Image: Contributed
Lance, Jesse and Jade Davidson at the 2017 Business Excellence Awards, in Kelowna.
Most of the time, when Lance Davidson sketches out his next design improvement, the engineers tell him it can’t be done.
Usually, of course, they’re eventually able make it happen, and Hybrid Elevator Incorporated’s machines get a little more efficient.
“Sometimes it’s better to not know the rules,” Davidson says with a smile.
In the six years since he first bought the Kelowna residential elevator company, Lance and his son Jade have grown the business from what was a two-man, boutique operation to one of the city’s most innovative businesses.
According to Jade, six years ago the company was building about five elevators a year.
Through constant design iterations, many that began as “napkin sketches” from Lance, Hybrid now has the ability to produce as many as 10 in one day.
Jade’s mother lives with multiple sclerosis, and years ago her mobility was beginning to become a challenge. The Davidsons were looking for a solution when they stumbled upon Hybrid’s residential elevators.
Before Lance and Jade took over, Hybrid was run by an engineer who Jade says had a great product, but little concern for sales or marketing.
“We came across this company, and we ended up buying it, because we just couldn’t find many products out there that we actually wanted to put in our house that we could see were either safe or aesthetically pleasing,” Jade explains.
“The product itself it quite different. It’s based on the same idea, the same system, but it’s really changed,” Jade says.
Today, he says, they’ve lowered the price by about $20,000, and redesigned it to take up only half as much space.
Jade explains the big innovation has been in the way they produce their elevators, designing their own components that serve multiple functions, rather than trying to build brackets and braces to force a bunch of parts from other manufacturers together.
This year, for example, Hybrid put out an entirely new generation of elevators that take advantage of that synergy, significantly reducing the cost and time it takes to put them together.
“We took our three most expensive parts to manufacture…and we’ve combined it into one part now, that does all three jobs,” Lance says.
On the factory floor, this philosophy allows them to keep all the parts they need in stock, so when an order comes in it’s just a matter of gathering together the components they need and shipping them to the job site, something Jade says they can do in as little as an hour.
That, says Jade, is a competitive edge he believes will allow Hybrid to continue its impressive expansion.
“We knew the market was fairly large, so it’s not inconceivable we could be $50 million in sales in the next four or five years,” Lance says.
He tells a story about a representative of their much larger competitor showing up at their shop to ask some questions.
Lance suspected he might be scoping them out with the intention of buying them out, so after a few minutes Lance asked the guy is he was interested in selling.
“He didn’t stay long after that,” Lance recalls with a chuckle.
On the one hand the comment was a pretty cheeky power play, but it was also rooted in Lance’s belief things will continue to go up from here.
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