Dryden refurbisher sets sights on Sudbury.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: MINING - Resource Equipment Sales - Company overview

Bob Ray's first attempt to break into the Sudbury mining service market in the early 1990s was a tough slog.

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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.

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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...