WasteExpo 2025: 4 business lessons Patrick Dovigi learned playing hockey

During a CEO Spotlight conversation at WasteExpo 2025 with National Waste & Recycling Association President and CEO Michael E. Hoffman, Patrick Dovigi, CEO of GFL Environmental Inc., Vaughan, Ontario, discussed his journey from playing professional hockey to environmental services, highlighting GFL’s rapid trajectory to becoming the fourth largest environmental services company in North America.

Dovigi shared his early experiences, including managing a troubled waste transfer station and learning the business from the ground up. He detailed GFL’s strategic acquisitions, including a $105 million investment in Western Canada and a transformative $700 million deal with Waste Industries. Dovigi emphasized GFL’s entrepreneurial culture, operational excellence and commitment to sustainability, with a goal to become the best-run environmental services business in North America.

He also shared how his beginnings in hockey shaped his career path. Dovigi grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a small town in Canada where, he said, everyone plays hockey. He was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers and traded to the Detroit Red Wings before hanging up the skates by age 21.

Here are four lessons Dovigi took from his time playing hockey.

1. To strengthen a roster, sometimes a strategic trade can make all the difference.

"I was a goalie, so very strategic.

"I learned a lot from professional sports, obviously. How to build a team. What makes a team work. It’s not always about having the best players, it’s about finding the right people for the right places."

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2. Like any shared interest, hockey can be a great conversation to open the door.

"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 [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization], significantly in excess of what our expectations were."

3. When it comes to M&A, teamwork is paramount.

"Our focus has been on acquiring family-owned and operated businesses. We have bought a few from private equity the years, but by and large, what we relate to, both culturally and myself, has been family-owned and -operated models

"A lot of these family-owned and -operated businesses, they want their people taken care of, right? And we needed their people. I think a lot of the time we spent on culture, because at the end of the day, that team had to become the GFL team. Were they going to be able to buy into the systems, operations, would they believe in the same vision that we had?

"When I go back and look at all the acquisitions that we’ve done, coming up on almost 300 today, the ones that went the best were the ones where, I call it the Joe Montana to the Jerry Rice was done perfectly, where the family passed the torch to us, they were supportive of the transaction, told their employees why they wanted to do it, why they selected GFL to buy their business. And those ones worked the best. Culturally, these people believe the same vision that we were trying to create."

4. In the end, winning is everything.

"Private equity training creates sort of an entrepreneurial spirit. Listen, we dream winners. We want to win, at the end of the day. And that comes in all forms of action, but ultimately, I think people want to be associated with success. The model works.

"You’ve got to believe in the vision that you have, and you can’t listen to what everybody else will tell you. At the end of the day, we knew what we were doing. We know what we want to do. And, I think, from where we sit today, this is just the beginning."