left Italy because the economic boom stopped in the big cities and did not reach the countryside, and the mill was not enough to support a family as large as ours. So he left. He immediately noticed that this country offered great opportunities and had me come here. He went back to Italy three years later, because 'this is a land for the young', as he told me. And I, who was young, stayed. In 1962 I had my sister Alberta come, and in 1963 my brother Angelo. In the meantime, as you already know, I had become the foreperson of a construction company where all the hands were from Friuli or other Northern Italian regions, and I was the only one from Central Italy. What I mean is, I had already adapted, so in 1963 I married a young woman from Abruzzi whom I had met on St. Clair Avenue, Angela, who bore me three sons: Mauro, who's now 35 and manages his own construction company, Armando, 32, and Mike, 24, both working with me. And I am the grandfather of Julian, Sophia and Gabriele, sons of Mauro, and Arianna, daughter of Armando. But when I married, I temporarily left the construction business."
And what did you do?
"With my brother-in-law and a common friend of ours we bought a grocery shop on Dufferin Street, the Veroli Supermarket, which was immediately successful because we sold fresh produce and were open seven days a week from 9am to midnight. But, with time, the shop became a jail: for three years, my wife, my sister, her husband, our friend and I never had a day free. Work and work, from morning to night. Thus, in 1966 we sold the shop, and with my share of the profit I bought a parcel of land and built a house on it, going back to carpentry; today I can say that that was the first of the Greenpark Homes."
But Greenpark had not been founded yet...
"Yes, but I had already decided that my business would be in construction, and since my company is the result of that decision I am used to saying that that house was the first built by Greenpark. And by the way, Greenpark was preceded by another company, the Four Brothers Carpenters, thus called because it was founded by my brother Angelo and me, and two cousins of ours, brothers themselves. Then, in 1967, the turning point..."
Which was?
"It happened in March of that year, when my sister and her husband decided to buy a houseware shop that was owned by a Jack Wine, and they asked for my help with the shop's inventory, since they knew I had run my own shop. I went to work and I did it so well that Wine himself was amazed. In short, I managed to buy the existing stock, worth 20,000 dollars, for only $9,000. The day my work was finished, Wine called me and asked what my job was. I replied I was a carpenter. Then he asked whether I wanted to become his partner in construction, and I retorted by asking why he wanted me for a partner. 'Because if you can buy stuff cheap from a Jew, this means you know what you're doing.' I was perplexed, because I had no money: all my patrimony had been invested in building my house. My wife Angela urged me to take the challenge: 'Try' she said, 'you can do it, this will go well.' I owe a lot to Angela, because she trusted me more than anybody else, and Greenpark must thank her particularly: she was the inspiration of this company. So I entered into a partnership with Jack Wine."
How did it go?
"It went so that I engaged with Wine for a 15,000-dollar share, which as I told you I did not possess, but which I could find by opening a mortgage on the newly built house. At that point, a friend of Jack Wine joined us, Phillip Rechtsman, also a Jew, and we formed the Carene Construction Ltd. I worked as a carpenter and they found the customers and took care of the administration. We started with three houses, which we sold at once. The following year I stopped working as a carpenter to direct work at our sites. The name 'Greenpark' came some years later, when it became necessary to give wider managerial margins to Carene Construction, but the partners remained the same: Wine, Rechtsman and I. From there it kept getting better: in 1968 we built six houses, in 1970 they were 23, and in 1983 we hit the 1,500 mark. That was the year Greenpark became Canada's largest residential construction company. A record it still maintains, with about 30 sites open at the same time. Just think that in 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1989 we built an average of 3,000 houses per year."
Don't tell me you never had a crisis, Mr. Baldassarra.
"Of course I had them, but I never submitted to them."
What do you mean?
"I mean that I always faced them fairly and squarely. Like the 1990 recession. At the beginning of that year we had already sold on paper 1,750 houses. The crisis burst abruptly, and people became poorer almost overnight. Thus, on January 20, on my birthday, I took a decision that if things went well I could save my company, otherwise it could bring us some problems. Many problems, indeed. I decided to launch a programme for those 1,750 families who had signed for a house and, due to an uncertain future, were prepared to lose their down payments: I offered them free mortgage for one year up to 300,000 dollars provided they accepted to add 15 or 20,000 dollars to the down payment. Actually I decided to give up an average of 36,000 dollars of profit on each house, but that way I saved 95 percent of the sales."
Did your partners follow you in this strategy?
"I must say that Rechtsman and Wine were more than partners to me, they were first and foremost friends. If Greenpark was successful it was also due to our mutual trust. And it is natural that today, now that my old partners have retired, their sons have taken their place, Harvey and David Rechtsman and Ted Wine, much like my sons and my brother Angelo, from our industrial and commercial sister company History Hill Group. This management team is assisted by technicians and managers of the highest order. Let's be frank about it: you cannot give your customers the best if you don't hire the best. This has always been our motto."
And in all this frantic activity on this side of the Atlantic, what place did Italy occupy?
"How can you forget your roots? I went back to Italy at least 30 times, and I have interests there, in partnership with another brother of mine, Vittorio, who remained in Veroli. But of course I'm connected to my country of origin by something more than economic interests: everything it gave me keeps this link alive, first of all my stubbornness, then the courage to go ahead even when you think you cannot go on, and finally a sense for family. It was not by chance that the most important moment in my life was in 1969 when I saw my mother, Lidia, for the first time in 11 years: she came and saw how I was getting along, she didn't wait for me to go to her. And that evening, after seeing my family and inquiring about my work, she told me: 'My son, I am proud of you'."
I assume you are proud of this award the Ben Gurion University decided to give you and your partners?
"Of course I am, and in order to prove to you how deep is my affection for them I'll tell you a short tale. As I told you, Wine and Rechtsman have retired, and therefore I am the spokesperson for the company. Well, when the managers of the Ben Gurion University told me of their intentions, I replied that Greenpark had been made great also by the zeal of two people who were not working any more, and that they had to be honoured as much as me. And all three of us will be given the award."
What is richness for you?
"Would you be astonished if I replied it is nothing?"
I would have expected you to say that richness is what helps man to achieve his objectives.
"No, it is perseverance, ambition and willingness to work that helps man to achieve his objectives."
What is the most important thing for you?
"My name. A clean name is worth more than the greatest richness. We put ourselves at our customers' service displaying a clean name. We never let them down. And we became number one in Canada."

(translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2002-12-22
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2182