Carrying the weight of crushing collapse

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This article was published 13/08/2016 (3628 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brent Trepel had things he needed to say publicly and felt it would be easier if he could do it through a friend.

Which is how we came to talk over lunch Thursday at the Fort Garry Hotel, about how the face of Ben Moss Jewellers dealt with the end of the Winnipeg-based national company his family had owned for 103 years — until they sold it three years ago.

Brent and his wife, Brenlee Carrington, are private people, so I wasn’t expecting Brent to open up publicly about the crushing collapse of a company his late father, Sid, inherited in 1962 from Sid’s father-in-law.

Brent took over in his early 20s because his dad was too ill to carry on day-to-day operations. He made Ben Moss into a model enterprise the Financial Post recognized as one of the “50 Best-Managed Private Companies in Canada” for six consecutive years. A company with a reputation for how well, and respectfully, its employees were treated. Which is the bitter irony of what happened earlier this month.

And why Brent needed to talk.

After he sold the business, he remained highly visible at its Portage Avenue and Main Street headquarters. Because of that, there was a sense he was to blame for the subsequent cold treatment of his former employees when half of the 60 headquarters staff were abruptly dismissed Aug. 2 without notice and without severance.

Ben Moss is in court-ordered restructuring protection from its creditors. And has been since May.

Which, looking back, was a month after Brent and Brenlee sat with my wife, Athina, and me after Passover dinner to give us what was then a confidential heads-up: we would read something in the newspaper shortly about Ben Moss. Brent didn’t specify what the news would be. He didn’t say, for example, he had watched helplessly as the company went into a financial free fall after he sold it. By the time he sat down with us, the company was headed for court protection from its creditors.

Still, as Brent confided then, and recalled Thursday, he was facing a dilemma.

“The dilemma of the head saying to leave and the heart saying, ‘What about these people and what they’re going to be going through in this process?’”

By “these people,” he meant the employees at the company’s headquarters who formed what he thought of as his work family, plus nearly 600 others who worked in more than 60 stores across the country. Employees he got to know individually on his annual visits because that was his style.

“There’s an employee who started the same month I did,” Brent said. “She works in our Garden City store. Her name is Roberta. She’s been there 30 years. And she’s devastated by this.”

But what could he do for Roberta and the others when he didn’t own the company anymore? Last spring, when he discussed his dilemma in the privacy of his home, he still thought Ben Moss could be resurrected. He said he even wondered if he should try to buy it back.

When he sold the chain in 2013 to wholesaler JSN Group, he didn’t foresee that within three years all the stores he helped build and all the people Ben Moss had employed would be enduring going-out-of-business sales. When he sold to the Toronto-based jewelery manufacturing company (and all the synergy he expected would go with it), he believed Ben Moss was going nowhere but up. In the end, it seems all that dazzle, all that big-city bravado Brent was sold on, turned out to be little more than ersatz bling.

“And in the end,” Brent said, getting back to his dilemma at Passover, “it was too hard to leave. Because I was concerned about the people. I wanted to be there for them.”

He was there for them, but not in a way all of them might have understood when they were called into the boardroom to be laid off and they saw him there. At that point, on that day, he was no longer part of management and really hadn’t been in a meaningful day-to-day way since Ben Moss was sold. Still, he asked a favour of the chief restructuring officer who would give the devastating news to people Brent had known for 10 to 15 years: he wanted to be in the room with them when they were told.

“I wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t have to be there. The easy thing would have been not to be there. But I felt a moral obligation to be there to at least be supportive to the people who were sitting in a room for the most part with someone they met three months ago, letting them know their employment was ending. You know, it’s just human compassion to want to be there for someone in a very dark time in their life.”

Obviously, at least in a financial sense, life isn’t as dark for Brent and his family as it is for some of his employees he knows live paycheque to paycheque and now don’t have one.

“So,” I asked Brent as his lunch-ending tea and my coffee arrived, “what’s your status?”

“Unemployed,” he said directly. “And looking for opportunities.”

How ironic, I suggested.

But there was more. It turns out Brent Trepel had been let go before his staff. He was unemployed when he sat there in the boardroom, trying to be there for the people who, over years, he spent more time with than his own family.

In a sentence that expressed his own pain in a way only those who know him well might appreciate, Brent Trepel left me with these words: “I stayed as long as I could.”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca