Rising To Power: Paul Desmarais and Power Corporation

Desmarais took over a failing bus company and built it into Power Corporation, which ended up as one of the largest holding companies in Canada with insurance and media and financial services underneath it. Outside Canada almost nobody can tell you the name.

The structure is the interesting part. A holding company is not a conglomerate and the difference matters: a conglomerate tries to run the businesses, a holding company owns them and leaves them alone, and the discipline is entirely in what you buy and what you pay.

This is the closest thing on the shelf to what I am actually building, because Odyssey Resorts is a holding structure rather than an operating brand, and the question of how much you leave alone is the one I get wrong most often.