Improving traditional ramps for loading snowmobiles onto pick-up trucks has resulted in an award for a North Bay businessman.
Dillon Guido, who owns Dillon Guido Recreational Products, is the winner of the IION Innovation Award of Excellence.
Guido is an avid snowmobiler but he got tired of constantly running into problems when loading his sled on his truck.
“I wanted something better,” Guido said.
Through DGRP Guido welded a ramp together and admits the first prototype was not a pretty sight.
However with some tinkering he made it better and developed his aluminum ramp.
The ramps weigh 90 pounds and are four feet wide and 10 feet long.
They also have five inch caster wheels underneath and that’s what makes loading or off-loading a sled easy.
Guido says the user simply drives the sled up the ramp, then using a cantilever system, the back end is easily picked up because all the weight is forward and everything gets rolled onto the truck thanks to the ramp’s wheels.
From the time he thought of making a better ramp to the point of the finished product, Guido said it took about a year.
2017 was the first year of sales and Guido says he sold 350 ramps in six months.
He talked to IION about his ramp, and the agency liked what it saw.
It gave him some money to market the product to a wider audience and Guido made videos for social media.
He says his videos easily get hundreds of thousands of views.
IION helped expose Guido’s ramp to a larger market and he now has plans to start marketing the product to the United States, Sweden and Finland.
Although the ramps are intended for snowmobiles, Guido says the public can also use them to load their ATVs onto a truck bed and lawnmowers.
