Adam Woodward, a professional networker in Calgary, poses for a portrait photo on Feb. 17.AHMED ZAKOT/The Globe and Mail
Seventeen people from Calgary’s business community have braved a February snowstorm to gather around tables pushed together at the Beltliner, a popular breakfast spot just south of downtown. These regular coffee klatches, held every second Tuesday, attract enthusiastic groups who want to talk. As always, Adam Woodward leads the discussion.
After some chit-chat, Mr. Woodward starts the proceedings by calling on the attendees, one at a time, asking: “Who are you, and what’s keeping you busy?” As they answer, Woody, as he’s known, offers up quips, points out connections between those around the table and keeps the conversation flowing, at times with unvarnished self-disclosure.
It’s a lot to disclose. As The Globe and Mail chronicled a decade ago, the one-time stockbroker and oil patch wheeler-dealer underwent a personal and business flame-out and a mountain of legal action, some of which is still unresolved.
Once everyone has an opportunity to answer, he moves the discussion along with other questions, such as, “What’s pissing you off?” and “How can the table help you?” The answers are sometimes candid and emotional in a way that networking banter tends not to be.
The sessions can involve business, politics, mental health – there are few limits at the table.
Frank Hildebrandt is a regular. He said he appreciates the conversation that goes deeper than those at networking and pitch fests that are ubiquitous in Calgary. Some of that, he said, is a function of the wide range of attendees, from “the ultrawealthy to guys who are struggling.”
Mr. Hildebrandt, an insurance adviser, feels a kinship with Mr. Woodward, because they’ve both experienced what he described as “the ugly.”
“I use it as a generic term, but the ugly is – oh boy – all the negative emotion, the hate, bitterness, deceit, accusing, aggressive, intentional harm. That’s ugly, right? And I’ve been through it,” Mr. Hildebrandt said.
Mr. Woodward, 48, has been holding these gatherings since January, 2025, and they’ve become his touchstone to stay plugged in to the community as he goes about trying to move past “a massive amount of shame and regret” while forging new relationships that can yield business opportunities.
“I was frustrated with myself because I’d run into people and I’d be like, ‘Hey, let’s grab a coffee,’ and I’d never find time to grab a coffee. So, I just used it as a way to get connected [and] catch up with buddies,” he said in an interview. “Then I sat at the first meeting, and I was convinced nobody was going to show up, and five or six guys showed up and one new guy.”
Woodward speaks with members of the business community at the Feb. 17 klatch in Calgary.AHMED ZAKOT/The Globe and Mail
He estimates as many as 100 people have since attended, happy to pose in photos he posts routinely on LinkedIn. It’s made him recognizable, even in other cities, as “the coffee guy.” It’s not what he was once known for.
Mr. Woodward had been a top money-maker for wealth manager Richardson GMP during Calgary’s boom years, when US$100-a-barrel oil fuelled a hard-driving and hard-playing downtown scene. But he descended into addiction and the collapse of his business and marriage as the stock market turned against him and client complaints piled up over steep losses in their retirement portfolios.
After struggling for months, and drinking to deal with the pressure, he checked himself into a residential treatment program in late 2015, and he emerged several months later pledging to own up to his wrongdoings, leave the fast lane behind and set a new course. RGMP fired him in 2018.
In that time, he was a central figure in a series of lawsuits, countersuits and regulatory sanctions. It began with a $50-million court action levelled against Mr. Woodward, his supervisor at RGMP and the investment business itself, on behalf of the former clients who suffered steep losses.
They complained their money had been gambled on high-risk private oil companies, even though they did not have the tolerance for heavy potential losses. When oil prices crashed, the shares became unsalable. They were forced to put retirement on hold. Their lawyer sought to have the suit certified as a class action, but the judge in the case eventually ruled that the dozens of affected clients had faced situations that were too varied.
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Over a series of interviews back then, Mr. Woodward, his marriage over and working as a furniture mover, admitted to ethical lapses, but said that he did not act alone – that his firm encouraged him and his team. He said he was intent on doing “the next right thing” – spreading the message that investors who hired the services of well-known brokerages were responsible for studying monthly statements and asking their advisers difficult questions.
In 2018, the regulator, then known as the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, imposed a lifetime ban on Mr. Woodward working in the securities industry as well as fines that totalled $500,000.
RGMP paid the regulator $500,000 in 2020 to settle complaints of inadequate supervision of Mr. Woodward and another broker. At the time, then president Andrew Marsh said the firm had instituted a number of measures, including improved tracking and awareness of risk exposure as well as automated portfolio risk tools, to ensure “consistency of supervision across the firm.”
Mr. Marsh retired from Richardson in 2021. When reached recently, he declined to comment on the situation.
The case isn’t fully over. Fewer than a dozen of the individual lawsuits are still proceeding after several litigants agreed to settlements, according to the law firm that represents them.
In 2019, RGMP was restructured when parent company GMP Capital Inc. sold its capital markets arm to be solely a wealth management company called RF Capital Group Inc. iA Financial Group acquired RF Capital last year, and an official there said it is still looking to settle an undisclosed number of legal actions.
“I can confirm that there remain some active litigation matters involving former clients of Adam Woodward. However, we are unable to comment further on these ongoing legal cases,” Chantal Corbeil, head of public affairs for Montreal-based iA, said in an e-mail.
Even outside of Calgary, Woodward has become recognized as 'the coffee guy.'AHMED ZAKOT/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Woodward remarried six years ago. Now, he said, he spends as much time as he can with his three teenage sons while scouting out opportunities to ply his forte – bringing people together to help create new or larger businesses. He’s not on any kind of a 9-to-5 schedule.
“I’m hustling every day trying to find somebody who’ll be willing to retain me to do something that they think I can be good at, and usually that’s reaching out, calling people, cold calling. I’m a good frog kisser. I will find it. I’ll go talk to anybody. No fear,” he said.
Sober 10 years now, he has kept going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and raises money for treatment centres, enlisting some people who attend the coffee meetings to pony up.
At the Beltliner, Buddy Herold, an investment industry executive, said he learned of Mr. Woodward’s travails a decade ago when they were both involved with their kids’ hockey team. Now, the man in the cowboy hat holding court at the end of table represents someone navigating a second chance.
“He came to me in pure honesty to tell me, ‘Buddy, you’re going to find out about this anyway, because you’re in the business,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve already read the article.’ Other parents on the team were talking about it. His brutal honesty is what’s super impressive,” Mr. Herold said.
Mr. Woodward is adamant that he does not want to be portrayed as someone who got clean and is now a new man who left his past behind without consequence. He said he is persona non grata with many former investment industry colleagues and contacts, and even some members of his family who disagreed with his public effort to try to make good.
“I’m not looking for forgiveness. I’m no saint in sobriety either. I’ve made my mistakes along the way. I’m not the guy who’s like, 35 years of bad living and now look at me – how wonderful it is. It’s actually really quite hard. I’m not marketing my way into heaven.”
With a report from Clare O’Hara in Toronto