BC Business
ETRO Construction Ltd. hasn’t yet reached a decade in business, but it’s making its mark by winning some of the province’s biggest projects—like BC Place’s upcoming renovation
Mike Maierle remembers July 1, 2015, well.
“I get up in the morning, my two kids are in our bed monkeying around,” Maierle recalls with a smile. “And I turn to my wife and say, ‘I’m quitting in 90 days.’”
Maierle grew up in Burnaby with an entrepreneurial spirit that led him to find work cutting grass, painting fences and refinishing decks as a teenager. He worked summers in construction and entered the BCIT construction management program immediately after high school. “I graduated on a Friday and the following Monday I started as a 19-year-old at [global construction giant] Ledcor as an estimator with a desk in a fancy downtown office,” he says.
Maierle spent some 13 years with Ledcor, becoming its go-to shopping centre/commercial retail project manager in Metro Vancouver and running projects like the $70-million Pacific Centre Holt Renfrew redevelopment. Eventually, the company enlisted him to go to the Bahamas for four years and build a $370-million airport in the country. It was there that the seeds of his lifelong dream of entrepreneurship sprouted.
Years before, Maierle had filed a corporation under the name ETRO after seeing the eponymous Italian fashion store’s logo in Milan. But it had been lying mostly dormant, save for a job here or there.
When he got back from the Bahamas, Maierle was promoted to be the director of pre-construction operations at Ledcor. The company was planning on making him the president of its construction group. “I wanted no part of that,” Maierle says, emphasizing his point by hitting the table. “I had two young kids, I knew I’d be on a plane all the time. I couldn’t see it.”
Then came that day in July. Maierle started getting everything ready for him to go out on his own and, on October 1, he put in his notice. “My boss was beside himself,” he recalls. “At the end of the month they threw me this incredible going away celebration—60 clients showed up, a lot of people. I think they thought I was going to go renovate houses and do small stuff. But I had a whole different plan.”
That weekend, Maierle set up two folding tables, a chair and a couple of screens and started ETRO (which now stands for Ethics, Teamwork, Relationships and Optimism) Construction in his basement with $100,000 of his own savings and, as he puts it, “a loan against my fucking house.”
The projects started coming in slowly as Maierle spent his time knocking on doors and calling people up trying to get work. First, there was a tenant improvement project for $500,000. Then a three-unit heritage renovation. Then 10-unit projects. Then 20, 50, 200, 500 and 1,000. And then the commercial stuff started rolling in.
Even for Maierle, who envisioned big things when he left Ledcor, the growth has been staggering. “I’ve got this little sheet in my office from the first month, when I set my revenue projections. I projected in our 10th year we’d do $40 million,” he says. Some would call that very optimistic. Turns out, he undershot it.
Currently in its ninth year, the Burnaby-based company now has some 140 employees and an office it is rapidly outgrowing. It will do around $200 million in revenue this year and plans to move into a new space in Vancouver’s east side. The scope of the work ETRO is doing has grown alongside the company.
Remember the Bahamas airport he steered for Ledcor? Maierle kept in contact with the company he worked with on it—“I’m a relationships guy”—and now ETRO is building a US$350 million Four Seasons Resort in the Bahamas. There was Aritzia’s second Vancouver office, a 62,000-square-foot architectural marvel in Railtown. And First West Credit Union’s 130,000-square-foot new Langley headquarters. Smaller, trendy ones, too, like House of Funk Brewing’s North Vancouver space.
“We’re builders, technical experts in what we do,” says the 41-year-old Maierle when asked how the company has been able to grow so quickly. “And we’re fantastic communicators. With the way we run our pre-construction business, we’re open and honest. We’ve been told by multiple clients that we provide a service that others just can’t match. And we’ve spent and have invested a ton of energy and time into that process.”
There has been a litany of huge projects in ETRO’s portfolio, but it’s fair to say none have put the company on the public radar like winning the renovation contract for BC Place in preparation for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. “We beat out the big guys; it’s a huge win,” he says, smiling. “All the credit goes to the team. They told them how the job was going to be built down to every nut and bolt. No one else did that. Everyone else came in to sell their companies. We said, ‘You’ve given us two weeks to prep for the interview, so we spent hundreds of hours putting together models and visualizations. Let us show you how we can deliver.’”
That project will involve 12 jobs in total, including field-side clubs, VIP lounges and a bridge between Parq Casino and BC Place. For Maierle, who now has four young boys and lines their teams’ baseball fields in his spare time, this is all much closer to the beginning of something than the end. “Most people in my spot, their lens and horizon thinking is five or seven years,” he says. “I have 25 years of horizon. And I love coming to work, love what we’re doing and love investing in new things and trying stuff.”