VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – He went from Mountie to mogul to one of TV’s “Dragons” and helped create one of Canada’s best known casual dining restaurants along the way.

In the book Decisions — Making the Right Ones, Righting the Wrong Ones, Boston Pizza chairman Jim Treliving lays out the philosophies that took him from squadroom to the boardroom.

It all started with simple decision on where to eat dinner one night, when a friend suggested they go to what was the original Boston Pizza location in Edmonton.

“A friend of mine took me there for a pizza one night. That was where we met the fellow that owned it at that time, Gus Agioritis,” notes Treliving. “It was actually a Greek family and next thing I know, I got talking to them and seeing the business they were doing and Gus came to me and he said, ‘You should get in this business. It’s a lot of fun and I think you’d do well in it.’ That was the start of it.”

Treliving and a partner set-up shop in Penticton, learning the restaurant business the hard way, as well as another important lesson — decisions without discipline are weak.

“When we got to Penticton we opened and we thought, ‘It’s great, the summertime, the place was packed, we were busy.’ And all of a sudden everybody left in September. So maybe the decision wasn’t as great as we thought it was, but we’d made the decision to go there and that’s what we were going to stick with.”

Fast forward to 2012 and Boston Pizza has grown to a global restaurant chain with more than a billion dollars in annual sales.

These days Treliving is best known as one of the dragons on TV’s Dragons Den.

As one of the original Dragons, he’s heard more than his share of pitches and definitely knows the good from the bad.

“Come prepared, come with sales, come with an idea. It’s not just the idea that you’ve got, you should be beyond that,” he believes. “You’ve got to have some business sense. If this thing is going to work or the idea that you’ve got, and you’ve taken it from the idea stage to the actual working stage.”

His favourite pitch came from Frogbox — a Vancouver company that rents reusable plastic moving boxes, totes and wardrobes.

“And they came in prepared. They had sales, they’d done their homework. They’d actually gone and done some things and what they were lacking probably was a little bit of [knowledge] at how to franchise and that’s where I felt that we could take it to another level.”

Dragons Den begins its seventh season on Wednesday night.

Treliving’s book is in stores now.