📍 Based in: Kelowna, British Columbia
🏢 CEO of: Pro Custom (PSC)
💰 Started with: $5,000 loan
📈 Scale: 7-figure diversified operation
🚗 Services: Custom truck builds, paint protection, aviation detailing
💪🏼 Expansion: Fitness coaching & structured meal prep brand
The British Columbia entrepreneur who built a detailing empire, cleaned $200 million planes, launched a meal prep company, and started a coaching business — all after getting sober and unlocking what he calls his greatest superpower.
By MADEINC Editorial | Blue Collar Made | Kelowna, British Columbia
The first thing you notice when you pull into Jer Smith's property in Kelowna is the lineup.
A Lamborghini Urus on 24-inch staggered wheels. A Rolls-Royce Cullinan — white with Dodger blue interior, shipped in from Montreal, one of the rarest specs on the road. A blacked-out F-450 built from the ground up at his own shop. A wake boat sitting on a private lift at the end of a dock that overlooks Okanagan Lake.
Most people would stop there. They'd take the photo, post the caption, and call it success.
Jer Smith will tell you that's exactly where most people get it wrong.
"I really don't think success is anything external," he says, sitting at the edge of that dock with a coffee in his hand, the lake stretching out behind him. "The cars, the money, the house — that's just a bonus. You have to become the person who can hold that lifestyle together."
At 34 years old, Jer Smith has made $5.5 million in a single year. He runs Prosmith Customs — a 15-year-old vehicle customization and detailing empire now operating in aviation. He launched Fit Fuel, a meal prep company already expanding across BC, Vancouver Island, and Alberta after just four months. He is building a hydrogen-infused water company. And he runs a growing coaching business helping men transform their bodies, their mindsets, and their businesses.
He did almost all of it, he will tell you plainly, at about 50 percent of his capacity.
The other 50 percent unlocked the day he got sober.
Jer Smith grew up in British Columbia watching his father run a large-scale trucking company. From the time he was old enough to hold a broom, he was in the shop — sweeping floors, working on cars, absorbing the one lesson his father repeated like a mantra.
"Do it right the first time or don't do it at all."
He was seven years old when he first heard it. He is 34 now and still hears it every time he starts something new.
His obsession with vehicles started before he had a licence to drive one. By the time he was a teenager he had bought and flipped close to ten cars — purchasing them cheap, cleaning them up, shining them until they looked like something entirely different, and selling them on. His father taught him the first one. After that he needed no convincing.
When he was 17 his father leased him a five-ton box truck loaded with Samsung products — flat screens, fridges, freezers — and sent him on delivery routes through the BC interior. Merritt. Kelowna. Vernon. Salmon Arm. Kamloops. Loop and repeat.
Then the recession hit in 2008. His father sold the trucking company. And Jer Smith, with no plan and nothing but a lifetime of working on vehicles and an obsession with making things look immaculate, started Prosmith Customs.
His first job was a greasy old dump truck. He made $300 cash.
"I felt accomplished," he says. "I did that. I completed it. I got that money in my hand and I was like — this is something I can grow and scale."
The early years of Prosmith were mobile. A 2015 F-350 — red, which he hated, but he knew it would catch attention — with a Lamborghini-wrapped detailing trailer hooked behind it. He would pull up to a client's house and the setup alone sold the job.
"People eat with their eyes," he says. "Image is everything. If you pull up in a rusty van with flat tires, what kind of job do they think you're going to do on their Bentley?"
He was detailing Lamborghinis and Ferraris while operating out of a truck and trailer. But he saw the same problem repeat itself with every high-end client. They would come in for paint protection film and then have to drive across town for ceramic coating, then somewhere else for tint, then somewhere else for wheels. Four or five stops to complete one build.
The light bulb went on.
"I just thought — I'm going to create a one-stop shop. Everything you could possibly do to a vehicle, I offer it."
That became his dream shop. That became Prosmith Customs. Paint protection film. Ceramic coatings. Paint correction. Lift kits. Suspension. Custom wheels and tires. Window tint. Full truck builds from the ground up — big diesels, jacked up, deep dish wheels, everything paint matched. Built to stand out.
He builds four to six custom trucks per year now. They sell into Alberta or get exported to the United States.
And then, almost accidentally, he stumbled into an industry nobody expected him to enter.
Aviation is not a space that lets just anyone in. The liability is massive. The standards are unforgiving. The trust required to put someone's $200 million aircraft in the hands of a detailing crew is not easily earned.
Jer Smith earned it one plane at a time over several years, starting with small Cessnas at private airports in Langley, working his way up through bigger aircraft, building a reputation that travelled faster than he did.
The breakthrough came through a turbo beaver — an amphibious float plane he detailed for a client who happened to know a pilot at YVR. One introduction. One meeting. One contract.
"Once people saw the quality, it just blew up," he says.
There is a detail in this story that Jer tells with particular weight. At the time he was still drinking. Still partying. Operating, he estimates, at half capacity. He had tried to land bigger aviation contracts repeatedly and kept getting rejected. He couldn't understand why.
Then he got sober. Three or four months later, he went back to one of the companies that had turned him down and asked for one more meeting.
"Jason — my manager — looked at me after that meeting and he said, 'From when we last spoke to these guys five months ago to now, that was a completely different conversation. Your whole energy, you were looking him in the eyes, you were present.'"
An hour after that meeting the contract came through.
"The drugs and alcohol — people don't think about how much it affects you. The trust level and the energy you give off is what people pick up on. You get what you give."
Jer Smith got sober just over a year and a half ago after more than a decade of drinking and drug use that he describes without flinching — partying three to five days a week, surrounding himself with people who had no goals, operating his business with fog in his brain that he had become so accustomed to he had stopped noticing it was there.
The change came through a program with a coach out of Miami. And what happened next, he says, was nothing short of a complete unlocking.
"I thought — this is so good I have to teach it to the world."
He started waking up at 4:30 AM. Reading. Going to the gym. Setting the tone for the entire day in the first two to three hours before anyone else was awake. He did it every single day for a year straight.
"It felt like a whole other level of my brain was unlocked. Something I always wanted to do but never had the brain power for because it was clouded with drinking and partying and hanging out with people who had no goals."
He lost friends during the process. He is clear-eyed about this.
"Once I removed the alcohol and the drugs and the partying — what was their purpose in my life? I didn't even have an answer. We just weren't walking the same path anymore."
His philosophy on this is simple and he states it without apology. Life is a subtraction process. Remove what doesn't serve you. The addition takes care of itself.
"People always think it's about adding more," he says. "More money, more cars, more houses. But really it's about subtracting and removing the things that aren't going to push you in the direction of where you want to go."
Jer Smith's coaching business was born from what he experienced personally. He had unlocked something — a level of clarity, focus, and performance — that he had never known was available to him. And he became convinced that most men walking around had no idea what they were leaving on the table.
His program is not primarily a fitness program. Fitness is the entry point. The real work happens in the mind.
"Fitness is probably the smallest point of what I do. It is a massive cornerstone of personal development. But the whole mindset — the ability to know and believe in yourself that you can do whatever you put your mind to — that's the biggest thing."
He watches his coaching clients change. Their thoughts elevate. They make more money. They fix their relationships. They get closer to their kids.
His standard for the people he hires at Prosmith reflects the same philosophy. He looks for employees who take care of themselves. Who show up to the gym. Who respect themselves. His reasoning is direct and he doesn't soften it.
"How you do one thing is how you do everything."
His manager Jason started as a wash boy at seventeen, dropping a mitt into the gravel four or five times on his first day. Jer kept him anyway. He saw something — a spark, a willingness to learn. Seven years later Jason runs the shop. Last year Jer bought him a new blacked-out F-150 with a six-inch lift.
"I want to show him that I can make him a career with this. I want to see him buy a house. Your employees are your family."
The story of Prosmith Customs and everything that has grown from it is not really a story about vehicles. It is a story about what becomes possible when a person removes the things that are holding them back and builds themselves with the same standard they apply to everything else.
The lessons translate to any business in any industry.
Build the one-stop shop. Jer saw his clients making five trips to complete one job and asked why no one had fixed that. The most powerful businesses don't just do something well — they eliminate the friction everyone else has accepted as normal.
Delegate before you're ready. It took Jer 14 years to fully let go of the day-to-day operations of Prosmith. Once he did, he had the bandwidth to launch a coaching business, a meal prep company, and a water company simultaneously. You cannot build new things while you are chained to the old ones.
Motivation is not the answer. Discipline is. "If you base your life off of just being motivated you're going to fail indefinitely," he says. "Discipline is always going to keep going when motivation dies." Show up at 30 percent. The showing up is the practice.
The economy is your mind. When people told Jer that a tough economy would slow his businesses down, he pointed to the recession-proof nature of each one. People need clean cars. People need to eat. People need to hydrate. He builds businesses around things that do not stop.
Build yourself first. Every external result Jer has achieved — the cars, the property on the lake, the aviation contracts, the expanding businesses — he traces back to a single internal shift. The day he decided to remove what wasn't serving him and build the man before building the empire.
In two to three years, Jer Smith wants to be on a Caribbean island somewhere with a helicopter and a private jet, coaching clients from wherever he happens to be.
He is not in a rush. He has learned that the foundation matters more than the speed.
Fit Fuel is expanding. The hydrogen water company is launching. His coaching roster is growing. His Instagram is building an audience that watches, every day, what it looks like to live at the standard he preaches.
And somewhere in Kelowna, in a shop that started with a red truck and a Lamborghini-wrapped trailer, Jason is running the operation exactly the way Jer would.
"The only thing I regret," Jer says, leaning back at the edge of the dock, the lake catching the afternoon light behind him, "is not getting sober sooner."
He pauses.
"Sobriety is a superpower, man. It is Superman. You can do anything you put your mind to."
Canada is watching. And Canada is taking notes.
MADEINC tells the stories of Canada's builders. Know a founder worth featuring? Send us a tip at tips@madeinc.ca
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Blue Collar Made | Kelowna | British Columbia | Canadian Entrepreneur | Prosmith Customs | Trades | Automotive | Sobriety | Mindset | Founder Story | Empire Made
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