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2 0 24 L illi e L o ui s e M aj o r
QUALITY TIME
dusted off the equipment and
decided to start raising pollina-
tors himself. He found himself
drawn to the peace and quiet—
a sharp contrast to his career
in health care.
Fletcher launched Re-
balanceMD in 2013 with a team
of orthopaedic specialists to
help ease access to musculo-
skeletal care. Since then, the
company has grown to a team
of 200, tapped into rheuma-
tology and opened a cardiac
division called Pulse C3. It's
also opening third clinic, this
time in Vancouver.
With his workdays full of
people management and stra-
tegic decision-making, Fletcher
looks forward to me ditative
activities like gardening and
Stefan Fletcher was sitting
in his backyard in Victoria
one afternoon when, all of a
sudden, the sky went dark. He
looked up to see thousands
of bees swarming—meaning
they'd fled one of the hives
his son Harrison Fletcher was
tending to in the garden.
"It was two or three times
that it happened over two or
three weeks," recalls the
CEO of
RebalanceMD, whose interest
in bees was inspired by his
son's teenage hobby. "Some-
times bees just swarm for the
hell of it and nobody knows
why, and other times they've
created a new queen." Swar-
mers could be 40 feet up in the
air, or they could be hanging
off a tree or fencepost. In the
Fletchers' case, the father and
son were able to track the bees
and coax them to a new hive,
creating a new colony.
After Harrison left for
university, the elder Fletcher
STING OPERATION
For health-care entrepreneur Stefan Fletcher,
transitioning to the slow life has been the bee's
knees
by Rushmila Rahman
W E E K E N D W A R R I O R
Stefan Fletcher started
RebalanceMD to
deliver orthopaedic
musculoskeletal care in
Victoria. Since 2013, the
company has branched
into divisions like cardi-
ology, grown to a team
of 200 and received
awards from UBC and
UVic for its innovative
teaching approach.
"People didn't think
that we would last,
but we proved them
wrong," says Fletcher,
who celebrated the
firm's 10-year anni-
versary in 2023, the
same year that he was
named a finalist in EY's
Entrepreneur of the
Year – Pacific Region
program.
WARRIOR SPOTLIGHT
beekeeping to practice slow
living. As a result, his personal
life is abuzz in a different way:
last year, Fletcher's bees,
which visit nearby maple and
blackberry crops for nectar
sources, filled 12 large and
24 small jars with dark, spicy
honey—all in one day. And he
predicts that'll happen again
this year.
"I have a hive that's just ar-
rived from New Zealand," says
Fletcher. Apparently, that's
common—with bee seasons
varying around the world,
access to boxed hives from dif-
ferent hemispheres allows B.C.
