Wednesday April 9, 2014 9:00 AM(Kitco News) - No.
We’ve all been told no, more times than any of us would care to admit. And, odds are we accepted it and moved on.
For Excellon Resources Inc.’s (TSX:EXN) 35 year-old president and chief executive officer, Brendan Cahill, a strong lesson in the ‘never say no’ department has been engrained since his days in law school.
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| Brendan Cahill, President, CEO Excellon Resources Inc. |
“There’s no such thing as no, there’s always a way of getting things done,” Cahill told Kitco News during a phone interview.
This would be a theme he would continually encounter and understand as he progressed through school and built his professional portfolio.
Cahill grew up in Mississauga and attended the all-boys St-Michael’s College School, where he played hockey and captained the football team as a running back.
Once graduating, he moved to Montreal’s McGill University for a year, studying science, which he adamantly stated he “hated,” before heading back to Ontario, to attend the University of Toronto.
There he studied a mix of English, history and philosophy, which he said was “a bit of an all over the place degree.”
However, it was that mix that pointed him towards the world of law.
“If you read any kind of author in any literature, there’s always a focus on lawyers,” Cahill said. “I realized from all that broad literature that if you don’t understand how the law works, how lawyers work, you’re really not going to get anywhere.
“I went to law school, not because I wanted to be a lawyer, but because I wanted to figure out how the law, and how lawyers work, so that, basically, lawyers wouldn’t get in the way of business,” he said. “And that’s really the kind of education I got at law school.”
Cahill studied law at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) where he would meet one of the first of many people who would cultivate that ‘never say no’ ideology.
Richard McLaren, a professor at UWO, whose credentials go beyond teaching and law, and into the world of anti-doping in the Olympics as well as NHL and ATP arbitration, was the first to really cement that ‘never say no’ attitude and make it stick with Cahill.
Working with McLaren on tribunal cases, Cahill took away with him his mentor’s ability to never accept that something could not be done, but always find a way of getting to a solution.
Upon graduation, Cahill joined Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, where he worked as an associate. This, said Cahill, is where he found his calling into the mining world.
“I went to Davies, working there 2004 to 2007, right as this huge crest of massive deals was hitting the market,” Cahill said. “The first really big deal, the first multi-billion dollar deal to hit the Canadian market, was the Barrick-Placer Dome deal.”
Cahill had the opportunity to work on the deal as an associate with Kevin Thompson and Lisa Damiani, which, given the intricacies and the way the deal was constructed, had Cahill hooked.
“It was just a really creative deal in the way it was done, getting this tax bump which basically eliminated anyone else from trumping Barrick’s bid for Placer Dome, and then getting Goldcorp to take off $1.5 billion of assets that Barrick wasn’t interested in at the time,” Cahill said, with the kind of excitement as if the deal was being brokered today.
From there, Cahill joined Pelangio Exploration Inc., formerly Pelangio Mines, where he would meet a few more people that would help solidify that ‘never say no’ creed.
Cahill joined Pelangio in January 2008 as vice president corporate development, alongside Ingrid Hibbard, who still serves as president and chief executive officer, and Peter Crossgrove, who sits on Pelangio’s board, and is currently executive chairman of Excellon.
He tells the story of how Hibbard, with very little capital, bought Placer Dome’s Detour Lake deposit in 1998, which has now become the Detour Lake gold mine.
“She went to Pierre Lassonde at Franco-Nevada and asked for the capital to buy Detour Lake,” Cahill said. “Pierre asked why he wouldn’t just go make an offer, and she told him if he went, he would pay $15-$20 million. If she went, she and Pelangio would get it for less.
“She bought Detour Lake for $1.5 million and now it’s become Detour Gold, valued at around $3 billion at one point,” Cahill said.
Cahill stayed at Pelangio for the next four years, until Peter Crossgrove offered him the opportunity to run the highest grade silver mine in Mexico, Excellon’s La Platosa property.
Crossgrove was the epitome of the ‘never say no’ attitude, being a former CEO of Placer Dome, long time Barrick director, founder of Masonite and an architect of the University Health Network, and the perfect mentor. Cahill would ease into the role as executive vice president, then president, and finally president and chief executive officer of Excellon.
Looking back, Cahill reflects that at every critical point, he was never missing a mentor.
“I constantly had someone who I could look to and say ‘that’s how you get things done,’” he said.
Age Really Just a Number
There were obstacles getting to this point, one naturally being his age compared to his peers.
“Age was a bit of an obstacle,” Cahill said. “The mining industry is an aging industry right now, and when I started in 2008, the market was ripping and booming, you’d make money off your options by going to bed at night.
“There was that little bit of tension with not having put in our time yet and suffered, which was true,” he added. “The fall of 2008 hit, and we learned about hard times real quick, but it was only for four months or so.”
While he has experienced successes during his career, Cahill sees bringing Excellon to the next level as his next success.
“We’re heading in the right direction, it’s a series of small successes,” he said with a chuckle.
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