Business Owner, Fort McKay, AB

For business owner Chris Wilson, Birch Mountain Enterprises (BME) is an integral and inseparable piece of his identity. Located just outside of Fort McKay First Nation, the Northern Alberta community of Chris’s youth, BME is both a commitment to the Nation as well as a testament to the hard work of Chris and others. Having grown the company from a fledgling mechanic and welding enterprise, into a powerhouse trucking and service provider that provides employment and opportunities for people across Canada BME has been one of Chris’s greatest sources of satisfaction.

When the company was founded in 2005, the Oil Sands industry was a different place. Having cut his teeth as a heavy-duty mechanic for Syncrude, Chris was eager to have something to call his own. Utilizing the skills and connections he’d learnt and inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit of both his own mother and father, Chris took the plunge and founded BME. But founding a company and making sure it is properly navigated through the difficult startup time are two different things, and early on Chris found it was his own willingness to put in crazy hours that set him and his partners apart from the competition.

“We used to have a competition,” he recalls. “Who could outwork the other and work longer hours and work more days in a row. Oh, you worked 27 days this month? I’m going to work 28 days… Looking back oh my god, we were foolish.”

The drive and willingness to learn have always been an integral part of who Chris has been. In high-school Chris dabbled with the idea of planning a career as an environmental conservationist, but the six years of schooling it would take turned him away from the idea, he wanted to get to work right away.

“Six years to become a fish and wildlife officer. I said, that’s too much, I don’t know if I got it in me. I did fairly well in school, but I wanted to work.”

Pivoting away from environmental conservation, Chris instead went to work as a laborer for Fort McKay First Nation. At 17, he had already been a volunteer for the fire department but now he was put in charge of supervising summer students as they built a cabin on the reserve land of Moose Lake. It was a taste of responsibility blended with hard work that Chris remembers well.

“That was the first year that we built the cabin in the Moose Lake area, out of spruce logs. It was a hand-crafted log house from scratch. 18 years old… I had the responsibility of looking after eight other summer students. We had a camp cook, we had what we would call a log house engineer–somebody with experience on building a lot of houses–and we had one medic. We were flown in, dropped in the middle of the woods, and got to spend the summer there camping, you know, cutting trees and notching them, hauling them. We didn't have no mechanical means. So, we had to haul with ropes, it was pretty exciting.”

When the position concluded Chris was offered a role as a general laborer in the oil patch. In August of 1994, Chris started to work in the tool crib of Syncrude handing out equipment and tooling to the shop mechanics. It was a start, but still not enough of a challenge for Chris….