Tuesday, April 29, 2014

The most successful Canadian dealmaker you’ve never heard of and will never see

In this age of zero privacy, Mark Leonard has managed to maintain a practically unthinkable level of anonymity for just about any individual—let alone an IT executive who runs one of Canada’s most dynamic, fastest-growing and most acquisitive software companies, and who has been compared favourably with Warren Buffett and Prem Watsa. So it’s no surprise that Leonard would probably prefer not to be the subject of a profile in this magazine. For that matter, he would prefer not to be the subject of a profile in any magazine. Or newspaper. Or trade publication. Or television show (you know, if there were a television show devoted to profiling Canadian business leaders). No, the founder, president and chairman of Constellation Software Inc.—a Toronto-based, publicly traded software company with a $5-billion-plus market cap and one of the best-performing stocks on the TSX—would prefer not to be profiled at all. And so far, in the nearly 20-year history of Constellation, he’s done a pretty good job of staying out of the spotlight.