A local business has received a sizable grant to support its continued growth.
Parker Equipment, or Parker Construction, is a heavy earthworks and contracting company that works primarily in the mining industry. The company was founded by co-owners Al Bussiere and Bobby Potvin in 2016 and currently employs about 20 staff.
The company recently received $400,000 from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC). It accounts for about 20 per cent of a $2 million business expansion. The funding will partially cover the cost of several new pieces of equipment for their fleet, and the remaining balance will go toward building a new maintenance facility for the machines, as well as hiring more staff.
“Our mandate is to create between five and eight jobs, which we’ve already created within our approvals for the NOHFC and will probably be creating another three to four jobs next year once the shop is complete. The help of the NOHFC is kind of making a long-term dream come to fruition,” says Bussiere.
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“We need a mechanic shop in order to do our service and our maintenance and run a proper business. Right now, I do all the estimating out of my house or my truck and on the laptop, so we’re building a separate administration building which we have to fund ourselves,” he says.
“It’s a growing field, and we’re growing. I’m not too sure what the future brings but we definitely want a facility that’s going to be assisting us in potentially growing a bit.”
The goal is to hire five operators, and likely a shop mechanic.
Eventually, they hope to buy a service truck and hire a full-time estimator, a project manager, and maybe a business manager. While creating jobs is certainly one of their main goals, Bussiere says that finding experienced workers to fill those roles has proven difficult.
“We need to cater to the growing mining industry. Mining is so big in this community and there’s just not enough people. I could take on more work, but we just can’t find the people, so I’d rather stay a certain size, grow slow, and do quality work because that’s what we strive toward,” Bussiere says.
“We like to hire people who come with experience, but those days are kind of gone. The industry we work in is a fast-paced environment and we want skilled operators to come on board with us, and if they don’t have skills we take the time with everybody, even if you have 20 years of experience, to run you through how we operate and what our expectations are as a company, our health and safety policy, how we operate, the environmental policies, you name it,” he says.
In the past year, Bussiere says the business has doubled in size, which is "fantastic".
"We’re taking all the risk, we’re hiring good people and offering a very good wage, good overtime, good group benefits, we have a pension plan as well which we’re working on now. We’re a small company, and we don’t want to be a big company, so baby steps, right? It’s not easy owning and running a business these days,” Bussiere says.
