Since 2005, more than 100 leaders have been inducted into the Business Laureates of British Columbia Hall of Fame, including seven celebrated last week at the program’s 19th annual awards gala, hosted by Junior Achievement British Columbia (JABC).
Recognized for their vision, leadership and integrity, the 2025 laureates have each built a legacy in the province that has enriched the lives of others, contributed immensely to community and served as a model for forward-thinking, mindful and successful business leadership.
BIV sat down with three of this year’s honourees to reflect on the careers they’ve led and impact they’ve made.
This is part one of a three-part series featuring excerpts from those interviews. Please visit BIV.com May 14 and May 15 for interviews with Stan Fuller and Ryan Beedie.
Four other individuals have been inducted into the Hall of Fame posthumously: Ivan Andersen and Bob Stewart; Keith Beedie (alongside Ryan Beedie); and Bus Fuller (alongside Stan Fuller).
John Nicola: Share the pie
“Don’t hoard the nuts,” says John Nicola, as he describes a value he embraced about a decade before founding the firm that bears his name.
It’s a memorable phrase from a conversation that covered the early days of Nicola Wealth, the firm’s ongoing leadership transition and the multiple crises that roiled global markets in the three decades in between.
Amid change and challenge, the company has grown to have 225 shareholders, 550 employees and more than $17.1 billion in assets under management. It’s annual average growth rate from 2006 to 2021 sat at 21 per cent — higher still, at 25 per cent, for profit, Nicola says. And the firm now serves 5,000 families and around 150 institutions from seven offices across the country.
While change is a constant, so too are the values and ideas that have been key to Nicola Wealth’s longevity since it was founded in 1994.
In three words, Nicola says one of the most important ingredients in the firm’s success is this: Share the pie.
“There is a benefit besides psychological benefit, emotional benefit to giving this money away. And I would argue the same is true with philanthropy,” says Nicola.
“There’s just so much evidence to support this. I think of what we do in terms of ‘share the pie’ being normal, because I tend to be a rational person.”
This mindset applies to the company, whose shareholders include executives, advisors and staff. It also applies to how Nicola Wealth has shown up in community — with hundreds of volunteer hours given by staff, hundreds of organizations supported and millions of dollars donated to help advance social, economic and health equity.
This thinking is, in and of itself, an important aspect of Nicola’s legacy, and a way of operating in life and in business that he says he’s tried to convince others to adopt, with some success.
“I’m doing my level best to find some time to write a book where the title is ‘Share the Pie’ and it’s meant to be about the things I’ve learned in 50 years, being in this profession and now in business, that might be surprising to people.”
Finding out he would be inducted into the Business Laureates of British Columbia Hall of Fame this year was its own surprise.
“A big surprise, really,” he says in his Nicola Wealth office along West Broadway in Vancouver. “Everybody was very quiet about this, and then I get the letter, and I was completely blown away.”
From his perspective, Nicola says he had thought of the program as a forum for recognizing legacies that span multiple generations, and indeed, two of the other sets of inductees this year are comprised of two generations — father and son duos where, in both instances, the second generations have carried on and significantly built upon the business legacies started by their fathers.
Nicola, 74, is that first father-founder generation. Later this year, his son, Christopher, will succeed him as CEO of Nicola Wealth, with Nicola continuing to serve as chief investment officer and as executive chair of the board.
It is, in his words and by any reasonable standard, not a big deal as far as the business is concerned.
“He and I have effectively had a working relationship and a partnership for just over 30 years,” he says.
“I think basically I will find myself as executive chair, kind of like the mad scientist in the back room with the experiments, trying to come up with the latest innovation.”
