WINNIPEG – While business executives, lawyers and investment bankers populate the trenches in the battle for United Grain Growers, a more colorful and familiar figure is leading the charge in the campaign for public support.
By sheer force of personality, UGG president Ted Allen has come to dominate the debate over the fate of the 91-year-old company.
The 55-year-old farmer from Taber, Alta., has taken to heart the fight to prevent his company from being taken over by Alberta Wheat Pool and Manitoba Pool Elevators.
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“Obviously I have personal feelings about this,” a relaxed and talkative Allen said last week in his office 29 storeys above the corner of Portage and Main in downtown Winnipeg. “I’ve invested a good chunk of my life in this company.”
Those personal feelings have become obvious for all to see during the past few weeks.
The number crunchers and business experts from both sides discuss the takeover in predictably careful, measured tones, but Allen bulldozes straight to the point, providing lively quotes for those tracking the takeover story.
The buyout offer by the “junior pools”, as he likes to call them, is an insult to farmers’ intelligence. The pools seem to think farmers are “ignorant hicks”. The demise of UGG would result in more “Stalinist uniformity” in farm policy debates.
Not concerned
Given language like that, it’s not surprising that adjectives like outspoken, combative, provocative and pugnacious are thrown Allen’s way, but the UGG president claims not to be concerned about how others see him.
“People will describe me in whatever way they want to,” he says.
And he doesn’t think anyone should be surprised by anything he has said or done during the takeover battle.
“The real me has been out there prior to this, although I think the real me gets tremendously distorted sometimes by people wanting to put a spin on UGG who aren’t very friendly to our point of view.”
Asked to describe himself, he mentions one trait that may help explain some of his public pronouncements.
“I do have almost a puritanical streak in me that has made me less conciliatory or less inclined to do a deal than others,” he said. “If I believe in something I’m willing to go to the wall for it, and sometimes at fairly great personal cost.”
Does fending off the pools’ takeover bid qualify as something worth going to the wall for? “Yes,” he says. “I believe we’re doing the right thing.”
Allen’s roots in UGG go deep.
Back in 1912, his grandfather was involved in starting the first local UGG board in Barnwell, Alta., and his father was a loyal customer.
In the mid-sixties, Allen attended a UGG annual meeting as a local delegate and discovered an organization whose beliefs he could subscribe to.
“Free enterprise is too trite a way of describing it,” he said. “It’s a philosophy of live and let live, individual choices, as little compulsion in society as possible, allowing the marketplace to determine whether commercial enterprises succeed or fail.”
Moving up the ladder
Elected to the board of directors in 1973, in 1989 he was named senior vice-president and chief executive officer and asked to conduct a complete review of the company’s management and future prospects.
In 1990, he became president and soon was leading the company’s 1992 conversion from a traditional co-operative to a publicly traded company, a move designed to provide the struggling firm with access to public equity markets to finance some much-needed modernization.
The company’s shares were listed for sale on the Toronto Stock Exchange in July 1993. Forty-two months later, the pools began buying up those shares.
Allen recalls that UGG’s farmer members worried whether going public raised the risk that the company might one day be taken over.
“We said yes, that possibility exists, and the way to prevent it would be to hang on to your shares and even buy more,” he says.
Now, facing the reality of a hostile takeover bid, Allen says he has no regrets about going public.
“If we hadn’t, we’d have sunk very quickly into a totally irrelevant and pathetically weak position anyway,” he said. “We really had no choice, we had to do something. And we went into it with our eyes open.”
As Allen talked last week, the fate of UGG was very much up in the air, with a court hearing on a bid to block the takeover bid still a couple of days away.
While declining to speculate on what the future holds for the company or himself, Allen acknowledged it’s hard to imagine the prairie landscape without elevators sporting the familiar blue UGG logo.
If anything positive has come out of the experience of the last few weeks, he added, it has been the renewed sense of loyalty and almost “missionary zeal” among UGG’s employees.
“I guess it’s like a lot of other things,” he said. “You don’t appreciate the things you’ve got until you’re at risk of losing them.”
