No stopping the hotel honcho
Stadium-hotel had ugly death but Ledohowski keeps building
Sat Jun 30 2007
ON the same day in April that Leo Ledohowski announced Canad Inns' ill-fated $520-million domed-stadium/hotel proposal for St. Boniface, the company also set the opening date of its $50-million hotel in Grand Forks, N.D.
Though the stadium project that is dead in the water was 10 times larger than the Canad Inns Grand Forks hotel -- now open and the talk of the town -- the two projects characterize the evolution of Ledohowski as a risk-taking entrepreneur and corporate CEO.
He and the family-owned business started buying suburban hotels in the late '70s and now Canad Inns dominates the Winnipeg suburban hotel market -- it owns seven with another on the way -- to an extent that may be unequalled in any other city in North America.
And while many similar hotels contract out the challenging management of food and beverage operations, Canad Inns has created its own restaurant brand, Aalto's, and its string of bars like Tavern United and Tijuana Yacht Club have been the preferred party spot for Winnipeg nightclubbers for years.
A month after the Winnipeg Blue Bombers turned down his domed stadium proposal in favour of a new stadium on the site of the existing one, Ledohowski did not hide the fact he was off-put by the manner in which the deal went down.
But he didn't spend much time licking his wounds. Neither did he bask in the success of the recently completed Grand Forks hotel connected to the Alerus Center, even though it was a challenging project that opens up a whole range of new possibilities for the company stateside.
For Ledohowski, it's on to the next projects. He's building a $25-million hotel at the Health Sciences Centre, planning the development of a hotel in Bismarck, N.D., and figuring out the redevelopment of the old Metropolitan Theatre on Donald Street into a bar/restaurant/rock 'n' roll museum.
The fact that he's stuck with a $1-million investment in a 160-acre parcel of land in St. Boniface with nothing to develop on it, does not cause undue concern.
"I'll think of something," he said recently. "It's not the biggest risk I have ever taken."
Fellow Winnipeg hotelier Bob Sparrow calls Ledohowski the consummate entrepreneur. And as such, there is always a potential home run with every risk taken.
For instance, one local real estate developer said he'd pay twice that price for that land if he could.
Now in his early 60s, Ledohowski has been around the hotel business all his life. He grew up in the small Ukrainian Interlake community of Poplarfield, where his father ran a trucking business and the local hotel.
"I used to sleep above the beer parlour at the Poplarfield hotel," he remembers. "Man, those guys were noisy."
He may have bought out his brothers earlier this decade, but the connection between business and family is still important to Ledohowski, even though there are about 2,300 employees. (One of his daughters has a leadership role in the development of the HSC property.) The company stages large volunteer events like Canada Day festivities and it has received several industry awards. And that is despite Ledohowski's reputation for sometimes being a bull in a china shop. Some say that a partnership with a group of blue-chip Winnipeggers in the Metropolitan Theatre deal dissolved because Ledohowski wanted to emphasize the commercial food and beverage side of the operation, while his high-profile partners were more interested in a non-profit rock 'n' roll museum.
And it was generally believed he committed a political faux pas by announcing his massive stadium proposal before briefing the premier, considering it depended on significant financial support from the province.
But no one denies the intelligence and incisive business mind that has helped him grow the company into one that generates more than $200 million a year in revenue. Ledohowski earned undergraduate degrees in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and then a master's at McMaster University in Hamilton and went on to teach accounting and economics at Carleton University and the University of Manitoba.
When he came back to teach at the U of M in the late '70s, he started buying motels on Pembina Highway. The Norlander was the first larger hotel he bought, with the Golden Oak Inn in Transcona and the Windsor Park Inn to follow.
The company started to include massive waterslides in addition to nightclubs and restaurants in every hotel -- Ledohowski prefers to call them destination entertainment centres. More recently, Canad Inns has started to forge another niche, developing properties connected to public-sector facilities. It owns hotels attached to the Club Regent Casino, the Keystone Centre in Brandon and the Alerus Center in Grand Forks.
Ledohowski sees a huge future for the company in those kinds of developments. The Health Sciences Centre project -- the only hotel development in the middle of a hospital campus in the country -- will be the next and he has already won a competition for the right to build a hotel in Bismarck, N.D., next to that city's Civic Center. He said there have already been a half-dozen other inquiries for developments of that type.
"The synergy between the hotel and Alerus is very exciting," said Rick Duquette, city administrator in Grand Forks.
Harry Schulz, chief innovation officer for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, said it was a serendipitous meeting between himself and Ledohowski that kick-started the Health Sciences Centre hotel.
"I saw him in the Maple Leaf lounge at the Toronto airport," Schulz recalls. "We had never met, but I went up to him and asked if he would be interested in doing a hotel at the hospital." Little did Schulz know that Ledohowski had been mulling the idea for a couple of years, since his mother's stay in hospital before her death.
He thought her medical care was excellent, but wanted to figure out a way to improve on the food and inconvenience for family and loved ones who wanted to visit her. "Our mandate for the next while will be these public/private partnerships," he said. "I'm not aware of anyone else doing this."
Although he recently announced the appointment of former premier Gary Filmon's chief of staff Taras Sokolyk as CEO of Canad Inns, Ledohowski, who remains the company's owner and board chairman, has the reputation of being a hands-on visionary/leader. Not so long ago at an industry function he was heard to say, "The only board of directors I'm used to dealing with is the right side of my brain communicating with the left side."
In spite of his predisposition to micromanage, Ledohowski is well aware of the need to develop a management team and systems.
"I used to go to every hotel every day. I don't anymore," he said. "I was a perpetual motion machine."
Now the corporation has extensive training courses for all its employees and has won awards for being among the best-managed companies in the country.
Ledohowski is chairman of the Manitoba Hotel Association, but Jim Baker, its executive director, said he has been a source of inspiration for members, especially rural ones, for a long time.
He said Ledohowski has got the association working on a couple of projects to figure out a way for the rural hotel operators to generate financial information that will make it easier for them to analyze results and another to figure out ways to make it easier for rural hotels to better capitalize on the food service side of the business.
"He's taken that upon himself," Baker said. "The way he sees it, those rural hotels are giving away the best part of the business."
martin.cash@freepress.mb.caaid. "The way he sees it, those rural hotels are giving away the best part of the business."
martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
1,011 -- total number of rooms including 192 in newly opened Grand Forks hotel:
* Club Regent Casino Hotel -- 146 rooms starting at $114 -- rated 3-Diamond by CAA
* Canad Inns Polo Park -- 111 rooms starting at $109 -- rated 3-Diamond by CAA
* Canad Inns Fort Garry -- 107 rooms starting at $109 -- rated 3-Diamond by CAA
* Canad Inns Windsor Park -- 54 rooms starting at $99 -- rated 2-Diamond by CAA
* Canad Inns Transcona -- 50 rooms starting at $99 -- rated 2-Diamond by CAA
* Canad Inns Garden City -- 55 rooms starting at $99 -- rated 2-Diamond by CAA
* Fort Garry EXPRESS -- 36 rooms starting at $75 -- rated 2-Diamond by CAA
* Portage la Prairie -- 92 rooms starting at $99 -- rated 2-Diamond by CAA
* Canad Inns Brandon -- 159 rooms starting at $109 -- rated 3-Diamond CAA
* Canad Inns Grand Forks -- 201 rooms -- starting at $109 (just opened -- not yet rated)
7.5 million -- the number of annual customer served throughout the chain of properties.
36,000 -- number of bar, restaurant, meeting and convention centre seats throughout the system.
2,300 -- total number of employees
Canad Inns Health Science Centre
* The company is expecting to start construction this fall or early next year on a 19-floor, $25 million hotel connected to the Siemens Institute for Advanced Medicine.
* The hotel will have between 160 and 200 rooms.
* It will be the only hotel in the country built on the grounds of a hospital.
Canad Inns Bismarck, N.D.
* The company has won a request for proposal review to build a $50 million, 16-floor, 260 room hotel and entertainment centre next to the Civic Centre in the capital of North Dakota.
* Construction date has yet to be determined.
Canad Inns Metropolitan Centre
* The company has purchased the historic Metropolitan Theatre on Donald Street.
* The intention of turning the boarded-up movie theatre that has been closed since 1987 into some sort of food-and-beverage facility with non-profit rock 'n' roll museum component attached.
St. Boniface Public Market site
* The company recently paid $1 million for a 160-acre parcel of land in St. Boniface with the intention of building a domed football stadium/hotel/entertainment complex. * The proposal is not going ahead and the company has not disclosed its intentions for the site.