Malcolm Parry
Sun
Donna Robertson is co-president and chief legal officer as Novus Entertainment seeks more cable-TV, Internet and digital-phone accounts.
FINER TUNING: City lawyer Donna Robertson is helping mount a contest against cable-TV, Internet and digital-phone giant Shaw Communications Ltd. Not in court, though. She’s “seconded” from her practice to join CFO Doug Holman as co-president as well as chief legal officer of Novus Entertainment Inc. Headquartered in 8,000-square-foot, second-floor premises at Third-and-Quebec Street, the 40-employee firm offers cable and Internet service via a modem-free fibre-optic network “stretching from the University of B.C. to Simon Fraser University,” Robertson said. With some 5,000 subscribers in multi-suite developments — no single homes — and rates that generally run some $10-a-month below its giant competitor’s, she said relative tiddler Novus “aims to be the bane of the life of Shaw Communications.”
That ambition grew last year with what Robertson calls a “breakout” from the False Creek subscriber area to Burnaby. Richmond should be added soon, and Novus is “rolling out” digital-telephone service, she said.
The firm almost got rolled out flat itself in 2003. The then-seven-year-old outfit was an even smaller tiddler then. Founded as Pacific Place Communications by Concord Pacific president Terry Hui and Telus to serve Concord‘s condo buyers, it had around 1,000 subscribers in 1999 when a group of investors bought it and applied to serve the entire Lower Mainland. That’s when Robertson left a five-year stint at the Lang Michener law firm to be in-house counsel. A year later, with the dot-com bubble climaxing and Nortel providing debt and equity financing, a subsidiary, Novus Telecom Inc., built telephone switches in Toronto and Vancouver to benefit from then-new competitive local exchange company (CLEC) licensing to enter monopoly-telecom territories. But Toronto-based Wispra Inc. bought NTI in 2001. Novus then paid off Nortel’s $2.5-million loan, focused on developing an all-fibre-optic network, and bid for $37-million financing by San Francisco-based Bechtel Enterprises’ Incepta Partners venture fund.
Then 9/11 hit, the deal collapsed, and Novus sought protection under the Company Creditors’ Arrangement Act (Canada‘s Chapter 11). Owed a reported $10 million, Regina-based Harvard Development Inc. pulled the plug in 2004 and, with Novus now in receivership, bid to buy it.
That’s when Hui, who had maintained a minor investment, made a successful $5.8-million bid and took up the reins he’d dropped. Robertson was looking to other options “when Terry came in and had a little chat.” The upshot was that she and Concord Pacific accountant Holman were named co-presidents. “I will trust you with my company,” Robertson recalls Hui saying, “if you will trust me with your bonus.”
And has she, like AIG brass, received it? “I think we are both looking for certain benchmarks,” she said, tapping the peeling veneer of an early-1980s desk. “But we both have a feeling about where they are, financially and” — remembering access to Burnaby — “psychologically.”
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