Jim Treliving

Early Life and Career

Jim Treliving’s grandfather, James Gardner, was the town grain buyer in Virden, Manitoba, and served as its mayor for 29 years. His father, Ted, was a barber who inspired his son to look at the larger picture in life in order to achieve success.

Treliving dropped out of high school in Grade 11. After working on oil rigs, he trained as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer in 1959 and was posted to Prince George, British Columbia. Having idolized police officers during his childhood, he discovered that the residents in Prince George did not share his enthusiasm. “The police weren’t considered allies of the people, there to guard and protect, so much as they were considered nuisances to the local criminals who menaced the streets of that city. It was a tough realization to come to,” he later recalled in his autobiography, Decisions.

Boston Pizza

While posted in Edmonton in 1966, Jim Treliving ate his first meal at Boston Pizza and Spaghetti House, which had been founded two years earlier. He has claimed it was his first exposure to pizza, and that he enjoyed the notion of eating a meal with his hands. He struck up a friendship with the owners and soon took on shifts working as a bouncer on Friday nights, mostly to handle inebriated university students.

As Treliving grew more interested in the pizza business, his enthusiasm for police work declined. After rejecting a reassignment to a desk job in Ontario, Treliving left the RCMP in May 1967. He and Don Spence, a police officer in the Edmonton Police Department, spent several months raising funds to buy their own Boston Pizza franchise. (See also Police in Canada.) The odd jobs Treliving took ranged from selling appliances at Simpsons-Sears to working as a masked wrestler under the name “Hangman.” (See also Professional Wrestling.)

Treliving and Spence opened their first franchise in Penticton, British Columbia, in May 1968. It included a basement night club that helped sustain the restaurant through its early years. They hired George Melville as their accountant, who later became Treliving’s business partner.

During a corporate reorganization in 1983, Treliving and Melville acquired 50 per cent of Boston Pizza International, eventually acquiring a majority interest. Treliving was appointed president of the chain, which at time consisted of multiple locations in Western Canada.

Under his watch, Boston Pizza landed a contract to sell pizza through three outlets at Expo 86 in Vancouver and, starting in 1988, opened its first Asian location in Taiwan. Boston Pizza’s first expansion into Eastern Canada was unsuccessful. Treliving blamed its withdrawal in 1992 on failing to understand how different the market was.

When the company returned to Ontario in the late 1990s, Treliving moved to Toronto in an effort to be more hands on and avoid earlier mistakes. He then moved to Dallas, Texas, in 2001 to oversee the chain’s American expansion.

By 2024, system-wide sales across Boston Pizza’s 372 locations had reached $1.175 billion.

Over his entrepreneurial career, Treliving, by himself or as part of the T&M Group of Companies, has also had ownership interests in auto repair centres, event management firms, food manufacturing, land development and real estate.

Dragons’ Den

In 2006, Jim Treliving was contacted by CBC producer Tracie Tighe to participate in a segment on the business program Venture. Following that appearance, Tighe contacted him to audition for Dragons’ Den, a new series based on a BBC show. Treliving initially rejected the offer after a successful audition, but his wife, Sandi Treliving, countered that it provided a great publicity boost.

Treliving decided to accept the offer. He figured “it’d be a lark, and it had been a long time since I’d taken a flyer on something.” Dragons’ Den premiered in October 2006, and he remained part of the series for 15 seasons. When he left the show in 2021, he was the last remaining original panelist. Along with fellow panelist Arlene Dickinson, he hosted a 2012 spinoff series, The Big Decision.

According to his autobiography, Treliving was proud that, beyond the successful rating of Dragons’ Den, it was used by educators to teach students how to pitch business ideas and create business plans.

Philanthropy

Jim Treliving learned the value of philanthropy from an early age, as his parents believed in helping community members. “My mom would give me rubber boots to give to kids who didn’t have footwear,” he told the National Post in 2023. “That’s the mentality you had, from day one.”

In 1990, Treliving and George Melville established the Boston Pizza Foundation, which has formed relationships with a number of other charitable and social service organizations, including Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Kids Help Phone, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada, Starlight Foundation Canada, and the Youth Emergency Shelter Society. His daughter, Cheryl Treliving, has served as the foundation’s executive director, as well as of its offshoot, Boston Pizza Foundation Future Prospects. By 2025, the foundation had donated over $37 million to Canadian charities.

Treliving’s volunteer board memberships have included the Hockey Canada Foundation, the David Foster Foundation and the Richmond Hospital Foundation.

Treliving and his wife, Sandi, made large donations to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), including $1 million to its foundation in 2012, and $5 million in 2020 to address gender issues in mental health via the womenmind initiative. They served as national chairs for 150 Leading Canadians for Mental Health in 2017, a Canada 150-inspired initiative where the public nominated people who devoted their lives to helping those experiencing mental health issues. Their interest in mental health was spurred by both his experience as an RCMP officer and by personal experiences within their families.

“You look at the health and happiness of your family and friends and what you’re contributing to your community. Success is about finding yourself and your business in a much better place than where you started out, and everyone, from employee to entrepreneur, measures that out in very different ways.” – Jim Treliving in Decisions (2012)

Personal Life

Jim Treliving has been married three times: to Elaine Tkatchuk, Bronwyn Tolley and Sandi Beauchamp.

Treliving’s daughter would serve as the head of the Boston Pizza Foundation, while his son, Brad, would serve as the general manager of the Calgary Flames and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Treliving co-founded with his son, Brad, and Rick Kozuback the Western Professional Hockey League, a minor league circuit which operated from 1996 until it merged with the Central Hockey League in 2001. (See also Hockey in Canada.)

His autobiography, Decisions, was published in 2012.

Honours and Awards

• Patrick Boyle Founder’s Award, Fraser Institute (2012)
• Inductee, Business Laureates of British Columbia Hall of Fame (2014)
• Inductee, Canada’s Walk of Fame (2019)
• Member, Order of Canada (2019)
• Horatio Alger Award, Horatio Alger Association of Canada (2023)