BUSINESS PERSON OF THE YEAR
A MONUMENTAL CAREER Gus Vasilarakis wins 2021 Business Person of the Year from the Brandon Chamber of Commerce
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Gus Vasilarakis is the owner and manager for Pizza Express & Submarine, a company that celebrates their 40th anniversary next year.
or Gus Vasilarakis, the activities that he did the first day he came to Canada in 1979 are the same things he does today.
Vasilarakis is the owner and manager for Pizza Express & Submarine, a company that celebrates their 40th anniversary next year. Vasilarakis immigrated to Bran don in 1979 from a small island village called Diafani, Karpathos in the south of
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••• Brandon Business Review ••• 2021
Greece when he was 14 years old. The day he arrived he went to work right away at his uncle Emmanuel’s pizza restaurant. “It was first thing in the morning on a Sat urday and he said, ‘oh, you have to come with me’. I was 14 and didn’t know what was going on, I thought he would take me to show me around Brandon,” says Vasi larakis. “He took me straight to work and I started working at 11 a.m. in the morn
ing cleaning the pizza pans, making the dough, and telling me ‘get me this, get me that.’ Later that night he took me to a Wheat Kings game. That was my first day in Canada and I’ve been making pizzas and watching hockey ever since.” After a few years working in his uncle’s
