If you’re like me you prefer the family car to be clean, especially in the good old summertime when you head out on one of those road trips that Canadians love to take when the kids are off school, and the snow is off the pavement.
To Lori Brown and Harold Smith, that lure of the open road has turned into a nice cottage industry with great prospects for expansion.
Lori and Harold operate CrossboneZ Detailing from their home on historic Elma Street West. They started the business after both being laid off in the middle of the last economic downturn.
Harold had been a truck driver for 25 years and Lori was about a year into a new career in the construction industry.
“It was early 2016 and we wanted to do something other than go back into the system,” Lori recalled. “We were looking for something new and different, where we could stand out by providing a new kind of service.”
Their first idea was to start detailing motorcycles, a need they had identified because they were motorcyclists themselves. For those not familiar with the term, ‘detailing’ means cleaning a vehicle so thoroughly it looks like new.
Their unique sales proposition would be that, rather than having the customer drop the bike off, they would go clean it in their driveway and even collect the water they used in order to protect the environment. What motorcycle enthusiast could turn down an offer like that?
But as luck would have it, their first customer turned out to be a lady with a van, not guy with a bike.
“She’s still our customer,” Lori said. “We detail that van every spring.”
More to the point, she was a hockey mom who, within a couple of weeks, spread the word across social media about what a great job this new outfit called Crossbonez.ca had done on her vehicle.
After that, as the saying goes, came the deluge.
Lori sat up until 3:00 or 4:00 o’clock that night answering more than 120 requests for quotes.
Next in line were the heavy equipment dealers. They got a call from a man at Iron Edge Equipment who wanted to clean up his used excavators, trenchers motor graders and other heavy construction equipment before he put them up for rent or sale.
“Having the reputation of always providing a spotlessly clean and sanitized workspace for heavy equipment operators was something of great value for them,” Lori said.
The name has been a big part of the story.
“We were going to call it Crossbones,” Lori said. “But my son Jack suggested changing the ‘s’ to a ‘Z’ to make it unique. Now, the ‘Z’ has become our signature trademark. For example, we thank our customers for inviting us over the style their rideZ.
“[Detailing] is more than just cleaning. It’s restoring a vehicle, so it looks and even smells like new.”
