Louis William MacEachern, a Prince Edward Islander, started a commercial cleaning company in Calgary in 1964. Servpro grew into a fixture of the city, and in 2023 he was inducted into the Southern Alberta Business Hall of Fame for a working life split between building a company and giving money back.
Yellow trucks made Servpro a Calgary fixture
MacEachern founded Servpro in Calgary in 1964. Its yellow vehicles became familiar in every corner of the city, according to his Junior Achievement Southern Alberta laureate profile. He sold the company in 2000 and stayed on as an adviser and supporter, and the name still has a place in the Calgary market. The two dates put his run at 36 years. Today he is President of Fortune Industries Ltd., a property management and financing company.
His board seats ran through energy, resources and finance
MacEachern has sat on the boards of Acadia Capital Corporation, Blueland Resources, Buckeye Energy Corp, Canacol Energy Ltd., CWC Energy Services Corp., Eagle Plains Resources Ltd, Hoodoo Hydrocarbons Ltd, Hurricane Hydrocarbons Ltd., PetroKazakhstan Inc., RareMethod Capital Inc. and Wellpoint Services. Not many people who start with cleaning contracts end up with a list like that, and directorships of that kind come from a reputation built slowly.
He gave to the arts and to schools in two provinces
MacEachern volunteers and gives in both his native Prince Edward Island and Calgary. The Confederation Centre of the Arts in PEI honours his support with the Lou MacEachern Upper Plaza. He collects art, and more than 500 of his paintings are on loan to charities and hospitals across Calgary. He has backed the University of PEI and Holland College, and has helped Alberta students get to post-secondary education in PEI.
The Lou MacEachern Fund at the Calgary Foundation, along with other named funds he supports there, has helped pay for projects at SAIT, ACAD, Bow Valley College, the YMCA and Junior Achievement. His Hall of Fame recognition comes from that last organization, whose mission is preparing young people for business.
Calgary’s business history was not built only by resource giants and downtown developers. Service founders like MacEachern built it too, and he put his success back into the city and into a second province. Servpro left his hands in 2000. The paintings, the named funds and the plaza in PEI are what he kept building afterward.
