On January 11, Ridge Powersports and Marine (formerly Budget Powersports and Marine) opened here in Tumbler Ridge across from the Chevron in the old Shell building.
The new business is a passion project for Chris Homister and wife Keisha. “We’ve actually been looking at this building for many, many years. Since back when it was the Shell gas station. But things didn’t work out. It was either my home life wasn’t stable, or the financial situation or we just weren’t ready to get this thing off the ground yet.”
But the time was right for Homister to take his plan forward. “We have a lot of family members that are in the maintenance and mechanical industry. And they’ve kind of been teaching us as we go. And for the last ten years, my wife and I have been working on trying to come up with contacts for this industry and how we can, how we can bring that kind of product here to the customers here where we’re not gouging.
“Tumbler hasn’t had anything like this before,” says Homister. “We’ve got tons of restaurants and other stuff. People will go fishing and go out sledding and do all that kind of stuff. We have the perfect area for outdoor adventures, but we have nobody here to help maintain it.”
The new business meets a need that Homister himself felt keenly. “If my sled broke down or something like that, I would go to Grand Prairie or Dawson Creek and spend astronomical amount of money to keep my machines up and running. Jet boats nowadays are $100,000 for jet boat. To maintain it, you’re looking at a couple hundred dollars each time it comes out, right? Guys spend a lot of money on their toys. They want to make sure that they have a good service and Tumbler is just been beat up over the years. Everybody comes in, they ride our areas, they play in our backyard and then they leave. They don’t spend a lot of money here. There’s no real draw for them to stay here.
“We’ve worked with both hotels so if they break down, they can drop their machine off, we can fix it overnight. They can go to the hotel, have a bite to eat, go to the pub, have a drink or whatever they like to do. And then in the morning we’d have their machine ready to go back out and play. So then the money’s not leaving Tumbler. It’s staying in our local economy right?”
The shop specializes in small engine mechanics, but offers a diverse array of services and products, says Homister. “We fix everything from snowmobiles, side by sides, UTVs, all the way down to weed whackers chainsaws. We also do marine engines. That’s Mercury, Evinrude and jet boat engines: 350s to three strokers to bigger size engines, but they have to be a marine-based engine. We can’t bring in a vehicle or car and work on their engines. It strictly has to be marine. We also offer professional grade automotive detailing and that consists of all our commercial grade detailing products. We also offer deodorizing for cars, trucks, all that kind of stuff. If you have a bad smell in your vehicle, and can’t get it out, that’s where we come in. Carpet shampooing, all that kind of stuff for automotive. We also offer cleaning and restoring plastics for snowmobiles, quads, boats, vinyls. So a little bit of variety. We have a variety of snowmobile apparel, safety gear for the avalanche seasons and for keep yourself warm. And we have tons of oil. We are an Amsoil dealer. The next closest one I believe was Dawson Creek. We also have competitive prices for out of town products. We also have a small retail store where we offer parts services and we have a detailed cutter or vinyl cutter. We can offer some basic stickers. If you come up with an idea that you’d like to see, we can make them up for you.”
The trick now is to start to capture those people coming in on the Boundary, heading out to the Core Lodge, then heading back out to Grande Prairie. But, says Homister, they have plans. Keisha builds signs, he says, and once they get the storefront all set up, they are going to go put signs out at the trailheads. “We have a pickup and delivery service, if a sled breaks down,” he says. “We’ll have our phone number and everything on the signs. We’re open 24/7, and we don’t charge for coming into the store and helping somebody out. The only time we have charges is for pickup and delivery.”
Homister is hoping to get a River Rat association going in Tumbler Ridge. “What they do is they raise funds to take care of boat launches riverbanks, waterways, garbage cleanups, building parks…that kind of stuff.”
If early indications are any judge, the place is destined to be a success. Council met on Monday night, says Homister, and the business got approval Tuesday morning. By Saturday, there were 12 machines in the shop. Homister says he hopes the business can support itself within the first year. Once that happens, he says, they are already starting to look at expanding, selling sleds and ATVs, though they would probably start with jet boats. “We work really closely with a few vendors in the Peace Country, they have a lot of stuff that we can buy from them, and bring here, so we are able to bring it to Tumbler and sell it at the same price. So the people that are looking to get into it can actually get into the can get into the sport fairly cheap with prices like you’d find in the city.”
But that’s for the future. For now, the trick is to let people know that the business exists and to prove they can do things just as well as places in the big city.
“It’s going to take a while for people to realize we’re here,” he says. “We get parts no slower than other places in the peace. I don’t want to sell parts and machines at astronomical prices and sell four or five. I’d rather have a million clients that come in and get their services done here and pay an average price, than say, have ten customers buy something for $10,000. I’m not looking for the big bucks. I’m actually just trying to provide a service to Tumbler that is unique. That you won’t find in other small towns, a place where we cater to the customer, not the machine.”
In order to get the shop up and running, there were some hurdles. One of the biggest was the area was not zoned for this type of business. “This building is the best location that we could have ever imagined getting. The district brought to our attention right away that the zoning was an issue and we ceased work right away. We followed all the rules and regulations that they wanted us to. And they did their process. We got through that and got our insurance and everything. And it’s been extremely busy since then. I don’t think we could have picked a better spot. This is probably the best location in the Peace Country. Everybody’s come for fuel. They see us open and they can jump in and grab oil, or safety products that they may be missing and from here, they can go straight out onto the mountain. Getting them off the highway is the easy part. They’ve got to come and get fuel. Then they might decide to grab food. That’s great. Let’s see if we can add something else into the mix where they can keep them into the downtown core. Get a little bit more money into our economy and then if they need it.”
Homister says that his plan is to keep the business extremely competitive. “It always seems like anything you do in Tumbler Ridge always has it’s a markup. It has the ‘well, if you go to Grand Prairie or you go to Dawson Creek or like that you’re going to pay for fuel and all that kind of stuff’ markup. We’re not trying to do that.
Homister has been living in Tumbler Ridge for nearly 20 years. He graduated in town before going to Edmonton for college. He worked in the jet boat industry around Edmonton for a while, before moving back to Grand Prairie, then to Tumbler Ridge to work at the mines, spending his time playing in the mountains (and fixing his machines when they broke) on his days off.
“We’ve made a lot of really close friends and some colleagues in Grand Prairie and Edmonton. My wife [who runs the detailing side of the business] deals with Pro Detail out of Edmonton for all her needs and they have a lot of educational videos and courses that they put her through. For the marine aspect of it, we’ve been dealing with Redline Power Craft out of Grand Prairie, and they’re sending us to a bunch of courses and to get started with jet boats. We’re working pretty close with Trailblaz’n Power out of Dawson Creek for a lot of our stuff too, and hoping that we can build up on that aspect of it. We’re working on trying to lock down a mechanic that can work on those full time.
Homister says after two rounds of mine closures, the town is still primarily a mining town. “I just feel like we got all our eggs in one basket,” he says. “And if that basket falls apart, then we’re all gonna be sitting here again. If we can diversify and bring in the tourism … The Geopark does amazing work and we would like to help out with that as much as possible. And we’ll just keep working at it, and slowly build the town as best we possibly can until it’s exploding and we’re not relying on one specific industry.”
