Virden, Man. – Diversification has been an important strategy for Virden, Man.-based Safety Source and its sister company, Discovery Safety.
Safety Source focuses on retail safety equipment sales and safety training. Discovery Safety provides field services like medics and air trailers.
“The big thing for our company, anyone who had a good business plan kept their debts to a minimum and watched their payroll and tried to be as efficient as we can,” said Dale Lewis, owner.
“We also started diversifying into other industries. That’s one of the advantages we have in the safety world. We don’t just have to deal with oil and gas.”
That includes working with power utilities and agriculture.
Before the downturn, oil and gas was probably 85 per cent of their business. Now it’s about 70 per cent. They had also started to work on turnaround, which was a big boost for Discovery Safety. Industrial medics working on drilling rigs had curtailed sharply when drilling dropped off.
“Nobody could have foreseen what was going to happen in 2014. Things were going well for everybody. The industry seemed to have been going at a steady pace, then out of nowhere, look what happened with OPEC and throughout the world,” Lewis said.
“It was definitely tough on a lot of people.”
Since the last quarter of 2016, business has been fairly steady, doing lots of different things. “It’s been a good eight months, for sure. I wouldn’t say it was as good as 2014, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that busy, either. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race,” said Lewis.
Lewis put some of their day-rate people on salary so as to guarantee them a wage. “One thing I was pretty proud of is I didn’t have any actual layoffs. I stayed pretty whole, with my staff. Any cuts with staff were by their own accord, people leaving by attrition,” he said.
They had a large casual staff base, but as things slowed down, they had to find work elsewhere. But full-time people were kept.
Currently there are seven employees on the Safety Source side, including two in their Redvers store. There are six full-time staff and nine casual staff working with Discovery Safety.
It’s been a tough couple years in Redvers, but things are starting to rebound there, too.
Echoing statements made by nearly everyone Pipeline News had spoken to in Virden, Lewis said, “It’s tough to find people who will want to work in the industry. They don’t know what’s going to happen. The crash is pretty fresh. Until we see a good run here, it’s going to be tough for people to find staff, not just on our side, but the drilling side and trucking side.
To that end, he said, “We’re looking for more casual staff, possibly a couple more full-time people, but it has to be the right person.”
