Tom Hickey
2019 Top 50 CEO Hall of Fame Inductee

You want fries with that?

Tom Hickey, the Nova Scotia investor par extraordinaire, turned his back on a high-profile job with the province to focus on his McDonald’s franchise business. And he’s loving it!

Multimillionaire investor Tom Hickey, who was once Nova Scotia’s economic development czar for a hot minute in the summer of 2022, is on his way to work. “I’m literally in the car on my way to the one in Bridgewater,” he says. “They don’t like me making burgers much. But I’m not bad at the drive-through window. Really, you should come on out.”

Specifically, Hickey means the McDonald’s restaurant in Bridgewater—where, yes, he works, and where, yes, people who have long known him as an Atlantic Business Magazine Top 50 Hall of Fame inductee (2019), who has bought and sold more businesses over the course of his career than most people work for in a lifetime—might reasonably ask: What the hell happened?

What can he say? He’s loving it. He owns five of them. The restaurants—a cluster of McDonald’s franchises along Nova Scotia’s South Shore that he acquired about four years ago, a move that didn’t take him out of the business world so much as put him deeper inside it.

Let’s go back.

By his own count, Hickey—the son of a carpet-cleaning business owner and a hairdresser from Glace Bay—has founded more than 30 companies over the course of his career, a run that began, as he told Atlantic Business in 2017, with a teenage car-cleaning outfit. “It wasn’t a big business or anything, but I did it in the summer and I got to drive nice cars around town,” he said.

 

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