Distributor has 'slippery' solution.

Slip-and-fall accidents can be a potentially dangerous and litigious experience.

A North Bay businessman has developed a spray-on-and-buff treatment for tile floors to eliminate those incidents.

Despite workplace safety being of paramount concern to most businesses, Brian Malcolm, president of Non-Slip Tile Solutions, has been nearly floored with the great strides his venture has taken.

Established in October 2003, the small North Bay company can count nine distributors of their slip-resistant product across Canada including outlets in Sudbury, Muskoka, Barrie, Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary, and by mid-February of this year had 23 more prospective distributors waiting in the wings.

"It's really taken off," says Malcolm.

He and his three-person staff were tirelessly working six, and sometimes seven, days a week. They also spent a lot of time hosting weekend training sessions for incoming groups from Vancouver, Sudbury, London and western Quebec.

Well-known locally as part of a stock car racing family, Malcolm ran a North Bay auto repair business for 25 years before selling it.

While scouting for other opportunities in Florida two years ago, he met a businessman who held the American rights to a biodegradable floor treatment product.

Some further investigation led to another meeting with the Arizona makers of a successful anti-slip solution called Wonder Step.

"I came back to Canada and saw a real need for this because nobody was doing it," says Malcolm.

He began polling some North Bay businesses to judge the product's interest. Very few said no.

"I'd never seen it done in Canada, treating ceramic floors to reduce slip and falls."

He eventually purchased the product rights for Canada.

Malcolm felt the Florida product was a good basic pretreatment for hard mineral surface floors and decided to add the Wonder Step product as a sealer and slip-resistant enhancement.

"We decided to combine both of them to do the process."

With the blessing of both manufacturers, Malcolm also came up with a seven-step procedure to apply the treatment.

Together with business manager Dan George, corporate sales head Tom Barber, and Rob Castellan, head of business development, Malcolm is focused on selling hundreds of distributorships and promoting floor safety.

The company is concentrating primarily on the commercial and health-care sectors but the solution has residential applications for bathroom floors and tubs as well.

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Their testimonials and clients in North Bay include Tim Hortons, Swiss Chalet and the Northgate Square Mall. The solution works best on hard mineral tile surfaces, including ceramic, porcelain, terrazzo and cement, and is guaranteed to last four years.

"But once you treat a tile floor, it'll never go back to its slippery state."

Once applied, says Malcolm, the pre-treatment solution is microscopically absorbed into the tile since all tile is porous. The application of the Wonder Step solution seals the floor, making it slip-resistant, creating what he calls "microscopic gcrystaline structures" that intensify with water.

A slip metre device is dragged across the floor or walkway to measure the static coeffiecient of friction.

"We record the reading before and after we do the job."

In getting the word out to janitorial companies, he couriers out various tile samples with their promotional material, asking prospective clients to test out their product. Malcolm expects to sell between 50 and 100 distributorships this year, generating a combined projected sales and corporate contracts of between $500,000 and $1 million.

Malcolm says the $20,000 distributorship package, which includes a North Bay training session, is designed to be a turn-key business.

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By IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business