Newmark Canada President Norm Taylor has worked for four of the world’s biggest real estate brokerages, but it was a college job as a tree planter in northern British Columbia that he credits for instilling many of the values and traits that have helped him succeed over 30 years in the business.

Taylor, hired by Newmark in May to serve as country head for Canada, found a summer job at a University of British Columbia job fair with Silvaram Holdings, one of western Canada’s largest contractors involved in silviculture, a branch of forestry dealing with the development and care of forests. He planted trees during two summers in 1991 and 1992 in Prince George, a city about 820 kilometers, or 510 miles, north of Vancouver.

“It’s not widely known for it, but tree planting is a commission business because you’re getting paid per tree. You had a crew that you worked with, but everyone had their individual blocks,” Taylor, who's based in Vancouver, said in an interview. “There’s a self-starting and discipline aspect to tree planting because you’re basically camping — loaded down by bags, cold and wet, and working by yourself. So it’s all up to you.”

Taylor’s summer experience helped him during the interview process when he unexpectedly landed his first real estate job a few years later after being talked out of going to law school by Bob Rennie. Rennie ran the top residential real estate firm in British Columbia for years and became one of Taylor’s mentors.

“I talked (with Rennie) about how playing team sports, hockey, football and rugby, developed my character and drive, and how tree planting taught me discipline and the value of commissions," he said. "No one else was making $25,000 to $30,000 over two months of summer, but we were in the tree-planting business! That’s where I realized that hard work pays off as long as you’re disciplined.”

Similar to brokers mining for sales leads, good tree planters realize they need to know the landscape and work strategically and efficiently, Taylor said. For instance, working on a steep mountainside while loaded down with planting bags requires precision and efficiency.

“You have to read the land and find the soil,” he said. “You may come across a huge fallen tree, and you only want to cross it once. There’s a strategy to being more efficient and creating more volume to make more money.”

Tree planting skills also have a direct parallel to Taylor’s challenge to build the Canadian business at Newmark, he said.

“It’s about first getting the lay of the land and looking at the landscape, in this case, the brokerage community in Canada,” he said. “And then creating a plan for how to work the marketplace that focuses on providing the best quality of service to your clients, and working on a team of self-motivated and disciplined people who are going to produce the volume that you need to be successful and profitable.”

When he worked with trees, Taylor was part of a team of hard-driven planters called the Highballing Crew. Planters were paid anywhere between 18 cents to $1.35 per tree. He planted mostly Douglas fir and spruce, depending on such factors as the steepness of the terrain.

“We were there to make money," he said. "We got up before the sun, had breakfast, packed our lunch, and packed dinner as well. We would go from sunrise to sundown, just banging trees into the ground.”

Newmark's growth aspirations in the U.S. and globally attracted Taylor, who came to the brokerage from the British Columbia region of Canadian mortgage firm CMLS Financial. He previously served as executive vice president and managing director of CBRE's operations in the province, in addition to holding leadership roles at JLL and Colliers.

“Newmark’s goal by 2025 is to have 10% of our revenue coming from outside the United States, so Canada is an important part of that,” Taylor said. “We’ve got a great foundation upon which to build in Canada. I think we can roll this out across Canada and grow it in a meaningful way.”

Everyone in commercial real estate had to start someplace. CoStar's First Job column explores where careers began.