The family garage may be known more as the birthplace of rock bands, but Jarrid Juse wasn’t playing music, he was laying the foundation for what has become a successful business venture.
With an early passion for both all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and snowmobiles, Juse found himself servicing the machines of family and friends in the garage of his St. Albert home. His client base grew quickly and soon the family garage simply wasn’t big enough.
From those beginnings grew Absolute Power & Performance, which specializes in performance snowmobile and ATV parts and service.
“It’s a passion of mine, so to me, it doesn’t really feel like a job,” Juse said. “If you love what you do, it’s not really a job and you tend to excel at things like that.”
The business moved from the home garage to a two-bay business in Riel Park and will undergo further expansion in the next two years to an acreage property north of city limits.
“I’m finding here that every year we just get busier and busier and that’s definitely what I want,” he said. “As a business owner, you want to improve your sales and your business that way.”
The reason he said he thinks the business has had such a welcome reception is because it caters to the needs and desires of clients, while backing it up with knowledge and expertise.
“There’s not a lot of custom companies like myself that do this sort of thing, so to get into this market, being that it’s kind of a niche market, you have to cater to your customers,” he said.
He said this philosophy has brought him success across western Canada, with clients throughout Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
These are clients who invest between $10,000 and $40,000 into performance modifications and upgrades to their machines.
“I’ll take my customers who spend $10-15,000 … up to the mountains the first time and go on a trip with them and ride with them to make sure that everything’s working good for them,” he said. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen everywhere.”
He said he believes this personalized service separates him from the competition.
“I cater to my customers. It’s service after they’ve paid their money,” he said. “We’re like a family, you know, if my customer’s not happy, I’m not happy.”
There are typically four employees – Jarrid, his wife, Janeen, a full-time tech and a part-time student – totalling roughly 30 years experience in the high-performance industry. He also employs students with the Registered Apprenticeship Program.
Juse took small-engine training at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology but is self-taught in terms of the high-performance part of his business, as there are no programs available.
In the last six years since he became Absolute Power, the business landscape has changed, he said, to suit a more specialized approach.
“We’ve focused more on less,” he said. “We’ve taken what we’ve learned over the last few years and decided to focus on three major brands of snowmobiles and three major brands of ATVs instead of trying to service all of them, which has made us more experienced at the fewer models.”
Absolute Power & Performance has a sister company, Boost Wurx, which builds turbo kits for sleds and quads that are sold in-store.
If you know of a unique business, contact the St. Albert Gazette at [email protected].
