Oilpatch entrepreneur has been keeping busy with a secret midlife side hustle that next to nobody in the business world knows about
The basement of Scott Saxberg’s childhood home in Winnipeg was emblematic of a mid-1970s’ household whose most senior member, Mervyn, played a ton of hockey, as did his two sons.
Smelly gear lay strewn about the washing machine, along with a vintage Second World War Canadian army duffel bag that Mervyn used as a hockey bag. The bag had belonged to Mervyn’s uncle Ardagh Cadieu, who was a near-mythic figure in family circles and someone Mervyn only really knew through stories others told about him, stories he shared with his boys.
These fragmented yarns of Cadieu, who went off to war, lodged in the imagination of Scott, Mervyn’s youngest child, even as he got older and started dreaming of things beyond playing for the Boston Bruins.
These include a $150-million development that Cache Island sold to a Spanish energy company for a hefty, undisclosed sum. Saxberg also recently bought a minority stake in a second-division German soccer team for a similarly undisclosed sum after previously being part owner of the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes.
All this, in addition to acting as a mentor and occasional angel investor to dozens of ambitious young entrepreneurs vying to be the next Scott Saxberg.
Yet, what has really been keeping the oil tycoon busy these days, aside from raising three kids aged six and under, is a secret midlife side hustle that next to nobody in Saxberg’s business life is aware of, although that is subject to change soon once his debut novel, Those We Carry, gets released in October.
It is not a business book imparting the entrepreneurial wisdom of a self-made rich guy, as one might reasonably expect. Nor is it a ghostwritten vanity project. Instead, it is an extensively researched and laboured-over work of historical fiction based upon the facts of great-uncle Cadieu’s life, a novel that is a love story, a war story, a family story and a distinctly Canadian story all rolled into one.
It should be noted that the author, who counts Ken Follett and Clive Cussler among his literary heros, has since finished the draft for a second novel, which is about a private-equity oilpatch legend who just so happens to be a serial killer. The opening scene takes place at the Calgary Stampede. He also has an outline cooking for a third book, which is to say Saxberg is on a writing roll.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he said.
Who else knew of this desire? Not many. People are full of surprises and Saxberg’s authorial ambition has struck his oldest and dearest friends and colleagues as a complete shocker. Count fellow oilpatch player Jim Pasieka, a former director of Crescent Point and current chair of Cache Island who has known Saxberg for more than 30 years, among the shocked.
The pair have both worked side by side and been on opposite sides of major energy deals. In all that time, they never once chatted about books, let alone about writing them. There were no dog-eared manuscripts visible on Saxberg’s desk at Crescent Point, no crumpled paper notes in the wastebasket sketching out plot points or any other clues hinting at the executive’s inner passion for the written word.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer
Scott Saxberg
“The CEO job at Crescent Point was all-consuming, and when Scott left it, I would say his interests and talents were unleashed,” Pasieka said. “He mentors startups, we started Cache Island, and it was all relatively linear to what he had done in his career. So when he told me he was writing a book, I was gobsmacked because it came out of nowhere.”
Saxberg asked Pasieka to read a draft of the novel, which he did on a vacation last summer that went sideways and landed him in a hospital bed in Cape Town, South Africa. With time on his hands, he plowed through Those We Carry and sparked a minor panic in the intensive care unit when the book’s concluding chapters moved him to tears.
“There is a turn at the end of the book, a pivot, and I was crying so hard the nurses came running, thinking something was wrong with me,” he said.
The novel’s twist will not be revealed here, but Saxberg’s readers should prepare themselves for some heartbreak because the book’s conclusion is indeed a tearjerking doozy.
The author started the novel during the late stages of his run at Crescent Point. He had always wanted to write and he knew that his great-uncle was who he wanted to write about. He was gripped by a sense that if he didn’t get going on the story, he never would. Fortunately, the skills that helped him become a high-powered executive translated well into being a rookie novelist.
“A book is kind of like a startup because you don’t know if it will be good, and if the idea behind it is a good one, and if people will be interested in reading it,” he said.
Pitching literary agents is like pitching potential investors, he added. Pitch 100 people in business and perhaps two decide to put their money behind an idea. Rejection is more the norm, as it is in publishing.
An engineer by training, Saxberg was long accustomed to grinding through problems, and the act of writing — as most writers, if they are being honest, will tell you — can be a real grind. Sometimes, the words spill forth; other times, the words dry up completely. Even worse, a wannabe writer is sometimes utterly lacking in writerly chops and no amount of grinding can make up for that.
But Saxberg can write, and he possesses advantages most first-time authors don’t, chiefly, a huge pile of money to help fund his passion. There was no fretting over whether that hypothetical $5,000 writer’s grant would come through in time.
He self-funded several research trips to Europe and more or less walked in the footsteps of his great-uncle, who had fought to liberate the Netherlands from its Nazi occupiers during the war and fallen desperately in love with a Dutch woman.
Saxberg was able to track down her descendants, who helped him bring her character to life. He admits to having gone a little overboard on the research, but he is new to the game, after all.
Other perks of having money to play with included writers’ retreats to Italy and Greece, where Saxberg mixed with university professors, PhD candidates, screenwriters, scriptwriters and at least one rabbi with several books already under her belt. There were also teachers and a stay-at-home mom with a story to tell. Group members exchanged ideas, shared story drafts, offered critiques, ate great food, drank good wine and, every so often, chatted about their lives back home.
“I was the only guy on both trips, apart from one of the organizers, who was named Scott, so we became known as the two Scotts,” Saxberg said.
He was also the only attendee who was an executive when he’s not being a writer. A different Scott, last name Anderson, was among a handful of professional editors Saxberg approached to help sharpen what had become an unwieldy work into workable shape.
“I wasn’t aware that Scott was a major energy figure in Canada until we were pretty far along in the process,” Anderson, an American, said. “I remember thinking, ‘How does the guy find the time to write?’ And I realized that he finds the time because he loves doing it.”
One of the places Saxberg writes is at the kitchen table of his “camp,” a.k.a. cottage, next to Shebandawon Lake, about an hour northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont. The area is the old stomping grounds of great-uncle Cadieu, and the Saxberg clan has been summering there since the 1920s.
It is the author’s happy place, as well as the inspiration behind the names of the companies he has started. His parents’ cottage is off Crescent Point Road and his cottage looks out at Cache Island.
He will set up at the dock when he is not writing at the kitchen table. Back home in Calgary, he writes in the back of Ubers and at Cache Island’s downtown office. If a day is packed with business-related meetings, he will write after putting the kids to bed, and if it isn’t, he will carve three hours out of his schedule, close the office door and get typing, with the goal of getting 500 words down a day. He writes, rewrites, revises and writes some more.
“I try to write every day,” he said. “It is like a muscle.”
I remember thinking, ‘How does the guy find the time to write?’ And I realized that he finds the time because he loves doing it
Scott Anderson
Of course, he has plenty of other things at work to keep him busy, and lately that involves Saskatchewan. Crescent Point during the Saxberg era did most of its drilling in the oil-rich Bakken rock formation in the province’s southeastern corner. Those were good years for the company and good times for the service providers Crescent Point employed.
Saxberg kept drilling when the price of oil cratered in 2014 and he kept people working as other companies pulled back. The tradeoff was that Crescent Point had to cut the rates paid to service providers, a move that marked him as not exactly a controversial figure, but definitely someone subject to mixed reviews.
Saxberg departed Crescent Point with a belief in his back pocket that pockets of the Bakken formation that couldn’t be drilled using fracking could, in theory, still be tapped by multilateral oil wells. Upon starting Cache Island, he bought the drilling rights to two townships’ worth of land in the northern Bakken, and the startup sank its first well there two years ago — lo and behold, proving his theory.
“It is a pretty basic concept, but nobody had ever applied it to the area,” he said.
His former company pulled back from drilling in the Bakken after his departure, but Veren has since returned and partnered with Cache Island in several of those wells.
“It is significant that Saxberg is back in the game in southeast Saskatchewan,” Zinchuk said.
They basically did CPR on the southern Saskatchewan oilpatch when all the other players basically called it a flat line
Brian Zinchuk
Saxberg said the plan is still to use oil revenues to fund solar farms in Alberta, although he said that if the drilling projects attract the notice of a party interested in buying Cache Island’s wells, they are welcome to give him a call.
Meanwhile, he has a few calls of his own that he would like to make. For one, he’d like to figure out how you go about getting your debut novel onto the shelves of the Indigo Books and Music chain.
“The world of book publishing is all new to me,” Saxberg said.
The Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society is publishing Those We Carry. Scott Bradley, the museum’s director, was surprised when Saxberg showed up at his door because he imagined the author, being a well-connected business guy, would know people who knew people, and those people could get him an audience with a bigger publishing house.
Saxberg’s book represents a calculated departure for a museum press that has traditionally published academic history books — books that, alas, have failed to sell well in recent years. The hope is that this foray into historical fiction hits the mark with the reading public. If it really hits the mark, the author’s cut of the royalties could reap him a handsome reward.
“It is a cool book,” Bradley said. “Even if we are just talking about the historical facts, this is not a story that is well known, and Scott was able to dig down into the details and bring them to the surface in a dramatic telling of events.”
The story behind the story started with the tales a father would tell his hockey-loving sons from behind an old hockey bag. That story now enters a new chapter in book form, and the author can’t wait to see where it takes him next.
“I just love writing,” Saxberg said. “Whether or not the book sells, just finishing it surpasses what I would have ever expected being able to achieve.”