Page 36 - November 2016

Norm Picov helped expand the family business by recognizing needs and filling them, through the example of his father, Alex.
by Diane Rice
photos Courtesy Ajax Downs & Clive Cohen, New Image Media
Some of the most successful business ventures stem from someone with an entrepreneurial spirit seeing a need and then fulfilling it. Such is the case with the Norm Picov family of Ajax, Ontario, Canada. Norm’s father, Alex, immigrated to
Halifax, Nova Scotia, from the Ukraine in 1921 with his wife, Anne; his oldest
daughter, Rose — who was born along the way in Belgium — and very little else.
While establishing himself as a farmer in Saskatchewan, where he was sent by Canadian
officials after they learned about his farming background, Alex noted the need farmers had for draft horses. Using the knowledge he’d gained while buying draft horses for Russian soldiers back
in Ukraine, he bought a load of stock and resold it. Then, he bought two loads and resold them.
Alex’s young family had been staying with relatives in Duluth, Minnesota, while he got established. He noticed many of his buyers took their horses to the Cobalt area in eastern Ontario, so seeing the opportunity, he moved his family back to Canada and spent the next 10 years near Cobalt. But, he soon noticed another trend: lots of his customers came from southern Ontario, especially the Durham region. So, he relocated the family south to Pickering, directly north of Niagara Falls across Lake Ontario, in 1931.
It was there that the youngest of Alex and Anne’s three children, Norm, was born in 1936. As Alex’s family grew, so did his horse sales business. When Norm was 16, Alex took him out of school, bought him a car and sent him on the road to buy horses.
Soon mechanization began to take over many of the agricultural tasks, and Alex saw
another opportunity: saddle horses. And not just any saddle horses — Quarter Horses. “They’re temperamentally superb,” Norm says. “They were a horse anybody could ride, and they were the best investment for us.”
By using his knack for matching a horse to a rider and adopting a satisfaction-guaranteed policy, Alex’s business soon grew to become one of Canada’s largest operations, expanding to two offices: in Pickering and Montreal.
The unconditional guarantee that Alex established in his sales business is upheld
yet today by Norm and his sons and grandchildren, who carry on the family businesses. “They call me a handshake dealer,” Norm says. “My father was the same. We didn’t need anything on paper.”
34 SPEEDHORSE, November 2016
Norm Picov gained his horse knowledge from his father Alex (shown here), who began by buying and selling stock horses in the Ukraine for Russian soldiers.