The next time you are caught in a hailstorm in Calgary and your car is pummelled with 600 small dents, once you get home to Victoria, you might want to call Evidents Mobile Dent Repair. This is just what one customer did when it happened to him. The best part was that Randy Ross and Jamie Gale, co-owners of Evidents, fixed all 600 dents at the customer’s home.
Evidents is a mobile dent repair business that uses a process called paintless dent removal — a micro-kinetic treatment that removes small dents. “We don’t use any power tools or chemicals; we just make the car dent-free, and nothing goes to landfill,” says Gale.
Both partners have been in the car business for a long time. Gale, originally from Oregon, started his own auto detailing business. He sold it and became a mechanic on the IndyCar circuit working for the Newman/Haas team. Ross worked his way up the automobile business from parts to management, but his real talent, other than dent repair, is in technology.
“We wanted to be able to run a truly mobile, truly environmentally sound company without a physical shop, so we do everything, from scheduling to billing, off our iPhones,” says Ross. “In fact, working with another local company, Beanstream, we were the first business in Canada to be able to take credit card payments on the iPhone.”
“I’m sure glad he knows how to do this stuff,” Gale says, laughing, “because it is way too expensive to have an outside firm do it.”
Dent repair may seem like a simple enough process: Get a hammer and bang out the dent. The end result is usually worse than the original dent. According to Ross, what Evidents offers is craftsmanship using special tools for the job they had to purchase in the United States.
“There are only eight suppliers of these tools in the world,”
Gale says.
The duo trained for six months in California, and, when they returned to Victoria, they bought a car hood and door and practised perfecting their craft for another six months before opening the business. The effort paid off: they have been profitable since the first week of operation. The long-term plan for Evidents is to franchise, but “we are quite a way from achieving that goal,” Gale says. “We want to build our brand here.”
See www.evidents.ca.
Check out the rest of the winners from the 2011 10 to Watch:
Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre | Body Dynamics Headquarters | Cook Culture | Draught WISE Draught Integrity Technicians | Origin Gluten-Free Bakery | Onlyhuman Furniture | Lizard Adventure Travel | Pizzeria Prima Strada | Sterling Financial Accounting Services
