Getting yelped

Our little shop took years to build, and yet at the same time we still aren’t done trying to build it. Operated by my wife Beth at the front desk and myself as the only technician we have taken the path less traveled when it comes to operating an automotive repair shop. Today people from all over the county and even other shops rely on us to solve the toughest problems that can occur on some of these cars. To be that shop, that tech, I have had to work harder than everyone else that I have ever been around both on the job and at home studying when I should have been off the job. That’s an extension of a habit that started in the late 70’s when I was a young technician and was struggling to learn how to be a good mechanic. When someone would say something like “You’ll never be any good” I took the anger and hurt that I felt and used it to push myself to study so that I would be the best technician that I could be and hopefully someday show them that they were wrong. I must say there have been many times that I wish that I would have simply walked from this career away instead of constantly striving to improve myself and my capabilities. Early in the eighties I started studying electronics because of how poor the wages and working conditions were and the plan then was that I was going to quit fixing cars and go make a living working on computers. Little did I know how that education would make me better at dealing with the computerized cars way back then as well as today and that is part of what makes our little shop different.

Have you ever taken your car into a shop for one thing and come out with a list of recommendations that cost hundreds if not a thousand or more dollars?

We don’t up sell maintenance services to try and generate easy dollars like so many places do, I’ve never believed in that approach. Back when that first started the business guru’s were running around telling shop owners “You can’t make money fixing cars, sell services”. They would point out that it took a much more experienced technician (who of course cost more to employ) to fix cars while there were fewer things to go wrong and greater profits if the shop simply concentrated on just doing the easiest work. I had been a technician for about ten years when this was all going down and had been gaining some recognition for my efforts and here were “experts” telling shop owners they shouldn’t be employing guys like me who could take on anything, they only needed entry level people to install tires, batteries, brakes, and to flush fluids.   

It was strange how it turned from I could never be good enough as a mechanic to being too good to allow a shop to be profitable in such a short time but that’s a mechanics life in a nutshell. It seems no matter where a tech is in his/her career there is always someone going out of their way to cut them down, and now I find this little gem of a review in Yelp. “One of the worst experiences I have ever had, the man is very confrontational and insulting. His character and workmanship is very very poor.” Adam W.

Well Adam I’d like to address this with you, but I can’t because there is no Adam W in our customer list. At the same time I’m afraid that I might live up to being confrontational at this point because working  90-100 weeks for the last thirty eight years has me pretty worn out and there just isn’t enough left in the tank to try and stand back up again when someone is trying to knock me down.  The facts are, our regular customer’s opinions of us and our shop don’t match yours. Plus the fact that we are the hero’s to thousands of people who were sent by their regular shop for us to solve a nightmare issue who routinely re-recommend us when someone else is dealing with a tough diagnostic problem.

The interesting part is we don’t actually make a good living dealing with these kinds of problems. The cost of the O.E. scan tools that we have been buying for the last fourteen years, while our competition hasn’t been making a similar investment has been crippling for us. The continued training expense reached a point that it turned into a way to supplement the shops tooling expenses when I started working a second career as a continuing educational instructor.  (That’s how I’ve been hitting the 100/hr weeks of late) Many of the problems that we solve on these nightmare cars take significantly more time to figure out and repair then we can bill for and keep the customers immediate interests in mind. In a lot of ways we prove that the guru’s were right, you can’t make money fixing these cars but that is what our shop is all about and since our customers need us we push onwards, in spite of our own personal challenges.

During the last eight years Beth’s epilepsy got so bad that surgery became the only chance for her to get any relief. Last year they took out the entire right temporal lobe of her brain to try and stop the clusters of seizures that she was experiencing.  Thank-fully that has stopped the periods where she could take twenty to thirty seizures in a cluster every three weeks, but didn’t completely eliminate them. The doctors are now starting to evaluate and try to decide just what to do next. For the moment they are working with the medications and we know not to expect a perfect result but any brief period that see’s her free from events is a blessing.

Three weeks before her surgery we took the only one week vacation we ever had since we got married thirty four years ago, previously we had only one four day vacation back in ’95. We don’t live beyond our means and that’s all we have ever gotten to have. We only took that one before her surgery because we didn’t know what we were going to have after it.

So now you all know a little more about us, and if you want a shop that takes pride at going straight in at a vehicle problem, solves it, and gets straight back out without trying to sell you everything under the sun, then we are who you are looking for. As a three time NAPA ASE tech of the year, an ASE Certified Master Technician since 1982, two time GM Master Technician, a member of the GM Master technician Advisory Council, a technical writer and Instructor, and I even host my own live call in radio show and a RepairPal Certified shop we are doing everything we can possibly do to be ready when you need us. We are far from perfect and sill not afraid to work harder than the guy down the street all while walking  the road less traveled.