Stuart McLaughlin: Mountain Man

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How Stuart McLaughlin, president of Grouse 
Mountain Resorts, turned around a money-losing North Shore icon.

It’s late January and Vancouver is in the depths of what passes for winter on the wet coast. A pounding rain that began sometime in the night hasn’t let up through the morning commute. As the sky lightens to a monochrome grey, sheets of water spill across roads, gathering in pools at intersections. Visibility is near zero as windshield wipers struggle to keep pace with the downpour.


Twenty minutes from downtown, it’s another world at the base of Grouse Mountain. Big flakes are falling silently, and cars that arrived an hour earlier are already covered in a blanket of snow. A path that was shovelled earlier from the parking lot to the administrative offices is already a couple of inches deep in snow. For Stuart McLaughlin, it’s just another day at the office.


The president of Grouse Mountain Resorts Ltd. is dressed in dark jeans, a checked shirt and a grey pullover sweater when he greets me in the company boardroom. Despite the casual office attire, his slightly stiff bearing and carefully measured answers to my questions reflect an earlier career in accounting.


McLaughlin is not only president of Grouse Mountain Resorts, but along with other family members he owns the mountain. His father, Bruce McLaughlin, made his fortune in Ontario real estate, buying 1,800 hectares of farmland west of Toronto in the 1950s, which would later become the centre of Mississauga. Looking to diversify in the ’70s, the senior McLaughlin bought a majority interest in Grouse Mountain, at the time a publicly traded company. When Grouse went into receivership in the early ’80s, he delegated the task of taking the company private to Stuart and his siblings. Today Stuart and two of his sisters run the family business, Peel Financial Holdings Ltd., and Stuart is the company’s point man in the west, responsible for all investments and operations in B.C.


Those responsibilities are many. Stuart McLaughlin is president of Whistler Water Inc., a bottled-water company that Peel Financial bought in 2005. He is also a director of Kicking Horse Mountain Resort LP, which was co-founded by the family company in 2001, and he looks after the family company’s diminished but still sizable chunk of Delta real estate – 200 hectares of Burns Bog. The family company bought the entire 2,200-hectare parcel known as Burns Bog in the ’70s and sold all but 200 hectares in 2004 after decades of public controversy and lawsuits.


Raised in Mississauga, McLaughlin always knew there would be a place for him in the family business. He moved here in 1991 to personally implement the company’s plans to develop a racetrack on the Burns Bog site, but a change of government in Victoria that year would put those plans on the back burner. “Unfortunately, the new government had different ideas,” McLaughlin says, “and British Columbia still does not have a one-mile turf racetrack.”


When he turned his full attention to Grouse, McLaughlin saw a perennially ailing operation managed by ski enthusiasts. “I didn’t know anything about the ski business when I came here,” he explains, but he relished the challenge of turning the business around. “I’m a little bit of an analytical person by nature,” he says, “and I started to look at the business.”

What he found was an unsustainable operation dependent entirely on the vagaries of West Coast weather: skiing in the winter and panoramic views of the city in the summer. Priority one was diversification, and, inspired by a popular exhibit at Expo 86, his first project was to build a First Nations feast house. Subsequent installations would include a movie theatre, a high-end restaurant, a wildlife refuge and multiple add-on activities including guided nature tours, zip-lining, hang-gliding and most recently an observatory atop the Eye of the Wind turbine.


The strategy proved successful; after losing money during his first year at the helm, Grouse has been profitable every year since, with revenue growing steadily year after year. While the company depended on skiing for 80 per cent of its revenue when McLaughlin arrived, today he believes he has found the right balance with about 40 per cent coming from ski-related operations.


For the 51-year-old McLaughlin, Grouse remains a family affair. His sisters advise him as directors of the family-owned parent company, and in 1998 McLaughlin married Della Kyle, who today is vice-president of marketing for Grouse. Their 13-year-old twins (a boy and a girl) are avid skiers.


As McLaughlin describes it, his challenge today is not figuring out how to bring more visitors to Grouse but how to continue to build the business in a sustainable way. “Unless we look after the asset we have, why are people going to come to us?” he says. “We are the window on the wilderness, and we need to preserve what we have.”