Saanich, B.C. -- Bill Hatswell, the Australian panel beater who came to Canada and built Craftsman Collision into one of Western Canada’s largest MSO's, has died
Hatswell started his collision career in Adelaide in the 1960s, building a successful bodyshop by the end of the decade. In 1970, however, his career was driven off-course by an invitation to a ski trip to the Canadian Rockies.
“I tried [skiing] and fell in love with it," he told Collision Repair in a 2005 profile. "It became an absolute passion. I told my wife I wanted to move to Canada and she thought I’d lost my marbles.”
He opened his first Craftsman location on Cambie Street in Vancouver in 1977. The shop was, in his words, “the epitome of the state of the industry in 1977. Filthy, totally unattractive, unfriendly and almost hostile.”
Hatswell decided to take a different approach. He cleaned it up, created a modern front-of-house, brought in courtesy cars and scaled quickly. The approach earned him a loyal customer base and, by 1981, the MSO opened two more locations.
Over the decades that followed, the brand continued to grow, expanding into Alberta and Saskatchewan, then into the United States, and even into China, where it opened a Suzhou location in 2012. Hatswell stayed involved in Craftsman even after stepping back from daily operations in the 2010s.
Today, Craftsman is the largest independent collision network in Western Canada, with more than forty locations west of Manitoba and a workforce of about six hundred.
While best known for his involvement in the collision industry, Hatswell also made waves in the real estate sector. In the 1980s, he launched Craftsman Ventures, a firm that invested in several developments in Whistler.
“I am saddened to hear of Bill’s passing," wrote Mike Rusch, executive vice-president of the Jim Pattison Group, in a social media post announcing Hatswell's passing. "A passionate entrepreneur and a self made man, I admired [his] hard work, straight-forward approach and the importance he put on loyal relationships."
