Most business owners struggle with growth.
They make it too complicated.
They use innovation as the answer to every problem.
They try to build everything themselves.
Not Patrick Dovigi.
Patrick Dovigi is a former Canadian hockey goaltender. He’s also the founder, president, CEO, and chairman of GFL Environmental. It’s one of North America’s largest environmental services firms.
Here’s the actual mechanism of his edge:
Field intelligence. Operational math. As well as a willingness to study an incumbent line by line until he could undercut it with a better system.
Patrick Dovigi explained how GFL analyzed Toronto’s garbage contract before bidding:
“We followed every city truck that left every yard, noted when they started and counted how many houses they visited, what time they got back in and where they dumped their loads.”
He studied a fragmented industry filled with small operators.
He proved that acquisition works best for market consolidation.
And yes, you can gain enormous wealth by copying him.
Buy existing cash flow instead of creating everything from scratch.
Patrick Dovigi is a Canadian entrepreneur and CEO of GFL Environmental, a waste management company. He is also a former hockey goalie, a philanthropist, and a billionaire.
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Dovigi launched GFL with a “one-stop shop” vision for environmental solutions. Three words built a multibillion-dollar fortune. He didn’t get rich because he was a visionary in some mystical sense.
He got rich the old, brutal way:
He chose a necessary, unsexy industry. Then he measured it harder than rivals. He used outside capital early, and scaled through acquisitions instead of founder-purity fantasies. That’s the real lesson.
Hundreds of small operators fill up the waste industry. Family businesses. Local haulers. Niche environmental service providers. Most entrepreneurs would see a boring industry. Dovigi saw a roll-up opportunity.
Instead of asking, "What can I create?"
He asked, "What can I acquire?"
Being a hockey player gave him reputational leverage. He didn’t need to start small. He didn’t need to build slow. He didn’t need to preserve some romantic notion of independence. He took institutional money.
Unlike most entrepreneurs, he didn’t worship bootstrapping. He reached for scale capital early. Then deployed it into a fragmented market when conditions got ugly:
"I realized I needed $5-$10 million, and another contact from my hockey days introduced me to his father. And I met a fund that managed money on behalf of one of the big Ontario pension funds. I walked in for an hour, pitched my idea, and the guy goes, 'I’ll give you $10 million but you’ve got to spend it by the end of 2007.'
"2007 was the heyday, you know, people had use-it-or-lose-it funds. They had to spend the money, the money had to be deployed. And then it wasn’t. It was quickly thereafter that the world started getting shaky in the spring of 2008.
"We had a very good run between 2008 and 2010 and we deployed that incremental capital to the point where we grew the business to almost $30, $35 billion of EBITDA...”
Dovigi explained, “significantly in excess of what our expectations were."
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This song, Put It All Together, like most of my songs, emerged from my subconscious. I enter a hypnagogic state. Doing this disconnects both the signifier and the signified. You have to break them from their purported referents in the phenomenal world. That’s when interesting ideas take shape. In that respect, this album, Opulence, is cohesive. What makes this song stand out is the visceral inference of incandescent evidence. That is, it’s the most vulnerable song on the whole record. It’s about love. Not being in-love as much as projecting it onto the listener.
He embraced leverage and acquisitions, and rolled up a boring but recurring-demand business. Most founders spend decades trying to build one company.
Dovigi used debt, acquisitions, and scale to buy dozens of companies. He combined them into a larger platform.
That’s the anti-guru lesson. Financial freedom usually does not come from protecting your downside with timid purity. It comes from seeing where cash flows are durable. Find the fragmentation. Discover where incumbents are lazy, and where scale changes the economics.
Gain competitive advantage through brand and positioning. Trying to do that on price can be a race to the bottom, most of the time (unless you’re Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton).
Dovigi empowered local operators like entrepreneurs. Which demands selective focus instead of chasing every “bright shiny object”. It also demands aggressive M&A where the culture transfer actually works.
Most entrepreneurs think freedom comes from owning 100% of a small thing. Dovigi behaved as if freedom came from owning a meaningful slice of a much larger machine.
Most business owners struggle with growth.
They make it too precious.
They use personal savings and slow organic growth.
They take endless caution as if control matters more than scale.
They refuse to study operations at the ground level.
They refuse outside capital until the opportunity is already half gone.
Not Patrick Dovigi.
On the surface, he built a waste company.
But he actually built a consolidation machine.
Most entrepreneurs chase innovation. Dovigi chased fragmentation.
Most founders try to invent something new. Dovigi bought things that already existed.
He picked a boring industry with recurring demand. He became obsessed.
He used leverage and acquisitions without apology and scaled it.
Timid people need to “validate” the obvious.
You can steal that playbook even if you never touch the waste business.
Patrick Dovigi has developed a reputation as a luxury real estate flipper. Of course, that’s alongside his main role leading GFL Environmental.
He buys rare, high-quality assets in elite locations. Trophy homes in markets like Aspen and Miami. Then he resells them at higher prices. One profile captured that attitude with his line: “I’m trash by day and luxury properties by night”.
He bought a home in Aspen for $72.5 million. Then he sold it for $108 million. In April 2025, a Dovigi-linked entity bought a Sunset Islands waterfront mansion. It traded for $27.5 million. JPMorgan financed the deal with a $19.3 million mortgage.
Fun fact:
I can’t confirm or deny that he owns a 118.8-meter superyacht. Feadship delivered the hydrogen-powered, BREAKTHROUGH, in 2025.
I like you,
– Sean Allen Fenn
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