Robert Schad on the manufacturing floor at Athena Automation Ltd. on May 16, 2016. The entrepreneur died on July 11 in Toronto at the age of 95.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
As a young man in Germany just after the Second World War, Robert Schad trained as a tool and die maker and began studying mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe. But after just two years, he dropped out.
“I was an impatient young man,” Mr. Schad said in a later interview. So he left for Canada in 1951, with $25 in his pocket and a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein, who was a family friend and member of the salon of intellectuals who had frequented his grandmother’s home. “I personally didn’t enjoy studying and I wanted to see something.”
That impatience never left Mr. Schad, who died on July 11 in Toronto at the age of 95, as he built Husky Injection Molding Systems into a world-leading plastics machinery business and became a philanthropist with interests ranging from the environment to naturopathic medicine, a man who continued to work for years after selling his business in 2007.
An engineering genius and perfectionist with unbounded energy, Mr. Schad expected the same dedication of his employees, which could make him a daunting taskmaster.
“He was not the easiest man to work for,” said Mike Urquhart, who began working at Husky in his late 20s and stayed for 33 years, ending up as a vice-president of sales. “He was demanding but he got tremendous loyalty from his employees. People either got fired or quit in their first year or else they stayed for life.”
Robert Otto Dietrich Schad was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, on Nov. 3, 1928, the eldest son of Hans Emil Schad, a businessman and part-time actor and artist, and his wife, Ruth Blos, a medical doctor who specialized in naturopathy.
As a teenager, he survived the 1945 bombing of Pforzheim, where 30 per cent of the population was killed and 80 per cent of the buildings destroyed. He was conscripted to serve in the German air force as an auxiliary member and operated a long-barrelled anti-aircraft gun. According to his wife, the bombings and gunning caused permanent hearing damage that plagued him for the rest of his life.
At the end of the war, Mr. Schad completed an apprentice program as a tool and die maker and began engineering studies at the local university. After moving to Canada, he embarked on the development of a snowmobile. The project failed. “It wasn’t much of a snowmobile,” he later recalled. “It only worked on asphalt.”
To pay off his debts, Mr. Schad opened a tool-making shop in the back of a garage in suburban Toronto. By the 1960s, Husky was making high-speed machines that would spew out plastic PET soft-drink bottles, coffee cups, margarine tubs and plastic parts for a range of consumer products. It later made machines for producing auto parts such as plastic bumpers.
From its headquarters in Bolton, Ont., Husky became a world leader in the industry. Mr. Schad was dedicated to constant improvement of his machinery rather than to immediate profitability. When a problem emerged, he would send in a team to fix the issue or simply replace the machine with a new one, at no cost to the client.
Mr. Urquhart said his dedication to clients was legendary. When a customer’s plant in Boston was damaged by a fire, Mr. Schad hired a private plane and sent down two service people to help the facility get up and running again. That kind of service led to lifelong customer loyalty.
“I see myself as a machinery person,” he once said. “A financial person can run a company downhill. You need a vision for where you want to go in the future.”
“Money was never an important driver in my life,” he said. “I built a new machine that was faster than anything else. I built a company that was different.”
With that dedication came a refusal to keep his opinions to himself. If Mr. Schad saw a customer who ran a sloppy operation, with poor maintenance of Husky machinery, he would let them know. “You always knew where you stood with Robert Schad. If something was crap, he would tell you it was crap,” Mr. Urquhart said.
For employees who could deal with the demands of working at Husky, there were rewards as well, including an on-site daycare, free massages and an annual allowance to buy vitamins.
Husky went public in 1998, and in 2007 it was sold to Onex Corp. for $960-million. At the time, it had annual sales of $1-billion, 3,350 employees and customers in 100 countries. (Since that sale, the company has been sold twice to other private-equity buyers.)
Mr. Schad was 78 when Husky was sold to Onex but he refused to retire and within a year had set up a new company in the same business. “He tried to retire,” his wife, Elizabeth Schad, said. “But after 50 years in the industry, he could not stop designing machines. So he started another venture.”
Robert Schad stands beside the larger injection moulding machines at Athena Automation Ltd. on May 16, 2016.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
But that business, Athena Automation Ltd., soon was embroiled in a brutal series of court battles with Husky, which was now run by his former son-in-law and hand-picked successor. Husky sued Athena for misusing confidential information. Athena countersued.
Mr. Schad won some battles in court but even after pouring $100-million into Athena and building a brand-new factory, the company never took off. Renamed Niigon Machines Ltd., it filed for bankruptcy in 2021.
Mr. Schad’s philanthropic interests were expansive and diverse, and he donated $200-million to different initiatives over his lifetime, according to his family obituary. He had a life-long interest in naturopathic medicine, instilled by his mother. When the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine became mired in financial problems in the 1990s, Mr. Schad was there to help.
“It [the college] was basically bankrupt and couldn’t make its next payroll,” said Peter Kendall, executive director of the Schad Foundation. “Robert took over as chair, provided financial support, hired new management and even got down to the level of helping hang pictures on the wall.” The Schad Foundation currently has an endowment of $85-million.
Although his business was centred on plastics, Mr. Schad was a keen environmentalist, embracing plastics recycling and turning Husky’s headquarters campus into a bio-diverse environment. He founded Earth Rangers, a conservation organization focused on school-age children, with more than 300,000 members across the country.
In the mid-1990s, he embarked on a fight against Ontario’s spring bear hunt and lobbied the government of Mike Harris, which banned the practice. The move angered hunters and lodge operators, who complained about the Schad Foundation’s funding of the anti-hunt campaign. That sparked an audit from the Canada Revenue Agency, prompting the foundation to stop financing political advocacy work.
Mr. Schad’s interest in the environment led him and Ms. Schad, a member of the board of governors of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, to make a $12-million donation to the museum to build the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity, which opened in 2009.
Schad handles a black rat snake brought in by his conservation organization Earth Rangers during an event announcing his $12-million gift to the Royal Ontario Museum, on Nov. 7, 2006.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The Schads owned an island on Ontario’s Georgian Bay, which they would access by boat from the nearby Moose Deer Point First Nation. Determined to help the community economically, Mr. Schad and his foundation spent millions launching a plastics factory on reserve land, which has gone through several iterations since its opening more than 20 years ago.
In recognition of his work with the community, Mr. Schad was named honorary chief of the Moose Deer Point First Nation.
He was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2006 and was awarded honorary degrees by McMaster University, Carleton University and Humber College.
Mr. Schad was an avid athlete, who would take an early morning swim during summers in Georgian Bay and was an expert skier, who remained passionate about heli-skiing into his 80s. He met his second wife, Elizabeth, while skiing at Sugarbush in Vermont.
Mr. Schad leaves Elizabeth; and children, Michael, Katherine and Mark; as well as five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. He was predeceased by his first wife, Herta; daughter Lili; and sister, Annina.
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