My name is Jonathan Wood. I am a Canadian Red Seal Endorsed automotive service technician turned entrepreneur. I live in Calgary, Alberta with my wife Sasha, and daughter Ruby. I have over a decade of experience in the auto repair business.
I guess I started my journey, as most of us do, on the driveway. On my parents driveway to be exact. I bought my first car when I was 17, a beautiful 1993 Saturn SL2. It had leather seats, a cd player, and those seatbelts that put themselves on automatically, while trying to kill you. Being 17, I didn’t have much money, so me and the old man spent a month getting it put back together to get it saftied and plated. We got it road ready, passing it’s safety and I was ready to hit the road.
7 days later, I got into my first car accident.
It took a couple more months to put it back together, again but this is what got me hooked on the auto repair business. After the Saturn I got hooked on Volkswagen’s. I bought a Golf, followed by a GTI VR6, followed by an older Golf, the older Golf got the VR6 put into it. My wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, likes to make fun that I took two crappy cars and made one crappy car out of it. You get the picture.
I started my apprenticeship through a GM dealer in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Changing oil and organizing tires and trying to work with the real mechanics in the shop as much as I could. I quickly progressed through the GM Automotive Service Excellence Program, graduating top of my class. Went on to score in the 90s on my Red Seal exam and could finally start my career as a licensed automotive service technician.
Soon after becoming licensed I heard about opportunities for trades people in booming Alberta. I sent a couple emails out and got offered a job, paying twice as much, in Calgary. So my wife, she was my wife now at this time, and I packed up the apartment and headed west. Loving our new life in the prairies, we bought a house and in 2017 had our first child, a beautiful little red haired girl named Ruby.
It was the winter of 2017/2018 and Sasha was just coming to the end of her maternity leave. Anyone in the auto repair business knows that the start of the year is our “slow season”. Jobs are few and far between and it gets quite boring sitting around the shop. I’ve come to enjoy slow season, as i’ve learned to be prepared for it financially. You can take off early, much less stress at work and just generally able to take a mental health break.
With the maternity leave payments not quite keeping us as well off as we would typically be, I decided to head back to the driveway and find some ways to make a little extra cash. So i put an ad up online asking if anybody would like a mechanic that came to them and did repairs on the spot. I got a couple of hits and managed to pay off a couple bills and get some extra spending cash, but it was then I noticed a number of people just wanting quotes on jobs that were far too big to be done on the driveway.
I was very friendly with the people getting in touch with me. I let them know that the work they were trying to get done would best be left to a shop that could handle such a big task. It was in an email conversation with one person that I realized how inconvenient it was to actually get a quote for auto repair without making 10 phone calls and explaining your same problem to 20 different people. It was then I decided to create the Mechanic Matcher app.
I got to work putting the app together, having done a little bit of coding in high school, and have come up with, what I think is an elegant solution to a problem many people are facing. I feel this app has only benefits, allowing shops to reach new customers and customers to conveniently know what they’re expecting to pay for the services they need.
I am hoping that one day the Mechanic Matcher service will be the first place Canadian drivers goto when they’re in need of auto repair. I thank you for taking the time to learn a little about me an where the idea came from. Also hope you enjoy the app and all the time and money savings it can bring you.