By Kristen Lipscombe
For Maritime Car Wash Sales and Services Ltd co-owners Gordon “Gordie” Ryan and Grant Shaw, their business is all about a passion for working with people – and of course, cars.
The lifelong friends share a love for everything automotive-related, which have made them more than ideal business partners for a Nova Scotia-based company that over the past two decades has grown into the largest supplier and service operator for car washes across Atlantic Canada.
“We just really like cars,” Gordie, originally from Wellington, N.S., said with a chuckle of their shared joy for working within the vehicle industry.
“We’ve been business partners for over 20 years now,” Grant of Grandlake, N.S., and son of original owner Don Shaw, added of when he and his buddy first took over Maritime Car Wash, based in Elmsdale, N.S., in 2005.
“It’s almost like a marriage,” Grant said of his co-owner, who he’s hung out with since both attended Charles P. Allen High School in Bedford, N.S. The two also together worked at his father’s service station in Enfield, N.S. “Him and I have been together longer than my wife and I.”
“We came right out of school and went into business together,” Grant said. “And the rest is history.”
The two Maritime Car Wash Sales and Services Ltd co-owners share a bond that goes far beyond business, and that includes the values they live by both professionally and personally, most importantly their commitment to treating “people the way you want to be treated,” Gordie said, whether that’s family, friends, employees or clients.
Those values came to the co-owners innately, passed down from Don, who instilled that commitment to hard work in both of his proteges, with son Grant taking over the service station and Gordie taking on the car wash business until it finally came time for the original owner to retire. That’s when the guys decided to buy out Don’s car wash business and build something they know would make him proud.
“My father was very old school,” Grant said. “The customer is always right and service is No. 1.”
“Gordie and I both adopted the same attitude,” he said, and that’s why “we are the absolute best in our field.”
Maritime Car Wash, which Don started out of his garage in 1972, describes itself as “Atlantic Canada’s vehicle wash and equipment headquarters,” and has since moved from Gordie’s garage to its current location in East Hants Business Park, starting with a 4,800-square-foot facility acquired in 2014 that stocks a full supply of inventory and provides space for meeting with and training with clients.
“He was a real pioneer and he kind of brought car washes to Atlantic Canada at the time,” Grant said of his father. “We’ve been around for a long time… and it has certainly grown a lot.”
In fact, the business has since constructed a second building in the industrial park in order to keep up with demand. Their busy operation includes a fully-equipped travel fleet manned by skilled technicians who are on the road regularly to ensure customers are served “promptly and efficiently,” according to the Maritime Car Wash website. “From installation to upgrades, to renovations to servicing existing equipment, we do it all.”
The company supplies and services about 70 per cent of car washes across Atlantic Canada, Gordie explains, from many of the gas stations you see every day on the to Private run carwashes.
“We service and supply all commercial car wash equipment, from cars to trucks, to buses to transport trucks,” Gordie said.
Currently, Maritime Car Wash has nine staff members, with Grant and Gordie at the helm, five technicians travelling to service clients, another travelling technician specializing in chemical supplies, and Gordon’s wife Heather Ryan taking on the role of customer service representative.
“I think we treat our staff extremely fairly,” Gordie said. “We try to help them with what they require and every employee needs to be looked at differently because they all have different situations.”
“One of the things that we’re super proud of is our retention,” he said of employees and customers alike.
“As a team, there’s nothing more important than being honest to your clients,” Gordie said.
Maritime Car Wash works with several suppliers in order to provide products to its clients, from PDQ Manufacturing, Inc. and Belanger, Inc. for automatic wash equipment and companies such as Magikist; Ten Lives Company; and Standard Change-Makers, Inc.; for self-serve wash systems, to Magikist and Westmatic Clean & Green for truck washes and Excalibur Water Systems, Inc. and PurClean for water treatment systems. NCS Carwash Solutions provides most of the chemicals so the company can then supply car washes across the region with top-quality product.
Check out the Maritime Car Wash website for a full list of the company’s suppliers.
Maritime Car Wash even serves the dog wash industry – yep, that’s right – providing soap and conditioner to care for your furry best friends, with four locations still offering the unique services.
Grant and Gordie also attend annual trade shows, most recently the Convenience U CARWACS Show in Toronto this past March and The Car Wash Show in Nashville, Tenn., in May.
“This gives us a good chance to reach out to our corporate customers,” Gordie said.
One of the biggest changes in car washes has been the payment systems, he said, explaining that the move from coin-oriented to credit card and code systems through suppliers such as PDQ and Kesseltronics, “has really changed the game.”
Airlift Doors supplies top-notch Overhead Doors for car washes, with the latest trend to attract those behind the wheel into car washes being aesthetic lighting systems. Maritime Car Wash gets their lighting equipment from G&G Lighting, Gordie said. “It really has transformed the experience.”
Clearly, Grant, Gordon and company have found the right combination of quality suppliers and dedicated car wash clients to keep their business running smoothly and successfully.
And as for founder Don, “he tells us all the time that he’s very impressed with what we’ve done and how it’s grown,” son Grant said.
And he credits much of that to what both he and Gordon learned from his father.
“I’m very grateful for the work ethic that he instilled in both Gordie and I,” he said. “It’s proven to work very well for us and we’re growing every year, so we’re obviously doing something right.”
Both Grant and Gordon are passionate about interacting with those they work with, from their loyal employees to those the companies they supply and serve to ensure the best car washes across Atlantic Canada.
As Gordon said, “what it really comes down to is, it’s a people business.”