Building community: Alumnus Steve Barkhouse takes a hands-on approach
Posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2017
Elite Ottawa renovator Steve Barkhouse is at least as proud of building community as building award-winning kitchens and bathrooms.
Barkhouse and his firm, Amsted Design-Build, are staunch supporters of the Boys and Girls Club of Ottawa, Habitat for Humanity and Hospice Care Ottawa. They are always ready to wield hammer and saw for a good cause – whether it’s repairing roofs at Camp Smitty, the subsidized summer kids camp, or designing and building a gazebo for a west-end seniors facility. His charitable work has earned Barkhouse many honours – including a recent appointment to the Order of Ottawa.
Barkhouse says some of his most important community work is with his alma mater, Algonquin College. He sits on the College’s Board of Governors, two of his staffers sit on the advisory board of the Building Construction Technician program, and he employs a number of student apprentices.
His involvement with his College is kind of payback. Barkhouse says he got more than he bargained for when he enrolled in the College’s Business Administration – Human Resources Management program in the late 1980s.
He was already a seasoned builder when he came to the College, having worked on construction sites with his father since he was a teenager. What he wanted from the program, he says, was the know-how to start his own business – “a practical education that I could apply fairly quickly so that I could get out there and earn some money.”
“I certainly got what I hoped for – (an) education… that allowed me to start a business,” he says. “I guess something I wasn’t expecting was learning how to learn at a higher level, the importance of learning…and also how to apply that learning. That was a pleasant surprise.”
His College experience, surrounded by students and teachers who excelled in different ways, also taught him the importance of team building, Barkhouse says. He learned not to be intimidated by people better than him in certain aspects of his business. “You hire the best in areas you need them as specialists – certainly Algonquin taught that, and that has been one of the keys to (Amsted’s) success for sure,” Barkhouse says.
He now has more than 60 employees at his Stittsville-based company, which has won more local housing industry awards than any other firm, including multiple Renovator of the Year awards. In fact, Amsted Design-Build has been recognized as one of the top renovation companies in North America.
Barkhouse has high praise for the College’s formal programs in entrepreneurship, which didn’t exist when he was a student. However, even back then, when a student showed an entrepreneurial streak, “the professors were very quick to take you a little further than the class’s prepared schedule and give you some leadership training,” he explains.
Barkhouse takes pride in the College’s innovations and advances: “The involvement and integration of Indigenous people and their way of life into programs is absolutely fantastic. That’s going to help people grow far more than they ever expected and they’ll be taking that around the world.”
Meanwhile, the College’s construction-related courses, and particularly its state-of-the-art teaching facility, the Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence (ACCE), have become a beacon for his industry in Ottawa, he says. Barkhouse himself helped raise millions of dollars to help build ACCE as co-chair of the building’s Steering Committee.
The College welcomed Barkhouse back home in September, where he was the 2017 Technology honouree at the Alumni of Distinction Awards Gala. Fittingly, the event was held in the Centre he helped make possible.
“Driving by that building, seeing that building as a symbol of our industry, I hope the students there realize how valuable it is to us and what a great opportunity for them to learn.”
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