Elizabeth Kirkwood found her inspiration to succeed early in life.
It wasn’t money; it wasn’t praise; it was simply to prove the naysayers wrong.
The president and ceo of
“My mother found out that the way you get Beth to do something is just suggest she can’t,” says Kirkwood, who grew up in Toronto, the second of four siblings.
That stubbornness has boded well in the business world. With the help of her partners, William Anderson and William Brereton (whom she affectionately refers to as Bill A and Bill B, or simply “the Bills,”) Kirkwood has brought the company from IPO to operation in just 16 months — with
Following the example of
But having always dreamed big — without the benefit of a college or university education — battling the skepticism of others has been a recurring theme throughout Kirkwood’s career and personal life.
“Do you think people didn’t tell me I couldn’t buy a nickel mine or I couldn’t be the president of a company?” asks Kirkwood, who also sits on the boards of Mountain Province Diamonds, Intrepid Minerals and Canadian Shield Resources. “People have told me that all my life. I have people in my mind that I think of when it gets really tough — I’ll show you! That’s a huge motivator for me.”
Yet despite the negative attitudes she’s encountered, Kirkwood, speaking from First Nickel headquarters in Toronto, isn’t bitter. She maintains an “anything’s possible” outlook, and with sincerity and enthusiasm, has a gift for engaging people and winning over unbelievers.
While the determination and enthusiasm Kirkwood brings to all of her projects is doubtless a large part of her success with First Nickel — which will be delivering its first batch of ore from the Lockerby mine to Falconbridge’s Strathcona mill in Sudbury, Ont., this month — it is probably equally responsible for her failures. Kirkwood admits there have been a few during what has been a long and bumpy career path.
After graduating from high school, Kirkwood worked as a legal secretary for a securities lawyer who specialized in junior mining. She worked her way up to legal clerk and learned the legal and financial nitty gritty of the junior mining business by writing prospectuses and listings agreements — meeting just about everybody in exploration along the way. Kirkwood struck out on her own in 1989 with a series of entrepreneurial ventures including an Internet business, an investment in a modelling agency, a business specializing in accounting and corporate secretarial services, and a number of junior exploration companies which never achieved the success of First Nickel.
TNK Resources, started in 1993 with Kirkwood serving as president, was exploring for diamonds in Botswana with De Beers before being dropped by the major — just before the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention in 1998. TNK also bought a gold property right beside Bre-X Minerals’ infamous Busang property in Indonesia “which was a really good thing for a short period of time, and then it was a very bad thing,” Kirkwood remembers. More recently, Kirkwood was at the helm of First Strike Diamonds, which had been exploring in the Northwest Territories before it went under in 2003.
While she’s lost money of her own and of investors, Kirkwood is a calculated risk-taker — not a gambler.
“I know people who mortgage their house and put everything on the line. I’ve always had a budget — a certain amount of money that I’m prepared to risk.”
Kirkwood believes that while failure teaches humility, early success can lead some entrepreneurs to give themselves too much credit — setting them up for a big crash.
“I’ve seen people blow all of the money (they made),” she says. “You have to acknowledge that a lot of it is luck.”
So what’s made the difference between her other business ventures and First Nickel’s success?
“I think it’s timing,” Kirkwood says. “You need all the stars to line up.”
First Nickel’s relationship with Falconbridge, meeting the right people at MGI Securities, who recently brokered the company’s flow-through share offering, rocketing metals prices and the model provided by FNX were all necessary components, she explains.
“It’s not anything you can manufacture yourself. If there’s any skill involved, it’s in recognizing (that).”
But Kirkwood says her biggest lesson in business came from her personal life. In the late 1990s, around the time of the Bre-X scandal, her relationship with her now-ex-husband turned rocky.
“Going through that and healing through that, I’ve really come to trust my instincts,” she says. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s to listen to what my gut tells me.”
And intuition can be a powerful tool in business. Although she loathes giving off the perception of being flaky — “I’m not consulting Ouija boards or anything,” she jokes — Kirkwood says many men have told her they believe in “female intuition” — or that intuition is stronger in women than in men.
While not all of the perceived differences between men and women in business are accurate — such as the “patronizing” (although generally advantageous) view that women are more honest than men — Kirkwood sees genuine differences in the way men and women work in the business world.
“I think we’re more communicative and consultative — we want more of a team spirit.” She adds: “For me, it’s not about me — it’s about us.”
Indeed, Kirkwood is careful to credit everyone who’s had a part in her success — from her receptionist and her first boss to Falconbridge, MGI Securities and FNX.
Despite the fact that the mining world continues to be male-dominated with women representing only 13% of the industry — or perhaps because of it — Kirkwood says she’s found her gender to be an advantage, rather than a hindrance.
“It’s fabulous — because you’re memorable just by being a woman.”
In an industry where networking is important, she cites a recent meeting she had with a Vancouver-area broker who, despite having met her only once, two years earlier, remembered her and the details of her business well.
“In that two-year period, he saw a thousand pale males, and then he saw me again.”
As for the “glass ceiling” that still confronts women in many industries, she says she largely agrees with Neil French — the advertising mogul who recently resigned after his comments on women in the industry were widely criticized. French told an industry audience that there were so few female creative directors in advertising because they are unwilling to put in long hours and tend to make their children a higher priority than work.
“It was all accurate,” Kirkwood states, matter-of-factly. “But I think it just made him look bad, horrible!” She says it’s sad that some men still feel they have to effectively abandon their families to succeed at work. “You’ve heard the expression, ‘Nobody regrets not having spent more time in the office on their death bed.'”
She contends that women are committed to work too; they just make more of an effort to find ways t
o balance their families and their careers, like taking work home.
Now that Kirkwood’s own nest is empty (both of her sons, 24 and 21, have moved out in the past year), she has been focusing even harder on business, as well as her other interests, such as singing in a jazz choir.
First Nickel’s graduation from exploration to operation and now production is also taking some getting used to. While risk is the name of the game in junior exploration, Kirkwood admits the stakes are higher now.
“In exploration, the expectation is chances are, you’re probably going to fail — but it’s the cruelty of Mother Nature — it’s not that you did anything wrong,” Kirkwood says. “(Investors) are on for some vicarious kind of thrill and it’s the risk portion of their portfolio. You take people’s money now, in mining operation and you’ve got to perform.”
Given Kirkwood’s history, all bets are on her.
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