Sleep Country Canada co-founder opens up about crack addiction, toxic relationship with stripper

Hamilton Spectator

4 days ago

As Sleep Country Canada was becoming one of the country's most successful homegrown brands, one of its co-founders was in the fight for his life against crack cocaine addiction.
After 26-years sober, and in the wake of
Sleep Country's $1.7 billion acquisition by Fairfax Financial last year
, co-founder and former chairman and CEO Gordon Lownds is ready to tell his story.
His new memoir, 'Cracking Up' — which hits store shelves on Aug. 17 — shares the story of entrepreneurial success marred by addiction.
The brutally honest tale takes readers from Lownds's his first foray into entrepreneurship as a teen at the CNE, to building one of the country's most successful retail brands, to the depths of Vancouver's infamous East Side, to a Toronto addiction treatment facility.
'When I went to treatment I thought I'd be there for a couple of weeks, get fixed up and be back to work,' Lownds says. 'The first day of treatment they said, 'based on your usage, you're going to be here for three months; you're a hard-core addict.''
In 1990
Lownds
and a group of financial investors
acquired
Simmons Mattress Company
alongside
his business partner and
the
co-founder
of
Kenrick Capital,
their
boutique investment banking firm
,
Steve Gunn.
Recognizing the lack of sleep-specific retail
options
,
Lownds
and Gunn
co-founded Sleep Country Canada in 1994,
recruiting
Christine Magee
to join them
as a co-founder and the brand's public face.
By 1998,
Sleep Country Canada
grew to
more than 50
stores coast-to-coast
. U
nbeknownst to the other
founders,
Lownds
was d
eep in the throes of addiction, thanks to a toxic relationship with a Seattle-based stripper
.
Lownds had never been tempted by mind altering substances
previously,
suggesting he
could count on his fingers the number of times he had been
drunk.
It
wasn't
until the addiction had
progressed to include needles, after
a
near fatal overdoses
and
a
brush with the law
,
that Lownds
came
clean to Gunn
.
'I
f
the shoe was on the other foot, I probably would have ripped into him,' says
Lownds, who retired in 2013
. Instead, Lownds's longtime friend and business partner did everything he could to get him the help he needed. 'H
is reaction was
a shock to me, and it was a very humbling
experienc
e,' he
adds
,
fighting back tears.
The Star recently spoke with Lownds from his home on Vancouver Island about the relationship between entrepreneurship and addiction, how he was able to manage a booming business
with
a debilitating drug habit, and why
he's
finally ready to share his story.
I recently volunteered to review a book for a friend, and when the publisher found out who I was, they reached out and said, 'there must be a book in you.' I said, 'I wrote a book a long
time ago as a cathartic exercise, but I put it on a shelf and never thought about publishing it.' She
basically talked
me into doing it.
At the time,
in 2002
, I was concerned about the collateral damage it might cause to Sleep Country, our partners, and my family. My daughter was 17 and I
didn't
want all that stuff out in public.
About 25 years later, the potential for collateral damage is
pretty much zero
. Steve retired about five years ago, Christine has been
Chairman
of the Board for several years, and the company was sold in October. They have a new president,
they're
well established, and there
isn't
much I can say to hurt them.
I spoke with Christine,
Steve
and my family to make sure they were OK with it.
I also
thought
it might be helpful for people to understand that addiction can happen to anyone at any time.
Absolutely. There is lots of research into entrepreneurs and mental health challenges.
I was a
workaholic
at the time, but I never really thought about it like that. I guess for a workaholic work fills an
emotional
void, and
a substance addiction does the same, so they very well could be linked, but it never occurred to me.
E
ntrepreneurs
can
sometimes
believe
they're
invincible
;
t
hat was my mindset. I was able to cope with any problem
in life, so it
was inconceivable to me that
trying cocaine might
cause
a problem.
When I was
15,
I went to the CNE to get a summer job, and I loved the energy and excitement, even though I was working 12-to-16-hour days.
The next year
one of
the
game operators
got
arrested and charged with cheating at the Calgary Stampede
, and
the company that runs the exhibition,
Conklin Shows
,
asked
me to run three games on my own.
Benoît Robert's dream of an alternative to car ownership was born in the early '90s.
I was in business at age 16, with lots of money at risk
. In those three weeks
in 1967,
I
made about $17,000. It was
a great experience
, and a great business education. I learned a lot about human nature, money, and greed.
Then when I was 17 or
18,
I
hitchhike
d
across the United States. I left
Toronto
with
$100,
and I came back with $100, and in those nine months I never once slept outdoors.
I decided that if the worst that could happen to me in life was washing dishes at a diner, which I did for a few weeks, I could live with that. I became fearless, and a lot of my early success in business was because I was willing to take a risk when most people
wouldn't
.
Steve Gunn and
I
did a leveraged buyout of Simmons Mattress Company, so we understood the industry.
Sleep Country came out of our frustration with the inability to increase market share volumes
for Simmons
because we were entirely
dependent
on department stores for
distribution
. T
hey
didn't
do
a great job
marketing
mattresses
, so
we
came up with
the idea of doing a specialty retail chain.
Steve and I did a lot of
research
, and we ended up meeting with a company in Seattle called Sleep Country USA.
W
e
gave
them a carried interest in Sleep Country Canada so we could
leverage
their
expertise
and minimize our risk as startup founders
.
That company was founded by a husband and wife and one thing that really worked for them was using the wife as the public face, because 80 per cent of mattress decisions are made by women
.
Steve and I
didn't
want to be in the public eye anyway
.
We had been working with Christine
Magee
for a long time — she was a commercial banker for National Bank, who was
a lender for a leveraged buyout we originated in 1989
— so she instantly popped into our minds.
I remember sitting down with her for breakfast on Bay Street one morning and asking her, 'how would you like to be the mattress queen of Canada?' and the rest is history
.
I ended up getting involved with the ultimate femme fatale.
Sleep Country USA introduced us to their marketing agency
—
they were the genius behind our jingle, 'why buy a mattress anywhere else?'
—
and I was going back and forth to meet them every few weeks in Seattle.
That's
where I met a stripper that
I'd
go hook up with when I was in town, and occasionally
she'd
come up to Vancouver where I was living for a weekend visit.
Then one day she arrived with all her luggage, and her cat, and said 'I'm moving in.'
I said, 'What? We
haven't
' talked about this
,
' and she said, 'let's just try it for a weekend.'
ZenaTech CEO Shaun Passley says drone technology is 'something more sci-fi' these days being
She overwhelmed me with attention, and I was working crazy hours anyway, so I thought
maybe it
would be OK.
Then one day, two or three months later, I came home
early,
and she was messed up on
cocaine and
admitted to me that she had been a drug addict since she was 16.
I
tried
to get her into
treatment,
but she kept giving
it
up.
Finally,
I
said,
'I can't live with a drug addict, so you've got to go,' and she said
,
'if you just try it once with me maybe you can empathize with how I feel, and how difficult it is to stop using.'
I've
known people who did cocaine and
didn't
have a problem, so
I figured
there was no downside. I
didn't
realize we were smoking crack
, and I had an instantly positive reaction to it.
F
or a while
we'd
get high on Friday night and party all weekend, and then
I'd
go into work on Monday. Six months later
,
I was rarely showing up on Mondays, and realized I had a problem
.
I was a high functioning addict, but I was terrified that someone would find out.
I was living a double life.
O
ther than the girlfriend and a few drug dealers, nobody knew.
Since March of 1999.
Entrepreneurs
have a tendency to
overlook signals that a normal person might
pick up on
, because
we're
so consumed with our business
, so
it's
eas
ier
to fall into a toxic situation in
our
personal li
ves.
If you discover
you're
in a relationship with someone who has a drug problem, you need to understand you cannot help that person; they must be willing to save themselves, and if
they're
not, you need to get away from it.