Newfoundland’s fabled cod fishery gave Mark O’Dea his first taste of entrepreneurialism at the age of 12.
At the time, O’Dea was too young to work on the fishing boats, but that didn’t stop him from wandering down to the wharf armed with a razor-sharp knife and a bucket, where he would eagerly await the arrival of the morning catch.
He wasn’t the only one.
Other boys waited to sift through the fish heads that would be dumped into table-sized bins on the dock, each of them clambering for Atlantic cod tongues, which could be frozen, bagged and sold as a delicacy at markets in St. John’s.
O’Dea earned $0.60 per dozen and, when he was old enough, found a berth on a fishing boat and learned what hard work was really about.
“That was good work-ethic practice,” O’Dea recounted, speaking to Business in Vancouver during an interview at his office in Vancouver’s Guinness Tower.
Although his fishing days are long gone, the Vancouver-based executive hasn’t given up on the natural resource game. The 43-year-old has just launched a new company, his fourth, months after his previous venture, Fronteer Gold, sold to Newmont Mining (NYSE:NEM) for a blockbuster $2.3 billion.
Although the Fronteer sale was O’Dea’s largest to date, it wasn’t his first. Late last year, he sold the company’s uranium assets to Paladin Energy (TSX:PDN) for $260 million.
Both deals revolved around metal deposits that had yet to be transformed into mines, earning O’Dea a new level of respect among deal-makers in Vancouver’s cutthroat junior mining sector.
In June, a relatively unknown shell called Drexel Resources (TSX-V:DX) (now called Blue Gold Mining) saw its share value soar 510% after it was revealed that O’Dea planned to take a large position in the company.
So how does he do it?
“There’s no overnight success,” explained O’Dea.
In fact, his formula for a winning junior mining company is simple: a good project plus talented people and a lot of hard work equals success.
“Good projects build good companies,” he said. “The harder I work the luckier I get, and the harder you work in this business and the more deals you do, the more opportunities get shown to you.”
O’Dea’s latest venture is called Pilot Gold (TSX:PLG), which was spun out of Fronteer earlier this year as part of the Newmont deal.
O’Dea, who assumed a chairman’s role in the new venture, said Pilot has already garnered interest from investors thanks to the way the company was structured from the outset.
Not only did Newmont take a 20% stake in the company, but also the Fronteer team was able to transfer more than a dozen precious metal projects from its portfolio into Pilot’s.
Two of those projects are in Turkey and count mining giant Teck Resources (TSX:TCK.B) as a 60% joint-venture partner.
On top of that, O’Dea was able to transfer 18 jobs from Fronteer into Pilot, allowing him to keep intact the team that built Fronteer into a multibillion-dollar success.
“What we like about the story and this new company is we’re not starting from scratch,” he said. “We’ve got a great base from which to grow and build our resources the same way we did at Fronteer.”
O’Dea’s interest in mining began at a young age while listening to his grandfather’s stories about prospecting for hard-rock treasure in Ontario’s outback. At university, he took a geology course out of curiosity and was hooked. “I loved the fact that you could go tell a story from an outcrop of rocks.”
After graduating from Carleton University with a bachelor of science honours degree in geology, O’Dea spent time hunting for valuable rocks in the mountains of B.C. before leaving for Australia and New Zealand, where he earned a PhD in structural geology from Monash University.
O’Dea said he was on track to become a professor, but in 1997 he decided to come back to Vancouver and try his hand at the business side of mining.
“I didn’t even know what stock options were or what equity was,” he joked.
Fortunately, his strong technical background outweighed what he didn’t know about running a public company. In 2000, he entered former Goldcorp (TSX:G) founder Rob McEwen’s global contest to find the next six million ounces of gold at the company’s Red Lake mine in Ontario.
O’Dea didn’t win, but he came in second and caught the attention of two Toronto investors who wanted him to lead a new venture called Fronteer.
“It was a complete thrill and scary and terrifying on the one hand because I didn’t know anything about public companies,” said O’Dea.
Dan Wilton believes O’Dea’s “unbelievable” technical background underwrote Fronteer’s eventual success. He also said O’Dea had more business skills than he was willing to admit.
“Mark is one of the better people I know at telling a story and getting people to buy into it,” said Wilton, managing director at National Bank Financial’s global metals and mining group in Vancouver. “But ultimately what separates people who are able to bring these things to a conclusion from those who perpetually work on projects is you have to deliver results, and that’s one thing the Fronteer team has always been able to do.” •
