Five years ago, a dozen Bay Street Boys were seated around the table at a breakfast at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. They’d come to hear why they should send their ‘top performers’ not to some lavish resort in Vegas or Arizona, but to a tiny inn off the north coast of Newfoundland founded by the woman who was speaking to them, Zita Cobb.
The Boys weren’t exactly leaning forward to hear her message about the Fogo Island Inn. Maybe that’s because I mentioned that Zita was once the third highest-paid woman in America. In other words, she’d not only made more money than any of them; she’d made more than all of them.
She had to leave the breakfast midway through because she’d won the Hotelier of the Year award and was needed upstairs for the rehearsal. The Inn had been open just three years.
One of the Boys then asked me: “What’s the golf like there?”
“Golf? No, there’s no golf.”
“Tennis?
“No, no tennis either.”
“Well, what about swimming? It’s on the ocean.”
“Swimming?”