David Nesbitt wanted to help his disabled daughter –with the Nesbitt Centre he helps many others, too
- David Nesbitt explains how his daughter sparked his quest to secure gainful employment for the city’s special needs young adults
- The Canadian co-founder of the Nesbitt Centre started the Nest chain of bakery and coffee shop social enterprises
Cold start: I’m from the frozen wastes of Winnipeg, Canada, where it falls to minus 45 degrees Celsius in January. My father was an HR manager of an oil company and my mother worked as a stenographer for another oil company but stopped work after she married. My elder brother was born before the war and I was born later, in 1947.
I went to school in Winnipeg and then to the University of Manitoba. I met Wendy in high school, and we went to the same university. In 1968, I went on to do an MBA at Queen’s University, in Ontario, and our communication picked up and we got married in 1970, the year I graduated.
I joined a tech start-up, Consolidated Computer, for a year until I got a message advising me to cash my expense cheque as they may run out of money that day. From there I was lucky enough to join a large Canadian brokerage company, Richardson Securities, as institutional sales rep. The firm was the Merrill Lynch of Canada and had offices in Europe and Asia. In the 1970s, it was unusual for a Winnipeg-based company to have an office in Tokyo or Hong Kong.
Looksy here: One day the managing partner of the company leaned across the fence of the brokers’ office and asked if I’d like to go to Tokyo. I asked when he was thinking. He said, “I know it’s Thursday, but you leave on the weekend and fill in for six to eight weeks for a guy who is going on home leave.” So, in 1975, I spent six weeks in Tokyo living above the National Azabu Supermarket.
During that time, I flew to Hong Kong for a so-called looksy for the weekend and got a picture of the place. Four years later, the key North American person in Richardson Securities’ Hong Kong office was moving on and I was asked if I’d take over as the assistant manager. We moved to Hong Kong in 1979 with three children – our daughter, Laurie, was six, and our sons were two and four – and a golden retriever.