Levi Sampson: Unlikely Saviour

Twenty-eight-year-old Levi Sampson’s career goals never included the president’s office at one of B.C.’s most storied forestry companies. The UVic history and economics major had toiled in the Alberta oil fields and was a marketing manager at a Victoria gym when destiny called.

News reports in early 2008 of yet another failed B.C. pulp mill barely registered, but Sampson’s interest picked up when he heard that employees at Nanaimo’s Harmac Pacific (founded in 1948 and named after B.C. forestry legend H.R. MacMillan) were trying to buy the company out of receivership. “When it became evident to me that they weren’t going to have the financial backing to pull it off, that’s when I got involved,” Sampson reports.

Always scouting opportunities for his family’s private investment company (his father, Edward Sampson, is a veteran of the Alberta oil patch and is currently the president and CEO of Niko Resources Ltd.), Levi Sampson saw potential not only for a decent return on investment but to save some local jobs. So he put together a proposal that would see his family company, employees and two other private investors chip in equal amounts to raise the $13.2-million asking price. After quarterbacking the coalition and delivering the courtroom plea that convinced then chief justice Donald Brenner to approve the deal, he could hardly turn down an invitation to sit on the board of directors. And, well, one thing led to another.

“I took it one step at a time,” Sampson recalls. “Initially, it was to help out. . . . I sat on the board, then there was a void in the president’s role; I was asked to take that role, and that’s where I find myself a year later.”

It’s a long way from the track field, where Sampson’s initial aspirations lay. The native of Yorkton, Saskatchewan, moved to south Surrey at age five, then on to Victoria, where he raced competitively during his studies at UVic. He attributes his competitive streak to his experience on the racetrack against competitors who would go on to sports stardom, including Olympic medallists Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin. Leaving the running world behind, he spent a year playing cornerback with the Victoria Rebels in the B.C. Football Conference amateur football league.

Today Sampson finds himself jetting around the world, assuring clients of the rejuvenated mill’s long-term reliability. And as he tells it, it’s a story that sells itself: within a year of restarting operations, the new Harmac Pacific had shaved operating costs by $100 a tonne and had negotiated an 11-year labour contract – unprecedented in the often-fractious forestry industry. By October of this year, the mill had started up a second production line, boosting output to 1,000 tonnes a day. About half of this is destined for China, with 40 per cent destined for Europe and the remainder headed stateside.

Sampson vows that his investment in Harmac is for the long term. The family fund has no near-term exit strategy, and he sees plenty of room for personal growth in overseeing the company’s seemingly limitless growth prospects. He points to the mill’s electricity generation and the potential to become a utility to the City of Nanaimo, and to the company’s extensive real estate holdings. “Being only 28 years old, I definitely have time to put into seeing that growth realized,” he enthuses.

The recently married Victoria resident is reluctant to speculate on the prospect of an emerging new world order but admits that he sees the employee-led buyout as more than an isolated incident. Sampson has since steered his family funds to a similar investment in Victoria’s CHEK Television and finds his advice in constant demand from companies big and small. “How far-reaching this becomes, the future will tell,” he says. He refers with particular pride to a local machine shop in Nanaimo: when its half-dozen employees bought the company from their employer, one was reported in the local paper as saying, “We pulled a Harmac.”

Because of all the attention surrounding these moves, Sampson may have trouble maintaining his low profile; he reports that a Hollywood filmmaker (whom he declines to name) has already been sniffing around, gathering anecdotes for a film now in development. No word on who will play the role of the 28-year-old former high-school jock who rises from obscurity to put the means of production in the hands of labour. But whatever the casting, there’s little doubt that Sampson’s script is ready-made for a Hollywood ending.