Judy Grimm’s last name is appropriate given her forensic products and equipment business, Evident.
“We kind of have a morbid profession,” her son, Mike Grimm Jr., said. “For the last 20 years we’ve given away a promotional item at conferences and in our orders. … It’s a bottle of hot sauce. We call it Grimm Reaper Hot Sauce.”
For more than 30 years, Judy Grimm has been the woman in charge at EVIDENT, a Union Hall-based business that provides law enforcement and government agencies with forensics products and equipment.
Judy Grimm started the business in 1992. Her husband, Mike Grimm, had a job at the FBI at the time and — while they were attending a conference together — was approached by a salesman.
“My husband pulled me into the conference area and I talked to the individual who wanted us to sell their product, and from there we are in business 30 years later because we took the company up on it,” Judy Grimm said. “We started out with fingerprint brushes and powders and fingerprint tape and lift cards and grew into the business we have today.”
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Before starting Evident, Judy was a secretary and computer lab manager at Franklin County Public Schools. For five years, she kept her job with the school system while also working part time as Evident’s sole employee, getting word of the business out to local agencies and surrounding counties.
After the first five years, she left the schools to do Evident full-time.
“We decided as a family it looked like it was going to be easy to go ahead and start the business,” Judy Grimm said.
What she began on her own turned into a family enterprise, with her son and husband eventually joining the business, too. Indeed, Mike Grimm’s combined 38 years at the FBI and Virginia Department of Forensic Science in Roanoke have served the company well.
“During that time I gained knowledge of not only fingerprint work but also crime scene processing. That has helped immensely in knowing what products are available to law enforcement for the recovery of evidence and also just the experience of having worked crime scenes and worked on major crimes,” Mike Grimm said.
These days, Evident operates out of a 15,000-square foot space in Union Hall with 20 employees. The company ships all around the world and, in 2019, became the exclusive retailer of the ForenScope product line, which is manufactured in Turkey.
Evident does not sell to the general public but has government customers at the local, state and federal levels.
“It’s a very different type of customer base. … We work with universities and the military and hospitals and crime labs … but it’s mostly government and primarily law enforcement,” Mike Grimm Jr. said. “They’re just really, really easy to work with. … They’re a very professional community.”
The sales process is unique, though, because governments are often required to go through a formal ordering, contract or bid or proposal process when making any purchases.
“Our website is structured to make it easy for government agencies to buy from us. They can purchase from our website using a purchase order, they don’t have to use a credit card to check out,” Mike Grimm Jr. said.
Being a 100% woman-owned business can be an asset when working with government agencies.
“If something is put out for bid, the government will sometimes choose someone that’s a minority or a woman-owned business. That definitely helped us,” Judy Grimm said.
Like all other businesses, Evident has experienced some supply issues in the last couple of years.
“Items that are made out of plastic have been a littler harder to get, a little more expensive to get because they’re manufactured from oil,” Mike Grimm Jr. said.
The COVID-19 pandemic also increased demand for certain pieces of equipment regularly used in forensics.
“We sell a lot of swabs for DNA collection and, because of COVID, the supply of swabs has been very short. … Same with gloves, PPE, respirators — a lot of shortages definitely affected our customers where they weren’t able to get the PPE, the protective equipment, that they needed,” Mike Grimm Jr. said.
After more than three decades in business, though, Evident has carved out a solid niche.
“It’s been rewarding,” Judy Grimm said.
