Colonnade BridgePort CEO Hugh Gorman started his professional life at the tail end of high school when he got into the real estate industry. But it was what he wouldn't do that launched the future Ottawa, Ontario, executive's career.

When the current head of the real estate investment and management company was a teenager, he said, he worked for someone who sold multifamily units at 120% to 130% above cost — and told prospective buyers they could get returns of 12% to 15%. When Gorman questioned the accuracy of the return estimates, he said his boss told him "Your job is to sell these things, and not to ask how and why."

The turning point came when an Ottawa scientist was ready to invest $600,000, Gorman said: "It was all of his life savings. So I told the guy, 'You shouldn't do this.' Of course, my boss found out and fired me. But I couldn't have gotten up in the morning and faced myself."

The experience didn't sour the future CEO on real estate and instead gave him a sense of himself and the type of company where he wanted to work. He applied to be a marketing coordinator at Montreal-based Canderel in the summer after graduation.

"My job was to run around (and) build a database of prospective tenants because, at the time, Canderel was notorious for not using brokers to lease their space," said Gorman, adding that he took photos of directory boards and created a database for the firm's leasing representatives to use. "I would run around lobbies until I got kicked out by the security guard," he recalled.

Now in charge of a company with about 150 employees, Gorman said he didn't mind the start-from-scratch aspect of that marketing job because he was always entrepreneurial: "I always had paper routes. I had multiple paper routes with kids delivering, and I would collect the money. I ran non-alcoholic teen clubs. I just did a lot of stuff."

But he loved property. "I was in high school and always reading books on getting rich in real estate," Gorman said. Even as a university student, he was an active investor. Gorman and some friends bought a war-time-era house that they lived in while getting their degrees, even building a two-floor addition at the back of the home.

He bought out his partners and eventually lived in the house with his wife and first child, making money on the deal when he sold it.

Gorman was with Canderel when it sold most of its portfolio to Oxford Properties Group in 1999. "They left a couple of people in the shop, but the entire Canderel team basically became Oxford employees," he said.

After selling off much of the company, the current Canderel chairman, Jonathan Wener, would eventually rebuild the firm to the point that it now has 80 million square feet of owned, managed, and developed properties and seven corporate offices in Canada. In 2008, Gorman thought it was time to get back to Ottawa and strike out on his own, so he left Oxford Properties and formed Colonnade BridgePort with plans to replicate the Canderel model.

"I bought a small platform, but I wanted to be committed to operating business and have a small investment platform to put deals together," said Gorman. "The idea was to start a small shop and build it up organically."

As he looks back on his career, Gorman said he learned he has to be able to trust people, which is part of the culture of Colonnade BridgePort.

"I want to be clear about what people need to do but let them push out outside the edges of the envelope to do things that excite them they are passionate about," said Gorman. "You want a culture to encourage that but also create some guardrails so they don't go off the clip."