By IAN ROSS
Bob Ray’s first attempt to break into the Sudbury mining service market in the early 1990s was a tough slog.
Mineral prices were in the dumper and it was hard for an outsider to break into the chummy, tight-knit club of suppliers and miners.
“I thought I needed to be in the hub of activity in order to start the business in mining,” recalls Ray, now the president of Resource Equipment Sales (RES), then a fledging equipment supplier in North Bay.
“I found out it was exactly the opposite. There was an overabundance of service people in this area.”
So, he pulled up stakes and headed west and home to Dryden to start doing repairs and selling equipment out of his house in 1994.
Things were not going well in the mining industry with gold prices bottoming around $2.60 US per ounce. Many mines were closing, not opening.
“It was difficult and I had to branch into all kinds of things to stay alive,” says Ray, who started repairing hand-held drills, tugger hoists and accumulating whatever equipment he could find to buy, fix and sell.
He also began landing the Canadian distribution rights to various equipment makers of pneumatic drills, hydraulic rock-breakers, hoses, fittings and adapters.
As a Class A mechanic and technical service representative for other national suppliers, mining was what Ray had known for 30 years.
But once he began travelling beyond Sudbury and making sales calls out of province, it was much easier for an entrepreneur with a specialty to get his foot in the door.
Nobody was servicing the mining industry in northwestern Ontario or northern Manitoba.
“I had lot more success in these out of the way places.”
His small home-based shop north of Dryden would eventually expand into town with a welding and fabrication shop on Kennedy Road. Next year, he’ll expand again into a large warehouse and shop space.
These days, with the mining industry experiencing an unprecedented global boom, miners from all over come looking for him.
Today, RES is a 13-employee custom design and fabrication shop, selling new and used pieces of mining and milling equipment. It grosses between $4 million and $5 million in annual sales.
The company’s new and refurbished pieces of jumbo drillers, scoops and utility carriers are trucked or airlifted to mining camps in South America, Mexico, Russia, Dominican Republic and Africa.
Though some sales come through the Internet, it’s mainly from Ray’s hefty Rolodex of industry contacts. He searches North American mine sites and yards for used equipment, then hauls them back to the Dryden shop to rebuild.
RES also sends their mobile welding and maintenance crews all over Northern Ontario and into Western Canadian mines to maintain equipment and do training.
The company also acts as a distributor to companies like Oldenburg Cannon, a New Hampshire maker of underground mining utility trucks and hydraulic rock drills.
These days, Ray and RES are even making inroads back into Sudbury. In mid-September he was scouting locations to establish a parts and service branch, quoting prices to companies and arranging equipment field trials at local mines.
Although the company dabbles in some forestry work, serving the mining industry has always been their bread and butter.
While there’s a huge amount of exploration activity in the Dryden area, for now there’s few products to sell.
And being located more than 200 kilometres from the nearest mine headframe isn’t an issue when the company is shipping expensive machinery internationally. “It really doesn’t matter where you are,” says Ray.
He is also preparing to move his company into bigger digs next year.
A recently acquired 12,000-foot warehouse and office complex, complete with overhead cranes, near the Trans-Canada Highway will be the home for all their welding, fabrication and light machine work. Their existing facility on Kennedy Road will likely be set aside for their separate equipment rentals and contracting company.
