BE Power Equipment has stayed in the Braber family for three generations
Bill Braber started an equipment company in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1969. His son built a pressure washer maker on it, and a grandson-generation owner runs it now.
Abbotsford, BC
In 1969, Bill Braber started Braber Equipment in Abbotsford, British Columbia. The history the family later published says little about what that first business sold or how many people worked there. It records what Bill cared about instead. Quality, service and support, the company writes, were the pillars that carried the business forward.
Twenty-two years later his son went in a narrower direction. In 1991, Nick Braber created BE Pressure Supply, a company built around pressure washers. By the family’s account, it quickly became Canada’s largest manufacturer of them.
That company is now BE Power Equipment, and it is family-owned. Curtis Braber, the third generation, owns it. The line of succession is what makes it worth a closer look. A business that began in one British Columbia city stayed with the same family as it grew into a manufacturer of pressure washers and other power equipment for professional users across North America. By 2021 the company said it was serving industrial markets in more than 30 countries. Its history carries two founding dates, 1969 and 1991, with the same surname on both.
The family’s account moves quickly through the Nick Braber years, but the outline holds. Under his leadership, BE Pressure grew to four manufacturing facilities around the world. The company kept building pressure washers, and it kept adding other kinds of machines alongside them.
By 2018 the old name no longer fit. That year the company changed it from BE Pressure Supply to BE Power Equipment, a switch it says was meant to better reflect the range of what it made. Its catalog lists generators, inverters and water pumps next to the pressure washers, along with the parts and accessories that keep all of them running.
The pressure washers are assembled from components that professional users know by name. The catalog describes gas machines on Honda engines, triplex pumps from CP and General, and electric units driven by Baldor motors. Some models are built to hang on a wall. Others are made to ride in the back of a truck. There are hot-water machines and cold-water ones, and a soft wash system that runs at 300 PSI and moves 11 gallons a minute. Each listing leads with pressure and flow, written as PSI and GPM, before it names the engine or the pump.
When BE Power Equipment marked 30 years in 2021, Curtis Braber was running it as owner and CEO. A company press release that year said the business had grown from a small family-run operation into the largest pressure washer manufacturer in Canada. It credited a disciplined approach to product development and the use of Lean practices for keeping that growth going.
The company states its mission in operational terms. It aims to get high-quality power equipment to customers around the world fast and on time, through an engaged team. Its stated vision asks managers and employees to think creatively and keep improving, which fits the Lean practices it says it relies on.
“BE’s mission is to deliver high quality outdoor equipment fast and on time,” Curtis Braber said in the 2021 press release, distributed by ACCESSWIRE. “I am very proud of the entire team,” he said in the same release.
The occasion for that release was an award. In 2021, BE Power Equipment was named one of Canada’s Best Managed Companies, a program that Deloitte Private and other sponsors have run since 1993. It judges Canadian-owned and managed companies on strategy, capabilities and innovation, culture and commitment, and financials, and hundreds of companies compete for it each year. According to the release, BE qualified on its first application, in the same year it marked three decades in business.
The result held up. The company was named a winner of the Best Managed program again for 2024.
In 2019, BE Power Equipment announced that it had acquired Barens Incorporated, a wholesaler of pressure washer parts based in Seneca, Pennsylvania. For 25 years, the announcement said, Barens had been a leader in that trade in North America.
BE did not fold Barens into its own name. The announcement, signed by Curtis Braber as president, said the Barens name and its staff would stay the same, and that orders would keep shipping from Seneca and from a second Barens site in Arizona. David Hildebrand would remain general manager of both locations.
Braber wrote that the purchase would strengthen BE’s mission of getting high-quality equipment to customers quickly and on time. Pairing BE’s global reach with the service Barens was known for, he wrote, would keep Barens the best source of pressure washer parts in the industry. He closed by saying the company hoped the deal would let it serve customers better.
The arrangement left a working business intact under the people who already ran it. For a family that had changed its own company’s name only when the product line outgrew it, that was a consistent choice.
The company is headquartered on Progressive Way in Abbotsford, the city where Bill Braber started out in 1969. The history the family publishes covers a founder, a son and a third-generation owner in a few short paragraphs. It skips the first machines and the four plants, and it names no early customers.
What it does spell out, set apart from the rest, is the purpose the Brabers chose for the company. It is four words long: help clean the world.