How Sagonaska started, and why the team is still small

Sagonaska Appliance Repair started in 2019 with one van and a fairly specific complaint. If an appliance broke in Belleville back then, you called someone, waited most of a week, and the technician who eventually turned up had often never opened that brand before. The quote moved. The part took another ten days. Plenty of people gave up and bought new.

We were not trying to build a company. We knew how to fix these machines properly and figured that ought to be enough.

The first year ran almost entirely on word of mouth around the East Hill and Old East Hill. Someone would call, we would come the next morning, fix it on that visit where the part allowed, and leave. No upselling, no padded labour hours, no vague talk about boards. Apparently that was unusual enough that people passed the number along.

Since then the team has grown, but not by much, and that is deliberate. We took on Quinte West, Trenton and the townships as demand pulled us outward, because half the crew lives out that way anyway. We know which buildings downtown have laundry rooms full of older Maytag machines, which streets out by Bayside went up with the same builder-grade range in every kitchen, and which LG fridges in the newer subdivisions have the ice maker problem everyone has already read about online.

The company is still small and the communication is still direct. If something goes wrong after a repair, and occasionally it does because appliances are complicated, you call the same number and reach the same people. No ticket number, no hold music telling you how much your call matters.

The name comes from Sagonaska, the older name for the Moira, the river that runs through the middle of this city and out into the Bay of Quinte. It seemed a better fit than anything with the word solutions in it.

The 90-day warranty on parts and labour was not a marketing idea. Early on a customer asked what happens if the repair fails next month. The honest answer was that we would come back and fix it, so we wrote that down and it has been on every invoice since.