00:00In this video, I'm going to show you how I went from this tiny little shack to 30 bays, a machine shop on four acres, and more cars than I can shake a stick at.
00:10So come on, let's take a trip down memory lane. I hope I don't cry too much.
00:19This would have been back in 1990, almost 35 years ago.
00:24This little storage shed. You're not going to believe it. There was no heater in this place. Come on.
00:30There's Dave's Auto, my very first building. I kid you not. This is where I went to work. I worked there for four months. Crazy story.
00:43The guy that owns this now won't let me go in the back.
00:47No, I wasn't. I was on the other side of it.
00:50Well, now I am. I'm leaving, though. Be good, man.
00:54But way there in the back, that old rusty garage door, that was my very first business.
01:00It was a crazy time. I'd gotten fired from my job, working at a Toyota dealership.
01:06Miles, who you know, was born. He was three months old. He was born in August.
01:11In fact, I got married October the 5th, and so I got fired on October the 7th, because two days after we got back from getting married at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we drove up to Jackson and got married in Jackson.
01:23Got to Justice of Peace, the bartender and a waitress were the witnesses.
01:28This is a true story. I come into work that morning, getting married a couple days earlier.
01:34They called me in the office, fired me, let me go.
01:37I go home, and I thought, man, I can't tell Allie. She's not going to be happy.
01:42And we had a brand new baby in the house, a great woman that she was.
01:45She stuck with me. I went and looked for some jobs, and there were some things going on.
01:50I didn't want to work for anybody else, and I said, dang it, I'm going to give it a shot.
01:53And that's where it started. There's no heat in there. I got a propane heater.
01:59We were broke, man. I mean, we were as broke as you could be.
02:03I was 30 years old, so I just started back there, and word of mouth.
02:07And this is back when you didn't have cell phones. There was no Internet.
02:10You know, you were passing out business cards and telling everybody, you know, help.
02:16But I was only there for about, I think it wasn't even maybe four or five months.
02:21So I realized I got to find another place.
02:24I was freezing to death with that little propane heater.
02:26And I'm going to show you now. Let's go to where I moved next.
02:29Oh, my gosh. You know, when you get old, man, memories, they impact you.
02:34Oh, this was my second location.
02:38So I moved in here, and I was so scared, man. I was so scared.
02:43All of a sudden, I went from that storage unit that had one bay to four bays and a real, you know, mortgage.
02:50I wish I could tell you how much it was, but I don't remember.
02:56Yeah. Wow.
02:58I used to eat lunch up there.
03:00Yeah, that's where the heater was.
03:02But these were my bays, and I know they're not very big.
03:05In fact, the name of my business when I first started out, when I incorporated, which was 1993, was Dave's Import Auto Service, Inc.
03:14I was so proud of that. Most of my history was in imports.
03:18So, you know, I do a lot of diesels now.
03:20Guys, you know, you follow the trail, kind of, you know, so to speak.
03:26And, you know, Japanese and back then, a lot of British imports.
03:31Oh, man.
03:32From Sunbeams to, you know, MGs, Triumphs.
03:36I've done them all, and I did them in this shop.
03:40It's crazy.
03:42You know, I think these are the original doors.
03:44I mean, look at this.
03:46These doors, there's no insulation in these doors.
03:50In the winter, this shop used to get pretty dang cold.
03:53The owner of this place wanted to expand into here.
03:57He had a filter business.
03:59And so he booted me out, and I moved to the third location that I'm going to show you here in a minute.
04:04But, guys, this is all I had for two years.
04:07I mean, this is it.
04:09And it's cramped in here.
04:11These old lifts, these weren't in here when I was in here.
04:16The lifts that were in here, I actually took them out of here and used them, but they've been long gone,
04:20because, you know, you can't keep a lift for 30 years.
04:23But, you guys, don't ever be afraid, man.
04:27Don't ever be afraid.
04:29You can do it.
04:30So this shop reminds me of a story that I want to tell you guys.
04:33I was $32 an hour.
04:34I believe I was, I think I was $32 an hour.
04:37So I did this guy's motor.
04:38Back in the day, you know, he told me, you're busy, raise your rates.
04:41I can't raise my rates.
04:42I raised them.
04:43Comes back a couple months later, how you doing?
04:45I'm busy as crap.
04:46Raise your rates again.
04:47I'm like, I can't do that.
04:49So I didn't do it every time he told me to.
04:51I was too scared to do it.
04:52But as I look back, that was some of the best advice that I ever had from a customer.
04:57You know, a customer was telling me, raise your rates.
05:00The rate that I have now, obviously, is not $32 an hour.
05:03But it doesn't matter what my rate is.
05:05It matters what your rate is.
05:07I'm doing this webinar, and I'm doing it for you guys, honestly.
05:09I've been so overwhelmed this last year with the response of techs and shop owners and
05:16just general car enthusiasts that want to know my story and want to know how they can
05:20take their business from the next level.
05:22So if you want to know how you can go from a storage unit to a four-bay shop and then
05:27finally to your very own, a place you really, really can call your own.
05:30And someday you, too, could, you know, have a 30, 40-bay shop and your dream comes true.
05:35I'm telling you, your dream comes true.
05:37But they only come true with a crap load of work, man.
05:41So hit that link.
05:42Sign up for the webinar.
05:44We've had a great response to it.
05:45It's limited because I want to be able to talk.
05:47There's a 30-minute live Q&A.
05:50So I want everybody to have a chance to ask me some questions and interact with you.
05:55So sign up for that.
05:57Let's go look at my other place.
05:58This is my third spot that I rented.
06:00So we get a little closer.
06:02This was my waiting room.
06:03It was just an open warehouse.
06:04The building had just gotten built.
06:06And the guy that owned it had moved me out from my second building.
06:09And he built this and he said, it'll be better for you.
06:11So I moved over here.
06:12I didn't think it was better for me.
06:14But, you know, I didn't, he wouldn't renew my lease in the building I just showed you.
06:18So I had these three bays.
06:20I filled them up pretty quick.
06:22Then I rented some bays over here from him.
06:24So I hired a guy, Stretch, God rest your soul, Stretch, and your family.
06:30I know they follow me.
06:32Peanut was his little girl.
06:33I can't remember her name, but he always called her Peanut.
06:35And I know she follows me.
06:36So hey, Peanut.
06:37He was my first employee.
06:39And he worked for me over there in those bays.
06:41And that was it.
06:43I was on a test drive.
06:45And this old farmhouse had a for sale sign in front of it.
06:47Right on the frontage road in Centerville on the freeway.
06:50I stopped in, knocked on the door.
06:52Sweet old lady answered it.
06:53She was in a walker.
06:54She comes out.
06:55Long story short, we struck a deal.
06:57This is the funny part.
06:58At that time, I'd been working for about two and a half years at these different shops.
07:04And I had saved up.
07:05All I had saved up was $20,000.
07:07And when I say I had saved up, me and Allie had saved us up.
07:11And that was all the money we had.
07:13We were still struggling.
07:15And this woman, I convinced this woman to sell me two acres of ground on the freeway frontage.
07:20She had it for sale for $135,000.
07:23This was back in 1992.
07:25I got her to carry the paper because I couldn't qualify for anything.
07:28If you go in a bank, banks were laughing at me.
07:30She carried the paper.
07:31She carried the note for a couple of years.
07:33I gave her the $20,000 down.
07:35But here's the story now I can tell.
07:37I went home to tell Allie about it.
07:39And Allie was like, no way are you taking that money.
07:42No way.
07:43You're not taking that money.
07:44That's too risky.
07:45You're buying raw ground.
07:47You know, where are you going to put your shop?
07:48And I said, I'm going to build a shop.
07:49And then, of course, she was smart thinking.
07:51She's like, where are you going to get the money for that?
07:53I was like, I don't know.
07:54I'll figure that out.
07:56But I want to buy that ground.
07:57So I took the money without her permission.
08:00And I bought the ground.
08:01I think she was kind enough.
08:03I think I only slept on the couch for a week after that.
08:05Allie, I love you.
08:09But it all worked out.
08:12And I found a bank.
08:14It took me about 20 banks.
08:15I'm not kidding you.
08:16Before I finally got a yes.
08:18And the truth is, I couldn't believe they said yes.
08:21I thought, I fooled them.
08:24They're going to loan me the money.
08:26I'll show you the building.
08:27They loaned me the money, but I was scared to death.
08:29So this is the building that I built in 1993.
08:33So I'd have been 33 years old then.
08:35So we got an SBA loan, small business.
08:37And I built the building like this.
08:38If you'll look at the front, you know, this door here.
08:41But you also have the same, you got the same setup on this side.
08:46And the reason I did that is, the bank, I didn't think I could fill the building up.
08:51I was scared to death.
08:52I was like, man, my bridges got way too big.
08:54But what I was going to do, and I never told him, I was going to lease out half the building.
08:59And that was kind of a weird thing back.
09:02And back then, the SBA wanted you to occupy, I think, 75% of the building, or they wouldn't give you the loan.
09:09And I was like, I don't think I can occupy 75% of that building.
09:13But anyway, I ended up, I opened up, you know, word of mouth spread.
09:16I've been in this community for a couple years.
09:19And thank God, and God thank you.
09:22You know, blessings from the Lord.
09:23I filled up the building, and we kept going from there.
09:27Listen, I'm going to take you back.
09:29I'm not going to embarrass you.
09:31I promise.
09:32Because we're talking about when we first got this building.
09:35Now, I told the story of how you were a little upset when I bought the building, and you kind of weren't, you know, too happy about us spending the money, you know, to buy the building.
09:44And then I bought the building, and then I finally got the loan.
09:47Remember how hard that was?
09:48Yes.
09:49Like 20 banks said, no, no, no, no, no.
09:50Oh, gosh, yeah.
09:51Yeah.
09:51When I finally got the loan, and then it was like, okay, maybe he can actually do this thing and get a building put up.
09:57Remember how we came out here, and we had a picnic on a blanket on the weeds?
10:02You can just say yes.
10:03I don't, but okay.
10:05I remember other things that you don't remember.
10:07Oh, okay.
10:08Like when you first put the shovel into the ground and turn the dirt over to start digging.
10:11I remember that.
10:12I don't remember that.
10:13I know.
10:14I remember the picnic on a blanket, the bottle of champagne.
10:17I remember that.
10:18Oh, okay.
10:19You know, you've got to celebrate the moments.
10:21Oh, yeah.
10:22You really have to celebrate the moments, because there's so much hardship along the way.
10:26But the hardships turn into the best memories, huh?
10:29Oh, it's not success if you're not enjoying your life.
10:32Yeah.
10:32Be successful and fulfilled.
10:34Joey is my number two son.
10:39You know that doesn't mean I don't love you.
10:41I'll take number two.
10:43Miles is number three.
10:44I got some good brothers.
10:45He was eight years old when I built this building.
10:50And what do you remember?
10:51I remember coming in here, and this was all just rock gravel before they laid the floor.
10:55You could see all the piping and stuff in the floor.
10:57Nothing was here other than dirt.
10:59Before I built the building, I tried really hard to get enough fill dirt in here from people that were building up on the hill houses.
11:06You've been doing that for years.
11:07Yeah, dude.
11:08I'm a tricky guy.
11:09You know, I was like, I have size out here.
11:12Free dirt.
11:12You're not free dirt.
11:14Put your fill here.
11:14So as the houses were getting build up on the mountain, which, you know, bank run is what they called it, made really good fill dirt, and I didn't have to pay for it.
11:22So I did that after I bought it.
11:24There's white PVC up here that goes to the whole building.
11:27Now, we put it under the floor originally, but it broke.
11:30Remember, we had to tee into it.
11:31Yeah.
11:31But the main line going through the building is still 30-plus years old, and Joey did it on a ladder.
11:41It was on a ladder, gluing that together, and it still holds.
11:44Child labor laws, none were broke in the building of this building.
11:48I think fathers and sons are allowed to do that.
11:50Me and Miles, we'd come in here on the weekends, and he'd make us push everybody's toolbox out, and we had one single floor buffer.
11:55Yeah, I did.
11:56And I'd make Miles sit on the floor buffer to get a little bit more pressure on there, and we would scrub this whole floor on the weekends.
12:02Yeah.
12:03That's a true story.
12:04I make my boys work.
12:06We'd clean this whole place, top to bottom.
12:08Every weekend.
12:10I've always been that way.
12:11I want a clean shop.
12:12Between 10 to 13.
12:14I was 10 to 13.
12:15Miles was probably 7 to 8.
12:17Yeah.
12:18Every weekend, I remember you telling me, you know, you'll be one of the richest kids in school, and it won't be because of me, and it's because he was paying me well.
12:23Yeah.
12:23I never paid my boys.
12:25Because you don't work, you don't eat.
12:26That's how I am.
12:27This was my first building, so it was 8,000 square foot.
12:30But back here, this was the back of the building.
12:34And then after we'd been in here for eight years, so in 2001, I started construction on this block addition.
12:43This was the outside wall, the back wall, the outside of the building, and you can see where we kind of turned and kicked it with the block here.
12:51So I built these additional 10 bays back here in 2001.
12:54Now, we finished completion on this.
12:57This was a big stretch for me.
12:58I'd only been in this building for seven, eight years, and now I'm growing, and I'm taking a big step.
13:05And, you know, you don't build 10 bays thinking you're praying that you can fill two of them.
13:11What happened was, of course, everybody knows, in 2001, 9-11 in September, the world was rocked by the biggest tragedy that's ever hit American soil.
13:23Business shut, I mean, it was like somebody turned a switch off.
13:26I mean, America shut down.
13:28And I can remember just being here in the shop.
13:32It seemed like a month or two where there was nothing.
13:35There was nobody doing any money, business or money.
13:37And I was scared to death, of course, because I had loans and, you know, money and a family.
13:42And I had some people that were working for me.
13:44By this time, I think we had maybe five employees.
13:47I'm telling you this story because I'm telling you this struggle.
13:49Remember, I have the four O's.
13:51Opposition is an opportunity with options to overcome.
13:55Trust me.
13:57I never read that somewhere.
13:58That came to me years and years later as I look back on my life how all this happened.
14:04When I bought this ground, you see in the pictures, and I built that shop, the first one, before I did the second expansion on the back of that.
14:10I bought that house there.
14:12Now, I remodeled it and upgraded it and stuff, but I lived in that house up until, man, I lived in that house for 15 years when I first built this building.
14:20That's one of my secrets.
14:21That was how far I had to go to work, back and forth.
14:24I don't think we'd ever had kids if I wouldn't have lived so dang close, man, because I was working so much.
14:31But, you know, think about it.
14:32If you drive a half hour to work each way, if you work 250 days a year, that's 250 hours.
14:38It's a half hour each way.
14:39Some people drive a lot more than that.
14:41That's six weeks of production.
14:43So, you know, that's how my mind works.
14:45Here we are 35 years later.
14:47And what I want to tell you is if you keep at it and you refine your product, make it better.
14:53It's your work.
14:54It needs to be as best as it can be.
14:56The people, your processes, and promote.
14:58I can guarantee you the promotion is probably one of your biggest weaknesses now.
15:03We're going to be talking about that.
15:04I'm going to help you with that.
15:06But you can have a work schedule that's as big as this.
15:11164 current work orders, active work orders.
15:14So come join me on this webinar so that you can figure out how you can get where you want to be.
15:19I'm going to make it easy for you.
15:20This is the same price of a good snap-on ratchet.
15:24It's actually less.
15:24But it's going to give you a lot more value for a lot longer and it's going to speed up your progress so that you don't have to go through all the pain that I've gone through.
15:32You're talking to a shop owner, not some consultant that's going to charge you 10 grand and come in there and tell you to sell more oil changes.
15:40You know, my hope is, man, that this inspires you.
15:43If one person, if one person out there is like this 15-year-old boy that was walking by a taxi cab and limousine company and wanted a job as a mechanic, oh my goodness, 50 years ago, that would be so touching to me.
15:58And I hope that you can understand how I'm passionate about helping other people out.
16:03I've spent my life doing that, over half of my life.
16:06Join us in this webinar on October the 3rd at 6 p.m. Mountain Standard Time.
16:11Click on the link below and join me and my sons for at least two hours.
16:16We'll open it up for live questions and answers.
16:20But we've got a bunch of things that we're going to try to explain to you and help you and teach you.
16:25And I hope that you'll join us.
16:28I guarantee it'll help you wherever you're at.
16:31We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:36We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:38We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:39We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:40We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:41We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:42We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:43We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:44We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:45We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:46We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:47We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:48We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:49We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
16:50We're going to jump you up from wherever you're at.
