#sparkchamber 120621 — Ted Moroz
‘Tis the season for cheers and clinking glasses, and in that spirit, #sparkchamber welcomes exemplar wannabe Ted Moroz. A retail-and-logistics-management wizard, Ted is President of The Beer Store and Brewers Distributor Ltd., retailers and distributors of beer and related products and services, with 450 retail stores and 29 distribution centers from Vancouver to Ottawa. The two companies employ over 7,000 employees.
Environmental leadership is a core company value. The Beer Store takes back all the packaging from products sold to individual consumers, as well as to the 17,807 bars and restaurants they sell to, with all collected materials either reused or recycled. Recycling industry-standard bottles and inert-glass containers helps reduce pressure on landfill space and significantly reduces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. A global leader in this practice — they have an impressive recovery rate of 97% on the industry-standard bottle — undoubtedly the most successful waste diversion program in Ontario, if not all of North America. The Beer Store was Canada’s first business recipient of the Environmental Choice Leadership Award.
Ted began working part-time at the Beer Store as a university student in 1983 … and it turned into his life’s work! “When I was 18, I started working at The Beer Store while going to school. I threw cases out the magic hole and down the rollers to happy customers, delivered beer to thriving restaurants and bars, sorted bottles, and cleaned the toilets, whatever I was asked to do. I was brought up to be polite to people, to listen, to never judge, to say please and thank you [this is the most important advice I will have, so if you’re already bored, consider this the exec summary and hit Esc]. 26 years later I became president of the company, and 12 years after that I’m still doing that. I’m both inspired and influenced by people who want to do good things for living beings.”
In that spirit, Ted is proud to serve as volunteer Chair of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada and a volunteer Chair of the Board of Directors of Ontario Shores Mental Health Sciences.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
Ideas are like sparks. They come from something someone said. They come from observations. I am pretty sure that I’ve never had an original thought in my life. But there have been sparks, tons of them. In the middle of a meeting or while duffing a wedge shot into a pond, a spark is born out of someone saying something. Some sparks become roaring fires — a bottle drive for a charity becomes a $20 million campaign to stomp out blood cancers. That really happened. Wasn’t my idea but with the help of a team coming together, we made that spark come ablaze. In today’s day and age, with all the personal digital devices people have, we should really log an idea when we get one so we can follow up on it. How many of these sparks come and go and are never followed up on? Maybe a cure for cancer or poverty or hatefulness would have been found by now. This very question sparked this idea to log our ideas. So this is me logging this idea.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
It didn’t take too long to realize along the way that the way to make your business successful is to look after your people. Look after your people and they will look after your business. Many years ago, I was a young manager in a workplace that some viewed as a bit of a hostile environment. Older, more veteran, managers would ask me why I could get more out of the workforce than them. For those of you who kept reading, it goes back to my earlier “most important” advice. Just be nice for goodness sakes. Ask politely — thank people — never tell anyone to do anything — respect people. Today that itch has evolved. I love to see people get ahead — I love to see people who are kind to living beings become leaders at work, in their communities, on their kids’ hockey teams — I love to see people giving back. Whatever I can do to inspire that is definitely scratching my itch.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
I don’t think I ever really shut off and i don’t think that's necessarily a good thing but somehow I find a way to balance it in a crazy way. I usually recharge my phone well before its dead and gas up the truck well before the tank is empty. I think that’s my life too. I’m always working and I’m always worried. I do love early mornings and getting to it surrounded by stillness and that first sip of hot coffee. Its 5:00 am right now and I think this is when the juices are flowing the best [yep this is the best I'm going to be all day, apologies to everyone else today]. I absolutely do take time to exercise every day. It could be an hour here or an hour there but it must happen every day or I’m mad at myself. That’s the recharge. I think I might be a little scatter-brained too. I can start something, then a spark comes [see what I did there] and I'll start something else before finishing the other thing I started and perhaps that will happen 4 or 5 times before I finished the first thing. Anyways, I’m okay with it — it seems to work for me but I must admit I’ll always try to get one more thing done before a meeting starts — if I click on a meeting one minute early, I miscalculated.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
I think I’ve always been a “that’s good enough” type of person. While I’d love to have three handicap [I meant to put twenty in front of the three] I’m really there to enjoy the outdoors and have a cold beer with good friends. I love to do a lot of stuff — cooking, golf, Pilates, slow-pitch, karaoke, landscaping, a ton of volunteer work [sometimes I forget what my day job is] — I don’t think I’m ever really done but am definitely not a perfectionist — I don't have the expertise to be really great at anything nor the patience.
