52 BCBusiness OCtObER 2018
e n T r e P r e n e u r o F T H e Y e A r 2 0 1 8 / S E R V I C E S
In the past 18 years, Mike
Lalonde has been unemployed
for exactly one night, when he
was 25. It was January 2000,
and Lalonde had what he calls
"a little falling-out" with his
previous employer, a landscap-
ing company. He decided to go
it alone the next morning, so he
put a truck on his credit card,
bought some tools, printed
business cards and hit the road.
"Every day, if I didn't have
a job to do, I'd drive around to
every construction site I saw
and met people and handed out
cards," remembers Lalonde,
who was born in Montreal and
moved to B.C. as a teenager.
"After a few years we started to
get known in certain sectors,
and word-of-mouth was de…-
nitely a big thing, and it kind of
snowballed from there."
Today, Surrey-based
commercial landscaper Blue
Pine Enterprises has about
150 employees. "There were
growing pains the whole way,"
Lalonde says. "We doubled
every year for …ve years, from
about …ve employees to 10 to
20 to 40 to 80. From 2003 to
2008, it was on the edge of
chaos every minute of every
day; that's the only way I can
explain it."
Lalonde, who studied busi-
ness administration at Univer-
sity of the Fraser Valley for two
years before dropping out, says
he knew little about running a
company, but he …gured it out
on the job. "When you're doing
it and it's costing you money,
you learn real quick," he notes.
"Within a couple of years, it
was obvious that this could be
a very viable business and I
could grow it to a certain point.
I didn't know back then it was
going to be this big, but it is,
and there's no end to it."
Asked if he has any advice
for entrepreneurs, Lalonde
keeps it simple, as he always
has: "Work your ass o—, be
honest to everybody, and …nd
good people and treat them
like gold." —N.C.
W I N N E R
Mike Lalonde
F O u N D E R a N D
p R E S I D E N T , B L u E
p I N E E N T E R p R I S E S
What is your denition of success?
Happiness. Affording the time to spend with your family and
friends. Affording to do whatever you want, whenever
25th
a n n i v e r s a r y
