YME Welding Enterprise

YME Welding Enterprise is named after an expression associated with the company’s director, Yvan Brochu: “After countless referrals and requests from clients, Yvan often questioned ‘Why me?’, which eventually became his nickname. Hence the company name, YME Welding!” 

According to YME Welding Enterprise’s website, the company “offers clients a safe, trustworthy, high quality and affordable welding service. YME Welding offers services in welding, fabrication, repairs, ornamental railings and fences, and caters to both commercial and residential projects within multiple industries including forestry, mining, pipeline, and construction.” Additional services include stainless steel staircases and fire pits, and performing safety checks and modifications to trailers in accordance with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation’s Safe, Productive and Infrastructure-Friendly (SPIF) standards. The company opened in 2013 and has been growing steadily. In August 2021, YME Enterprises moved from a small 3,000 square foot shop to their current 10,000 square foot location.

Tuyet Dao is the Administrative Manager at YME Welding Enterprise. Dao initially looked to Digital TBay to gain professional feedback on the company’s existing website. Dao met with squad member Dylan Uurainen. Going into their meeting, Dao was realistic about the importance of having an online presence and of keeping up-to-date with the digital world. “I appreciate any amount of input and assistance from an expert. They give you their point of view and their feedback, and you feel more confident. Technology is improving every day, and if you don’t follow it, you stay back. So you have to go with the trends,” says Dao. 

“Because of the economic situation, we cannot afford to hire a web designer. We had a website, but wanted to update it”, explains Dao. “I really appreciated [Uurainen’s] expertise. I sent him the website in advance, he had a look before we met, then in the meeting he said that everything was good. He provided insight and feedback on some small changes to improve it—mostly removing repetition.” These small tips and Uurainen’s shared knowledge were valuable reinforcement for Dao, and boosted confidence that the company’s website was on the right track. 

Uurainen provided a few suggestions that Dao is working to incoporate. “We are not a retail sale business, so we are not really looking at increasing online sales,” Dao explains. “We are interested in posting what we do, to spread the word around to get more customers.” Dao is now working on posting before-and-after photos of the company’s services. “We learned that we can offer people expertise and professional input on what they can do for themselves. We can show them how to do things. And what they can’t, they can bring to us,” Dao says. 

Dao recommends Digital TBay’s free mentoring services to business owners of all kinds. “Use whatever you can get, especially during the pandemic. Digital marketing is a very good tool for any small business. Especially in Thunder Bay, where we are catering to a large amount of small business owners and entrepreneurs. [Digital TBay’s mentoring program] is a very good resource for all small business owners, whether you can use it to help with your digital marketing, catering to retail sales, or any small business at all—you can always use it to assist you in your website building, your marketing, the digital strategy to help improve your business.”