Calgary-area entrepreneur Denny Brian has been starting and building businesses since he was 13.
His latest venture, Drivee, ties one of his hobbies – cars – to the online world through a b2b automotive care and repair marketplace portal.
Brian said they work similarly to Home Stars, where they work with a list of curated automotive service professionals to ensure that consumers can get fast, friendly and affordable help on their vehicles.
“We verify and vet the businesses and then what we do is we essentially aim to reduce the risk for customers when trying to find an automotive service,” he said.
“We try to weed out the bad companies.”
Brian said at Drivee, an app-based platform, they’ll take the time to look into the company backgrounds, ensuring proper licensing, along with having the right insurance and liability coverage.
He said that everyone runs into companies that seem great at first but turn out to be not-so-great, so they have a transactional review system. Once a deal is done, people can leave a review. It’s different from sites like Google or Facebook where anyone can leave a good or bad review.
“One of the benefits of that obviously is it prevents customers that weren’t actually customers from leaving negative reviews or competing businesses from leaving negative reviews, but it also prevents business owners, or friends of business owners leaving positive reviews for you,” Brian said.
Brian said a lot of folks who sign up are connected to a variety of potential dealers they may not have been exposed to in the past. He’s had business clients tell him people have come into their locations because they found them on Drivee.
“It’s kind of like Google in the sense where you can find the businesses,” he said.
“But with us, you know that they’ve been verified, vetted. You know, we’ve done our due diligence on them to ensure that the customers have a reduced risk down the road.”
Small business versus tech business
Right now, Brian is working on retooling a 1999 Acura Integra. He’s converting it to all-wheel-drive and adding a supercharger to it. He’s documenting it on video and sharing it with the public. He also runs social media channels that are car-based, and they host interviews and have events.
After starting a drywall company at 18 (after doing it since he was 13), he launched a taxi company in Airdrie that he eventually sold as well. He’s also had a successful landscaping company and done outdoor marketing on garbage cans.
So, with a wealth of on-the-job experience being in small business, what’s he getting from the Alberta Catalyzer – Velocity program?
“Small business versus tech business, I just want to say right away, they’re very different things,” Brian said.
“At its core, there’s a lot of similarities but once you really kind of zoom out and look at the landscape of things, it’s vastly different.”
With small businesses, you have a service, you market the service, build a reputation in your local community and you go about your daily work.
“With software… we have the capacity to go global because what we’re doing at Drivee, for example, definitely has the capacity to go global long term. It’s just operating at a very different level,” Brian said.
“I found that Velocity has made me question things that I otherwise would not have questioned because I was coming from that small business mentality of working in a small geographical area.”
They’ve had success launching Drivee in Calgary and Airdrie, validating the model and tweaking things along the way. Now it’s time to branch out, Brian said. They have generated interest in Edmonton, in BC’s lower mainland and in Halifax.
“From here, it’s kind of building the version three where we add the extra features and we kind of build the platform to what we actually want the platform to be,” he said.
They are looking at having a web-driven presence to go along with the app soon.
- Join Alberta Catalyzer to fast-track your startup with know-how and expert guidance. Alberta Catalyzer offers merit-based, pre-accelerator programs for early-stage tech entrepreneurs in Alberta at no cost. These programs are developed and delivered by Platform Calgary and Edmonton Unlimited, with support from partners and organizations across the Alberta Innovation Network. They are made possible by the generous support of the Alberta Scaleup and Growth Accelerator Program, run by a consortium led by Alberta Innovates. The consortium includes the Government of Alberta, Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan), The City of Edmonton through Edmonton Unlimited, and the City of Calgary’s Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund allocated $35 million over three years to retain business accelerators. It’s part of the Alberta government’s goal to help create 20,000 jobs and increase technology firm revenue to $5 billion by 2030.
