Anyone who often cruises down Revelstoke's Victoria Road may know the Big Bear Limousine coupe always parked near Wynn Street, which locals fancy once in a blue moon for a ride around town.
But according to its owner, 38-year-old Alex Cadotte, that limo was never meant to be a business when he bought it in the first place — and to this day is a running joke he makes zero profit off.
Cadotte, who also runs Gutter Done Exteriors and the Big Bear Chalet he names his limo gig business after, grew up in Val-David, Que., which he calls the Quebec version of Revelstoke. He moved to Whistler at 18, speaking hardly a word of English, and took up a nighttime washroom cleaner job so he could spend every day snowboarding.
"This guy was like, 'hey kid, come over here. Did you ever hear about Revelstoke?'" he recounted, describing the brochure the man pulled out that touted the town as the next skiing Mecca with the new Revelstoke Mountain Resort. "Nothing was built yet. It was just starting."
The fellow worked in construction and, needing a hand moving his things across the Interior, offered Cadotte a gig.
Seeing home building as a promising career, he first returned to Quebec to get first-level carpentry training with his brother, then drove across Ontario and the Prairies to reconnect with their new employer. Along the two-day drive, however, something changed the world: The 2008 financial crisis. When they arrived, the deflated man who'd beckoned Cadotte to Revelstoke informed him he no longer had work for him.
So, determined to stay in town and get his daily snowboarding fix as the resort started up, Cadotte scoured every street looking for construction work. In an absence of luck, "it came to that point where there was no money to eat," he said, recalling his visits to the food bank. "I remember what it was like to have nothing."
Cadotte also encountered hostility from locals who took issue with a Quebecer moving in.
"If I got a dollar for every time I got told, 'this is our town,'" he remarked.
Then, a glimmer of hope shone his way. A fellow tradesman told him that one construction firm near the resort he'd been calling biweekly was "not hiring, but if you say you know steel stud (for commercial buildings), you might have a chance." Visit their office at 7 a.m. Monday with a hard hat on, the tradesman said.
"That was like the cutthroat moment," Cadotte said, recollecting how he lied about his experience back in Quebec but above all begged the firm to give him a chance. He said if they let him work for free just one day, and they didn't like his work ethic, he'd never bother them again.
They put him on the site with his brother, doing steel stud for a building hallway, when the manager rushed out.
"The guy said, 'what the hell! Why did you guys have to build so fast?' If you keep going at this pace, we're going to run out of work!'"
It was a perplexing comment for the Quebecers to wrap their heads around, but the manager kept them on and their Revel-broke lives took a turn for the better.
A decade later, following the successful launch of his exterior finishing company and Big Bear Chalet, a new venture landed on Cadotte's desk as he lay in bed.
"One day I woke up, I look at (Facebook) Marketplace, and there's a limousine for sale," he recounted, seeing it on his screen posted from Kamloops with a $9,000 price tag.
He joked to his girlfriend it would be fun to own a limo purely for the sake of driving it — not as a commercial vehicle.
"All I wanted to do was listen to some Snoop Dogg, rolling down the street while smoking joints with some friends," he explained, admitting that he did no prior research on rules around limousine ownership.
The coupe was a dump when he first examined it in Kamloops, but the bigger problem was sorting out the insurance. The auto insurers "sent me in a spiral of paperwork" to register the vehicle under his name. Being undocumented to operate a limo, he couldn't even drive it back to Revelstoke without first going to ICBC and getting a day permit.
The registration paperwork alone took Cadotte a year to thumb through, because despite not wanting to operate it as a business, he still had to complete the commercial documentation. He wanted to sell it off before it burdened him any further, but he couldn't convince any buyers without lying about it being insured.
"It's literally the craziest application I've seen in my life," Cadotte said. When he finally bit the bullet and decided to make a go of it as a business, since no other chauffeurs operated in town, "I had to convince the Ministry of Transportation that it's a nice thing for Revelstoke."
In response, the ministry suspected him of lying about his intentions for limo ownership, and prepared a 25-page report assessing his other businesses and determining whether his application to operate the coupe in B.C. seemed genuine and legitimate. Miraculously, he got provincial approval to start Big Bear Limousine — just in time for the COVID-19 shutdown.
"After all this work, the first winter of operation is the first winter of the pandemic."
Regardless, the many setbacks didn't stop him from giving the coupe a much-needed refurbish. Okanagan Valley artist Benji Andringa was his choice for the eye-catching paint job, while a friend in town installed vinyl for the interior.
"I said, if you're going to do something, do something that represents Revelstoke," Cadotte said. "It's loose. You don't need to be dressed up. You can be in your ski gear. I try to make it as affordable as possible."
Two-hour rides cost $20 per person, which he emphasized doesn't bring the business anywhere close to making profit given the thousands of dollars he pours into insurance, maintenance, parking and more. He also keeps booking to a straightforward five-minute process, allowing clients to simply text and send an e-transfer, rather than fill a form and provide a credit card.
Still, "the problem with the limousine is people want it 'now,'" he said, noting it's especially challenging in winter when it takes 30 minutes just to warm the coupe up and dig it out of snow. "A lot of the revenue you lose is from the people who don't book ahead."
After years of labour put into the limo, Cadotte said he's mostly just renewing his commercial licence at this point because it may accumulate some value of its own. One addition he would like to add to the business model, however, is limousine karaoke. Coupes are already a perfect setting for playing music, and putting microphones in passengers' hands without anyone outside able to hear could be a worthwhile investment.
Credit where it's due, Cadotte himself rarely does the driving. Most often, it's a retired limo driver from Manitoba in the front seat. She arrived to Revelstoke looking for extra work, and also operates local buses for School District 19. Cadotte said she was quick to earn passengers' respect.
"We're not going to talk about her age," he joked. "She's killing it."
It's also not Cadotte who lives at the Victoria Road address where the limo spends most of the year parked. He pays a friend who lives there for parking so that Big Bear Limousine gets maximum exposure from passersby.
"To this day, the numbers don't add up and the business does not make money," Cadotte said, admitting he only manages to float Big Bear Limousine thanks to his other two businesses. "Basically, you drive around, people take pictures and that's it. I get like two or three customers a month."
Though he's not a reader, two of the few books he knows offer fitting wisdom for his life: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechteand, and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.
"One told you buying a sports car isn't a good investment," he said. "The other is about the secret of manifestation."
Today, his only real complaint in the limo business is getting a few too many calls from people down in California's Big Bear Mountain Resort.
"They Google 'Big Bear limousine,'" he explained. "I get a lot of, 'can you pick us up from here?'"
