At 97, Bill Pollock still extends dinner invitations like a man half his age. “Are you available to join us tonight?” he asks via our Zoom call, only half-joking about my hopping on a plane to meet him at his favorite Monaco restaurant. The Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Drake International has always lived this way: with curiosity, humor and a firm belief that work and life should feel like an open, inviting table — at a restaurant that never closes, mind you.
One of YPO’s earliest members — and its longest-tenured — Pollock helped shape the organization into the global, inclusive and peer-powered force it is today. A pioneer in international expansion, he was one of the first to imagine YPO as a global community; convinced that business success and peace alike required leaders to reach across borders.
Along the way, he was also on hand for some of YPO’s most pivotal — and at times, unbelievable — moments. As we celebrate YPO’s 75th anniversary, Pollock’s story isn’t just part of the organization’s history, it’s the story of someone who embodies the spirit of leadership, innovation and generosity that define YPO at its best.
“YPO’s values and Bill’s personal values are interconnected; in fact, they mirror each other,” says Karen Meredith, YPO member and Drake’s Global CEO. “He has always been on this quest of curiosity, discovery and learning more. And I think YPO really helped accelerate that. And he helped accelerate YPO.”
Grassroots: an entrepreneur from the start
Growing up in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, Pollock was no stranger to hard work. As a teen, he took a job mowing lawns but when the man he worked for didn’t pay him, he and a buddy launched their own lawn-mowing service. By their second year in business, they employed 22 people.
It was the unofficial launch of his entrepreneurial life — and a clear foreshadowing of Drake International, the company he founded in 1951. In the 75 years since, he’s grown Drake into a global leader in human capital solutions (staffing, recruitment, certification, assessment and health and well-being), built on the same principles Pollock learned back in his lawn mowing days: “Pay people fairly, treat them with respect, and create opportunities for talent to grow.”
Trains, planes and papal acclaims
Pollock’s YPO story began by chance, on a train between Toronto and Montreal. The 26-year-old was traveling on a free rail pass from his father when he overheard two men discussing an organization for presidents and entrepreneurs. Curious, he introduced himself and discovered they were YPO members. Soon, so was he. At the time, there were just 300 members, all clustered in North America.
Pollock quickly realized YPO’s potential would be limited if it stayed within those borders. In the 1950s, he set his sights on Europe, proposing a YPO conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, where they could connect with European leaders and entrepreneurs outside of their North American bubble. He chartered a plane himself to mark the organization’s first real step onto the international stage. That bold move opened doors in Europe and later, in Australia, Asia and Africa.
— Bill Pollock, Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Drake International share
He says, “That was my concept of the world becoming one world eventually. A happy world, not fighting with each other, but a peaceful world where everybody’s collaborating and everybody helps everybody.”
That global vision sometimes placed him and his peers right in the middle of history.
In the early 1960s, Pollock persuaded a group of YPO members and their spouses to extend their European trip into Moscow, only for them to be stuck there at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Huddled at the American embassy, they witnessed the U.S. ambassador deliver a fiery speech really meant for Soviet microphones hidden in the walls, because “the Kremlin [had] everything bugged.” A week later, just as they were finally set to fly home, they witnessed a plane crash on the tarmac. Pollock and other members sprinted through mud to help, only to be stopped at gunpoint and told to turn back immediately.
Not all his international adventures were dangerous. Once during a visit to the Vatican, Pollock had the honor of introducing YPO members to the then Pope Paul VI. As he started to return to his seat, the pontiff invited him back up to chat further. Pollock’s words, “One planet, one people, one purpose” struck the pope so much that he repeated them back to the crowd. The phrase became Pollock and Drake’s credo.
Drake’s global reach kept pace with YPO. What began as a small Winnipeg outfit quickly crossed borders, with offices in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia before spreading to more than a dozen other countries. Eventually, Pollock himself decamped to Monaco — the perfect home base for an international businessman who also happened to enjoy dancing and the glamour of the European social scene.
Laps ahead but bringing his peers along for the ride
Pollock advocated for a global YPO, but from the beginning he’s also harnessed the power of “peerdom,” the idea that through trust, members can learn, grow and give back, together. Throughout his decades as a YPO member, he served in various leadership roles in an official capacity, as well as informally. He was a mentor to many, including Canadian Australian businessman, entrepreneur and founder of Australia’s Hungry Jack’s, Jack Cowin.
Early in his career, Cowin interviewed for a job with Pollock, who quickly sized him up before turning him down, telling him he was destined to be a founder and entrepreneur himself, and that he’d be competition before long. Years later, by sheer coincidence, the two bumped into each other in an elevator in Australia and reconnected, launching a lifelong mentorship and friendship, with Pollock coming on as a director and shareholder of Hungry Jack’s.
“He introduced me to YPO, and it was another steppingstone in my career,” Cowin recalls. “Here’s a guy, who’s now going a hundred miles an hour running an international business, who understood tax and a lot of things I knew zero about. He was the kind of person I hoped I could evolve into from a business point of view.”
— Karen Meredith, YPO member and Global CEO of Drake International share
Another thing Pollock understood early? Digital. When the internet arrived in the 1990s and most leaders were still scratching their heads, Pollock was making plans.
“None of us really understood what the internet was, and he was 10 laps ahead of all of the rest of us,” Cowin says. “He was at the forefront of where business was going and where technology was going.”
Pollock invested in and helped launch PictureTalk, a pre-Zoom video software company. He also had a global email system called The Coordinator before any other business.
“This was before anyone could understand that was even possible,” says Meredith. “He saw technology as a vehicle to connect people, and he was always out there before anyone else.”
Breaking with tradition, betting on talent
If Pollock’s entrepreneurial instincts were ahead of their time, so too were his views on women in the workforce. After all, he’d grown up the youngest of nine children, and with four older sisters he knew firsthand the talent and drive women could contribute.
Yet in the early days of Drake, the prevailing attitude of post-World War II society did not hold the same views as Pollock, that women held untapped potential. “Once you married, you quit working and stayed home,” he recalls. “I fought to get them back into the workforce even though many husbands resisted it.”
And he didn’t just hire women into sales, he promoted them into management, making the company one of the first in Canada to do so. “I built my business up with women managers, not male managers,” he says proudly.
That conviction spilled over into YPO, where he pushed for greater inclusion long before it was fashionable. Karen Meredith is living proof of that legacy.
It was 1993 and Meredith, Jack Cowin’s niece, had just lost her job. As a favor to Cowin, Pollock agreed to meet with her on a Sunday afternoon — if she could get to his house in two hours. Meredith prepped on the car ride over and quickly impressed Pollock. He offered her a job, which led to a decades-long professional relationship; one that Meredith counts as “life-changing.”
“Bill is always focused on integrity, industriousness, innovation and helping things be better in the world,” she says. “Whether that’s businesses or people, he helps them find their potential.”
Still at the table
More than 80 years after that first lawn business, Pollock is still at it. Retirement, he says, was never an option. “I couldn’t ever consider retiring,” he says. “That is one of the dumbest concepts on this planet. My concept is if you go into work every day and work yourself to death, you’ll have yourself a much happier, healthier time.”
Along with daily work, he still goes out for dinners with colleagues and friends in Monaco, treating both as opportunities to learn, connect and enjoy.
He wants to be remembered for making the world a better place.
And for those who know him best, that spirit is contagious. “He’s once in a lifetime,” says Meredith. “He makes you think differently and makes you a better person.”
