On the TechTO stage ×2
Jim Estill of Danby Appliances presents To Inspire You Long Term
Watch on YouTube ↗Journey of entrepreneurship and innovation | Jim Estill, CEO of ShipperBee & CEO of Danby Appliances
Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on the TechTO stage in 2015. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Jim ↗
In their words
The CEO resigned, and I said I could run that company. I went in to run it as an interim CEO. Then they said they wanted to sell the business. I said, 'How much for?' And they told me, so I said, 'Fine, I'll take it.' So that's how I ended up owning Danby Appliances.
I'm not good at that. I am good at failure. Fail fast, fail cheap. What I've done is a lot of failure, and that has made me highly successful.
I've had 25 exits, and 100 down to zero. The key is to invest more and more on the ones that grow, and learn to shut it off.
Around the web ×4
Quick answers
What is Jim Estill known for?
Owning and running Danby Appliances in Guelph, Ontario; building computer distributor EMJ from zero to $350M in sales before selling it; serving as a founding director of BlackBerry; and privately sponsoring the resettlement of Syrian refugee families in Guelph.
Did Jim Estill found Danby Appliances?
No — he bought it. Danby dates to 1947 and was family-owned. Estill sat on its board, stepped in as interim CEO in 2015 when the previous CEO resigned, and then purchased the company. As he told the TechTO stage in 2019: 'They said they wanted to sell the business. I said, How much for? ... Fine, I'll take it.'
What did Jim Estill do before Danby?
He started EMJ while at university, buying and selling computers, and raised no outside capital until the business was doing $68M in sales — which took 15 years. He grew it to $350M, sold it to Synnex, then ran the acquirer from $800M to $2B. He was a founding director of BlackBerry (then RIM) for its first 13 years, retired to New York, and angel-invested in about 150 companies with roughly 25 exits.
What is ShipperBee and is Jim Estill still running it?
No. He founded ShipperBee in 2018 and pitched it from the TechTO stage in 2019 as a way to strip the hub out of hub-and-spoke parcel delivery, using transfer mailboxes he called 'hives' sited at gas stations and commuter drivers already making the trip. Metroland Parcel Services, a Torstar subsidiary, acquired ShipperBee's parcel delivery business in January 2021.
What is Jim Estill's refugee sponsorship work?
His Order of Canada citation credits him with sponsoring the settlement of 61 Syrian refugee families in Guelph. He described running it like a business on the TechTO stage in December 2015 — a director of housing, a director of transportation, a director of jobs, a director of education and training, an Arabic-speaking and an English-speaking mentor family per family, and a scorecard reviewed every two weeks. 'It's actually not as tough as what everybody thinks it's going to be,' he said. 'It's not actually the money — it's the orchestration.'
How many times has Jim Estill spoken at TechTO?
Twice — December 2015, on what he'd learned building and selling businesses, and November 2019, on Danby's Parcel Guard smart mailbox and his then-new venture ShipperBee.