Commercial & Industrial Equipment Repair
The industry — Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment (except automotive and electronic) repair and maintenance
Base industry report for 811310 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 7,105
- Under 10 employeesA
- 80%
- Establishments · USA
- 22,433
- Employment · USA
- 209,190
- Payroll · USA
- $14.6B
Of 7,105 Canadian establishments with employees, 80% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Execution decidesThe hurdles here are ones a better operator clears. That is not a promise of success — it is the absence of a structural reason you cannot win.
Find something that compounds. Entry is achievable and so is the first customer; what is missing is a reason the next entrant cannot repeat it as easily as you did.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 3
The binding constraint — defensibility
The classic overlooked business: recurring, essential, and priced on response time. Its weakness is that the value sits in individual technicians who can leave and take the accounts, and manufacturers increasingly restrict diagnostic software and parts to authorised servicers — a right-to-repair fight the independent has not yet won. A service business that cannot get parts is a labour broker.
The product is how fast a technician arrives when a machine stops, which makes distance the whole business. Sized by the response radius.
Handle — Finning's product support line. Finning reports product support separately from equipment sales, which is rare and exactly the split this industry turns on. It shows what the service half of a dealership is worth when it is attached to the machine population it serves. An independent shop is competing for that revenue without the machine population, the parts network or the warranty relationship — which is the whole of the defensibility argument in one comparison.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finning InternationalTSX: FTTA | $5.9B | — | FY2025 product support revenue (parts and service), 8% above 2024 |
| Toromont IndustriesTSX: TIHC | not disclosed | — | Caterpillar dealer for central and eastern Canada with its own product support line; its figures were not opened for this record. |
| WajaxTSX: WJXC | not disclosed | — | Multi-line Canadian industrial distributor and servicer; not researched for this record. |
| The independent single-shop majorityA | not disclosed | — | 4,334 of 7,105 Canadian establishments employ one to four people, and none employ 500 or more. No revenue is published for any of them. |
Evidence
Evidence. Finning's FY2025 figures were read in the company's own Q4 and annual 2025 earnings release of 10 February 2026 [A] — the revenue-by-line-of-business table, not the headline bullets. This matters: a search summary of the same release reported product support revenue as $1.5B, which is the fourth-quarter figure; the twelve-month figure is $5,934M, and new equipment likewise is $3,863M for the year against $1,000M in the quarter. The percentages here are arithmetic on the annual column. Finning is a Caterpillar dealer, so its product support line measures dealer-attached service, which is the thing an independent competes with and NOT a measure of the independent trade itself — no revenue series for independent industrial repair shops was found. Toromont and Wajax are named without figures because their filings were not opened. Establishment counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US County Business Patterns (2022) [A]. The cut — that value walks out with the technician and that parts access is granted rather than bought — is analyst judgment: UNVERIFIED.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Trade association for equipment distributors and their service departments; lobbies in Washington and Ottawa (Parliament Hill Day, Nov 2026). No member count stated.
Not-for-profit for maintenance and asset-management professionals, i.e. the plant-side customers of industrial repair shops. Cites 400 CAMP certifications issued; no member count stated.
Independent board where operators and mechanics discuss repairs by machine type; blocked automated access (403). Search results show the live site and its sections.
Largest construction-equipment show in North America, every three years; next edition 13-17 Mar 2029, Las Vegas, per its homepage.
There is no association for independent repair shops as such; dealers talk at AED and the customers at PEMAC, while technicians talk on machine-specific forums. MRO Magazine (Canadian maintenance trade title) was unreachable on two attempts and is not listed.