Proudly Canadian Owned and Operated

We’re a solutions-based company, with over three decades of experience in the automotive equipment business.
In that time, we’ve grown from a local sales and service business of commercial and hobby lifts to Canada’s largest lift and equipment dealer.

Our beginning is similar to many start-ups. A dream, ambition, a home office, and a garage as a warehouse. Babco Sales Ltd was incorporated in February 1993 and was the BC distributor for Hofmann Balancing Techniques wheel service equipment along with Western Lifts. Not long after, Bruce met Jeff Kritzer, the sales and marketing manager for BendPak, and we started selling BendPak benders and ProLift lifts, which later came under one brand, BendPak.

With a lot of luck and blind ambition, we set out to gain our piece of the automotive equipment business. Along the way a partnership was formed between two old neighbourhood friends Bruce Buckborough and Garth Anderson.

The path to our success started with Hofmann, which had contracts with many national accounts, with Babco providing sales and services in BC. After a lot of cold calling, it became evident that for growth to happen, we needed to be different than the competition. Most competitors were like Babco, small local companies that would stock very little and order as needed.

Jeff gave us the extra push we needed, “we know the market in Canada is small, it will never amount to much, but every lift counts”. This confirmed we needed to be more than a local equipment vender if our numbers would mean something to BendPak.

BendPak who had been manufacturing benders and lifts since 1965 in California, had little market share in Canada. We saw that there was a large price break between single orders and truckloads. With encouragement from Jeff, we started to mail flyers to every commercial shop in BC. With great pricing, we managed to sell two truckloads of lifts. These were exciting times!

As we grew, we started stocking a few lifts, the flyers grew to small catalogs, and we expanded our mailing area further across Canada. The internet was just starting to take off and babco.ca was born. Hofmann was sold to Snap-On, Babco sold our BC Hofmann rights and we started selling BendPak’s new line of wheel service equipment, Ranger.

With a lot of trial and error, persistence, and a willingness to adapt, our presence grew across Canada. Babco added more cities and provinces to the mailing list and the growth of the internet played a large part.

In mid 90’s a new category was created which would change the lift business. Hobby lifts, started to be come popular. Jeff saw that the hobby lift market would be huge, possibly larger than the commercial lift market. BendPak created the HD-9 series of 4-posts for the hobby market, modeled after the commercial HD-14. BendPak would become the market leader in hobby lifts by ALI audit numbers and Babco grew with them. In 2012 the Dannmar lifts were added. In 2019 we added Peak lifts and Bron parking lifts.

In 2009, we had our first sale of thirteen parking lifts to a BMW dealership. In 2010 we started two parking projects. The first was a Mini dealership that need to get vehicles lowered 10’ to the showroom. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the birth of the SubTerra. The second was a dealership where we installed eighteen triple stackers in a 5,000 sq foot warehouse adjacent to the dealership. Parking lifts have played a pivotal role in our growth, and our product range has grown from a simple double-stacker to more complex parking systems and the babcopark.ca website.

Today, Babco is Canada’s largest equipment dealer selling coast to coast. We offer a wide range of equipment for hobby, commercial, heavy duty, and parking. Our brands include BendPak, Auto Stacker, MaxJax, QuickJack, Chicago Pneumatic, Peak, Bron and Omer. We have over 30 team members, sales offices and warehouses located in Surrey BC and Mississauga ON, and company owned service centres in Surrey, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Mississauga.

Our path over the last 30+ years has been challenging and rewarding, and we are proud of our achievements. Looking ahead, what drives us is to make Babco a company that our customers, suppliers and team members think of as a great company to be involved with.