About 20 years ago, Steve Beauchesne made a sudden career shift based on a single phone call. That gut decision led him to co-found one of Canada’s most successful craft breweries.
Then, in 2024, he pivoted again, this time to his position as CEO of Family Enterprise Canada (FEC), a community of business families and advisors.
In a chat with Canadian Family Offices, he talked about what he learned as part of the father-and-son team running the company behind Beau’s Lug Tread, and his vision today for FEC.
Beauchesne, who holds a BCom in Management and Entrepreneurship from Ryerson University, was 29 and pursuing a successful career as a provincial public servant in Toronto when he got a call from his father. Tim Beauchesne was pondering a potential transition late in his career, as his textile business in Vankleek Hill, Ont., was winding down.
“My father said, ‘Steve, you’re a home brewer, and I’m seeing more of these microbreweries starting up. What would you think about starting a brewery?’ I said, ‘If you’re serious, I’d be willing to sell my house and start a brewery with you,’” says Beauchesne. “The next day, it still seemed like a good idea. A year later, Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company had started up.”
The two founded Beau’s in 2006. Over the years, it eclipsed scores of other brewers that started around the same time through a series of canny moves. The firm’s signature Beau’s Lug Tread, with the green tractor on the label, is available through licensees and retailers across Ontario.
We’ve got a very vocal group who really feel empowered to tell us what they’re interested in, and that’s really exciting.
Steve Beauchesne
“We kind of beat the rush,” Beauchesne says. He explains that a 2006 change to tax laws for craft breweries, which came into effect only a few weeks after Beau’s launched, opened the gates to new microbreweries across Canada.
“When we opened, there were about 30 in Ontario and about 100 in the whole country,” he says. “Now there are about 500 in Ontario and a thousand in Canada.”
While competitors offered mostly common lagers and English-style beers, Beau’s focused on a rare style, the classic Kölsch brews of Cologne—essentially ale fermented like lager. To make their product more approachable, instead of calling it Kölsch, the Beauchesnes coined a new term: lagered ale.
“We took a style of beer that no one had seen before and we gave it a name that no one in the world had ever heard before. But everyone could immediately understand it,” Beauchesne says.
A third strategy was to make it organic at a time when there was only one other such competitor in the market.
The final key, and the one most pertinent to Beauchesne’s current position with FEC, was to hop onboard a new platform called Facebook. “We really leaned into that as a mechanism to create community,” he says.
But family demands increased. “My father, who had previously stepped back from the business, was not in a position to take on my role,” Beauchesne says. With the company also facing the impact of COVID shutdowns, the time was right. They sold Beau’s to Toronto-based Steam Whistle Brewing in 2022.
While maintaining a board position with Beau’s, Beauchesne was looking around for other opportunities when a LinkedIn posting caught his eye. It led him to his current role with FEC, an organization that had given Beau’s its Family Enterprise of the Year award in 2010.
“Because I come from a family business, I have an intimate understanding of how difficult it is to work with your family and still get along afterwards. So I get a lot of purpose and pride out of getting to work with other families and help them avoid some of the pitfalls my family had,” he says.
One of FEC’s most direct tools to assist families is its Family Enterprise Advisor (FEA) designation, a unique training ground for advisors that’s beginning to gain recognition internationally. The organization has certified more than 500 Family Enterprise Advisors, he adds.
Members of FEC can also join peer groups to ask questions and exchange information. Through local hubs in cities across Canada, they present topics to their peers and help organize events. Ambassadors spread the word about the organization and make international connections, among other activities.
“We’ve got a very vocal group who really feel empowered to tell us what they’re interested in, and that’s really exciting,” Beauchesne says.
Family advisors are increasingly recognizing a need to step out of technical ivory towers and collaborate more to better serve families, and he says the FEA accreditation is positioned to help advisors do that.
“That is such a cornerstone of what we teach in that program. If you’re going to be focused on the success of your family—whether you’re quarterbacking that family or just swimming in your lane—you need to understand that family’s dynamics in a way you can only get if you’ve worked across disciplines and across functions,” he says.
After all, “the plan never fails because of the technical side. It’s only going to fail because of the ‘soft’ side of it, the communications.”
Next year, FEC will partner with the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business to host a business-case competition that pairs FEAs with graduate and undergraduate students to address real-life situations.
The organization has also announced its next two symposiums: in Vancouver on May 26 and 27, 2026 (“Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”), and Toronto, in May 2027.
“The idea of creating impact with hundreds or even thousands of family enterprises in Canada is quite exciting for me,” Beauchesne says. “I’m really enjoying getting to work with the advisors and seeing how much dedication they have for their families. It’s incredible to witness.”
Sarah B. Hood is a Toronto-based writer and book author. She has served as editor of three national magazines and written weekly columns for the National Post. She also serves on the editorial board of Spacing magazine. She writes frequently on business, urban affairs and culture. As a food writer, her work has been translated into Japanese and Arabic. She has taught writing at George Brown College for more than 20 years.
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