Small Town Billionaire: How John Bragg Built 3 Empires [Outliers]

Picture this. It's June 1968, and overnight, a killing frost wipes out nearly every wild blueberry. At the time, Jon Bragg is 28 years old. He's just borrowed everything he could to build a processing plant for those blueberries. And now he's standing in this brand new factory with no crops to process. Bills are coming due. Workers are showing up for shifts. The whole thing is a disaster. Most people in that situation, they'd call the bank and work out some kind of bankruptcy deal. But John Bragg picks up the phone, but he doesn't call the bank. He calls McCain Foods, and he asked them one question that would change everything. Hello? Hi, it's John Bragg. Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Today, we're exploring one of the greatest untold stories in business, Jon Bragg. Jon Bragg's story reads like fiction, except it's real. He's founded three companies in three entirely different industries from blueberries to telecommunications to aviation. Two of the three companies are worth billions, and the third one is well on the way to that. Not only is John Bragg the largest grower and processor of wild blueberries in the world, but he owns North America's largest private telecommunications company. And if that wasn't crazy enough, imagine doing it all from a small town that he's never left with a population of just over 1,100 people. But the part of the story I think you'll most like is how he did it. He defied nearly every rule about where and how success is supposed to happen. This isn't our first episode on John. I interviewed him in episode two zero four, and his story captivated me so completely that I needed to dedicate an entire Outliers episode to better understand how he did it. This episode draws from that conversation and Don Savoy's masterful biography, The Rule Entrepreneur. As always, it's for entertainment only. It's time to listen and learn. It's 1962, and John Bragg has just graduated with two degrees, commerce and education, and he has one job offer. The offer is to teach high school in Pugwash, Nova Scotia for $3,800 a year. He'll get another 100 if he coaches the basketball team. For most 22 year olds in the post war boom, this was the jackpot. A stable government job with generous benefits and a first rate pension. The kind of security their depression era parents could only dream of. But there's one problem. John Bragg has been an entrepreneur since high school. In the summers, he was making $4,000 picking wild blueberries, more than the teaching salary, doing what everyone else thought was beneath them. So when the school board offered him their position, John Bragg does the unthinkable. He just says no. His friends think he's lost his mind, but John Bragg …