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. Unbeknownst to the other founders, Lownds was deep 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.
“If 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. “His reaction was a shock to me, and it was a very humbling experience,” 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.
Why did you decide to tell your story now?
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.
Why didn’t you publish it after you wrote 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.
Are successful entrepreneurs more susceptible to addiction?
Absolutely. There is lots of research into entrepreneurs and mental health challenges.
You had no experience with illegal substances previously, but you admit to being a workaholic. Was work your gateway drug?
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.
Entrepreneurs can sometimes believe they’re invincible; that 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.
Where did your interest in entrepreneurship begin?
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.
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 hitchhiked 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.
How did Sleep Country Canada come about?
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. They 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. We 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.
How does someone with a successful business and no history of substance abuse get addicted to crack?
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.”
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.
For 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.
In the book you admit to doing drugs at work, even chairing boarding meetings high. How did you keep it hidden?
I was a high functioning addict, but I was terrified that someone would find out. I was living a double life. Other than the girlfriend and a few drug dealers, nobody knew.
How long have you been sober?
What lessons do you hope readers take from the book?
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 easier to fall into a toxic situation in our personal lives.
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.
