Scale Is The Name Of John Evans’ Game

Mario Toneguzzi

John Evans, Founder and CEO of Calgary-based EverLine Coatings and Services, a parking lot line striping and pavement maintenance brand, is changing the game in an entire industry.

Scale is the name of his game and in recent years the company has seen burgeoning growth through its franchise model with locations now across North America and plans to keep growing at a significant pace.

In this interview, Evans talks about:

  • How the business has grown;
  • Plans for the future; and
  • Why Calgary is a good environment for business.

Enjoy,
Mark

John Evans, Founder and CEO of Calgary-based EverLine Coatings and Services, a parking lot line striping and pavement maintenance brand, is changing the game in an entire industry.

Scale is the name of his game and in recent years the company has seen burgeoning growth through its franchise model with locations now across North America and plans to keep growing at a significant pace.

EverLine Coatings started in 2012 and after five years it began to franchise the concept.

Today, it has about 77 franchisees across North America - 20 in Canada and the rest in the United States.

“Every building out there has a parking lot and there’s work that needs to be done in the parking lot to maintain the asset,” says Evans.

“We’re a one-stop shop for our clients to get everything done in a parking lot.”

Evans is participating on April 12 at the Business Transitions Forum in Calgary on a panel discussion about growth strategies that provide the greatest return on investment.

“As we launched into the United States last year, I needed to get some growth capital. I wasn’t really interested in selling half my company off. I needed the capital to execute on the opportunity that I had there for us,” says Evans.

Evans’ entire life has been surrounded by franchising. His parents were multi-unit owners – he owned and operated one of the highest performing student painting franchises while in University – and now he is building a system that is made for franchisees – by franchisees.

In 2015, he won the prestigious Grand Prize award for the IFA’s NextGen in Franchising competition. In 2020 he was invited back to participate in the “All-Stars” program.  In November 2019, he appeared on CBC's Dragons' Den and successfully pitched by getting a deal with the Dragons - since then EverLine has been expanding fast across Canada and now the United States.

“We expect to get to about 350 franchisees in the United States. That’s where the bulk of our growth is. We had remarkable growth last year - we grew from zero franchisees in the United States launching in March 2022 and we ended up with 51 all the way up to the end of that year,” says Evans.

“Our corporate team, it was just the three of us handling Canada and then our corporate team grew up to about 15 people all within nine months. We’ve really struck a chord in the American market.”

Evans attributes the growth to being a business owner in Calgary.

“The biggest thing is I’m firm believer that if you can prove it in Calgary in a rough economic environment or a roller coaster economic environment it will sustain anything. Calgary is the fire in which we were forged because for myself as a standalone business owner, we had to develop all sorts of different methods of how we do business in order to survive that environment,” he says.



BACK