Born in 1937, my dad, Dan Pekarsky, was a lawyer in Edmonton in the 60s and 70s—and, in those circles, something of a legend. Long before I attended the University of Alberta Faculty of Law myself and embarked upon what can most charitably be described as a brief and unspectacular legal career, and in all the years since, I’ve heard some version of the same refrain: “Are you Dan’s son? You know, he was a GREAT lawyer.”

Truthfully, his looming reputation played no small role in my eventually deciding not to practice law at all. Big shoes. Long shadow. There are easier ways to make a living than following a highly respected father into the same profession, likely at the same firm, in the same prairie city.

Dad’s own path had not been easy. His father died when he was sixteen years old. Suddenly, with three siblings and a family requiring support, he became “The Man of the House” well before anyone that age could possibly understand what that responsibility actually meant.

So, he did what many in that generation simply did. He carried responsibility. He put himself through law school, completing his BA and LL.B. in a joint five-year program, and quickly made partner at his law firm—eventually one with his name on the letterhead—Witten Pekarsky & Vogel. After that, the family moved to Vancouver and it was onto First City Financial and then Rothchild Canada before ending his career at the firm he founded, the Corporate Advisory Group, a strategic advisory firm proffering wise counsel to executives in need.

But increasingly, I’ve come to understand that what he really built wasn’t merely a law practice, a trust company, a Canadian banking operation, or an advisory firm.

It was a reputation.

Dad often lamented that he didn’t work in a business he could pass down to my brother, Josh, and me. No manufacturing company. No hotel chain. No family restaurant. Nothing tangible for us to inherit and operate.

Yet he passed down something far more valuable: credibility, integrity and the importance of community, without which very little of lasting value can be built. Those things provided both my brother and me with a tremendous head start in building our own firms—in my brother’s case, Longview Communications, now FGS Longview; in mine, Pekarsky & Co., now Amrop Rosin. It wasn’t seed capital he gave us so much as reputational capital.

One of the most consequential business decisions I made was shaped directly by those very principles. About sixteen months ago, my partners and I made the difficult decision to leave a firm we’d been recruited to, and helped build, because, ultimately, we no longer felt aligned on some core issues and bedrock values. By then, Parkinson’s had already narrowed dad’s world considerably, and we never discussed the situation in any real depth. But I know him well enough to know he would have understood the decision immediately and admired it instinctively. Because, while reputations can create opportunities, principles are what protect them. And once those are compromised, everything else becomes very difficult to recover.

One thing I’ve come to appreciate more deeply in recent years—both through executive search and through life generally—is that reputation is an extraordinarily fragile asset. It takes decades to build. Moments to damage. And generations to either strengthen or squander.

In many ways, executive search is little more than the business of reputational assessment masquerading as recruitment. Clients think they’re hiring us to find resumes. In fact, they are hiring us to assess judgment. To identify trustworthiness. To determine whether someone’s character will hold when things become difficult, political, exhausting, or lonely. Can this person lead? Can they be trusted? Will people follow them voluntarily? What do people say about them when they leave the room? Those are ultimately reputational questions.

And increasingly, I realize my understanding of all this began long before I conducted my first interview or wrote my first candidate summary.

It began around our dinner table.

Dad understood something many modern leaders and businesses occasionally forget: community and reputation are not “soft stuff.” They are not ancillary to success. They are the infrastructure upon which lasting success is built. He understood the importance of showing up. Returning phone calls. Helping younger members of the team. Supporting community organizations. Doing what you said you would do. Not because there was immediate commercial value in doing so, but because that was simply how serious people conducted themselves.

Do people believe you? Do they trust your judgment? Will they place their own reputation in your hands? Every client who hires us is taking reputational risk themselves. Every candidate who entrusts us with confidential career conversations is extending trust. Every reference who speaks candidly is putting their own reputation on the line.

And although he didn’t initially understand my decision to leave law practice and start my recruiting career at Robert Half (“who’s the other half?” he quipped as I nervously explained that decision over 25 years ago), he understood matters of trust, principle, and reputation instinctively.

He was full of little aphorisms he repeated endlessly throughout our childhood and well into adulthood. They were often overly simplified. Life, as it turns out, tends to resist neat binaries and trite exercises like making a list of pros and cons (one of his favourites).

Dad once told me, many years ago, that if someone is trying to pitch me on something—an investment, an idea, a merger—and I try my hardest to understand it, and I still don’t understand it, that’s not because I’m not smart; it’s because it doesn’t make sense. Shoulda listened more closely to that one.

When I was away at university, which he gratefully underwrote, dad insisted I prepare detailed budgets before each semester. The outcome was never in doubt, but that wasn’t the point. The educational value lay in learning to account for things line by line. That lesson had very little to do with money. It had everything to do with accountability.

That same accountability extended to tennis, my childhood passion, where dad weaponized psychological warfare decades before sports psychologists became fashionable. During tight matches, he would stare across the net, point to the palm of his hand and signal “I’ve got your mind in the palm of my hand.” It was infuriating. It was also highly effective.

Though a fan of this newsletter, often the first to read it and send along a note, dad could be a tough critic, too. Back in October, 2022, on account of being out of the country getting a kid settled in Scotland, I—for the one and only time in 17 years—shirked my monthly responsibility of writing something original and instead reposted an article from Manage HR, a multinational publication, proclaiming Pekarsky & Co. “The New Leader in Executive Search.” It was a highly complimentary article, touting our firm’s successful rise in the Canadian executive search landscape. My dad’s response?

“If I may be so bold as to offer critical advice, you have to guard against coming across as growing bored, complacent, tired, etc. I know that’s easier to say than to practice, but as they also say, ‘that’s why you get the big bucks.’”  

In my eulogy, I described dad as “the stone against which we sharpened our tools.” I think it explains something important about fathers generally, and perhaps ambitious fathers specifically. Dad was tough but fair. Principled but pragmatic. Demanding, but deeply invested. And over time, I’ve realized many of the foundational principles upon which I built my business were inherited long before I understood I was inheriting them.

Things like your word matters. How you treat people matters. Consistency matters. You cannot be charming and self-effacing in one moment and rude and temperamental in the next. You cannot treat clients one way, staff another, and suppliers a different way again. Reputation compounds. And eventually, everyone finds out who you really are.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that professional success is built less on brilliance than people think, and more on consistency, trustworthiness, and accumulated goodwill over long periods of time. In other words, it’s back to that word—reputation—built quietly. Repeatedly. Consistently.

And while our relationship could at times be complicated, there was never ambiguity about dad’s investment in me. He cared deeply. He pushed hard. He expected much. Mostly from himself. It took me years to understand that part. As children, we experience parental expectations as pressure. Only later do we realize many demanding parents are hardest on themselves. At some point in adulthood, you also realize your parents were improvising too. Beneath the certainty and authority was simply another human being trying to navigate responsibility, ambition, marriage, parenting, aging, and mortality as best they could.

And that brings me back once more to The Test.

Why should anyone care?

Because many people reading this are trying to build something too. Businesses. Teams. Families. Communities. Reputations. In a culture obsessed with scale, optimization, and personal branding, it’s worth remembering some of the most valuable things we leave behind cannot be measured on a balance sheet. A respected name. The trust of colleagues. The goodwill of a community. Children who carry forward your principles.

Yes, mentor stories are easier because mentors shape parts of you. Fathers shape the foundation. And that is legacy, too. Maybe the purest form of it. At the end of his life, what dad left us was a good name. And ultimately, that may be the most valuable inheritance of all.

For my family and me—and for our kids, and theirs after them—that should be more than enough.

Regards,

Adam