Family Affair

How Family Values Shaped Bombardier’s Journey to Innovation

Deep in the Quebec countryside, under a canopy of autumn trees, Laurent and Pierre Beaudoin walk the path towards the lake behind Pierre’s home. They approach the shoreline that bends around a secluded bay and take in the view. The air is still, the only sounds a gentle rustle of leaves underfoot and the muted chatter of father and son. This is a peaceful place, a happy place.

The walk continues. They reach Laurent’s property and cross a field where he keeps horses. Pierre rode here when he was just a boy, and Laurent was still President of Bombardier. Pierre’s equestrian days are behind him now, but having served his own tenure as the company’s President and CEO, not to mention his current role as Chairman of the Board, the Beaudoins are still among Bombardier’s brightest guiding lights.

Pierre stops to admire the landscape, his eyes fixed on the horizon. Laurent admires his son instead. “He’s looking toward the future,” he says, smiling. For the Beaudoins, the future is always top of mind, but beneath the ambition, beneath the tireless pursuit of growth and perfection, lies a foundational value that has endured since the early days of the snowmobile: Bombardier is built by families, for families.

It started with an act of empathy. Growing up in rural Quebec, where winters brought everything to a standstill, Joseph-Armand Bombardier spent his youth experimenting with vehicles that could help his community conquer the snow. In 1934, when his son tragically passed away because they couldn’t access the hospital during a snowstorm, Bombardier doubled down on his vision, determined to prevent parents from ever having to experience the maddening grief he and his wife, Yvonne, endured that fateful night.

His life’s work culminated in 1959 with his unveiling of the Ski-Doo, a vehicle that would set the stage for the company’s exciting and innovative future.

1959 was also the year Bombardier met his son-in-law, Laurent Beaudoin. “Like any father, Joseph was skeptical of me,” says Beaudoin, who married Claire Bombardier after studying together at the University of Sherbrooke. Having also grown up in small-town Quebec, Beaudoin knew of Bombardier long before meeting Claire because his father, a wholesale grocer, had purchased snowmobiles for winter deliveries. “But he gave me a chance, even hired me to help some of his partners and make the company more profitable. That’s when his perception of me changed.”

When Joseph-Armand Bombardier passed away in 1964, he entrusted his legacy of innovation to Laurent Beaudoin, who succeeded Bombardier first as Managing Director and then, two years later, as President. “I was only 26 at the time, but he trusted me,” Beaudoin recalls. “I went from Controller to having my hands in engineering, production, marketing… It was total immersion.”

An accountant by trade, Beaudoin honored his father-in-law’s legacy by approaching innovation from a new angle: strategic acquisition. He leveraged the experience and expertise behind Bombardier’s Ski-Doo to make inroads in rail transit, watercraft and, with the acquisition of Canadair in 1986, business aviation. This marked a paradigm shift for Beaudoin: in business jet owners, he discovered a new way to project Bombardier’s passion for innovating and fostering true connections.

“Business jets let you do a lot more, a lot faster,” says Pierre Beaudoin, who started his Bombardier career in 1985 in the Marine Division. “They let you spend more time networking, but also more time with your family.” Few people understand Bombardier’s heritage like Pierre: as a boy, he traveled the world with his father, meeting clients and their families with children just like him. “It’s one thing to know someone professionally, but if you can know them personally… their family, their humanity… a business aircraft creates that connection.” Bombardier has always treated clients like family—so much so that this emerged as a fundamental point of distinction in the company’s recent rebranding.

By the 1990s, Laurent Beaudoin shepherded Bombardier’s legacy of innovation towards a business jet experience that perfectly mirrored the aspirations of the business jet owner. This formed the foundation of the company’s approach to business aviation across all touchpoints—a foundation that lives on to this very day. Just as Bombardier the man invented and perfected a vehicle that catered to individuals, families, and companies alike, Bombardier the company designed a business aircraft that could meet customers at every possible altitude of their individual needs and values. We see it in the way Bombardier’s industrial and interior design teams converge to deliver comfort and connectivity that is not only best-in-class for all customers but also highly personalized, from custom cabin configurations to gourmet meals at 45,000 feet, from jetlag-combatting circadian lighting to family crests stitched into headrests. We see it in the company’s trademark Smooth Flĕx Wing, which famously delivers unmatched smooth rides, uncompromising short field performance, and record-breaking speeds, and the award-winning Nuage seat collection, whose cutting-edge ergonomics represent the first meaningful change in aircraft seating architecture in over 30 years.

In the background, every Bombardier business jet is designed to help every customer do a lot more, a lot faster; in the foreground, when each customer takes delivery of their Bombardier business jet, they discover a direct extension of themselves, a mirror-like reflection of everything they have ever achieved and everything they hold dear.

Looking ahead, Bombardier might be focusing solely on business aviation, but the values that form the bedrock of this company —innovation, integrity, family—are arguably stronger than ever. It’s Bombardier’s way of turning the act of empathy that started it all into an enduring legacy of making customers feel seen, feel heard, feel that they’re not so much investing in a vehicle, but rather joining a family.