08/24/2026
4 Years Ago Today
We posted on Facebook and told the world we were open. We had no idea what we were doing.
We knew how to fix cars. That part we had down. Running an actual business? That was a whole different animal, and nobody hands you a manual for that one.
Four years in, here’s what we’ve picked up along the way:
We’re not for everyone, and we’ve stopped apologizing for that. We do things a certain way, and if that’s not what someone’s looking for, that’s alright. We’d rather be the right fit for the right people than try to be everything for everybody.
Our values aren’t something we came up with for a Facebook post. Honest work, being upfront about what a job actually costs, doing it right the first time even when the easier path was sitting right there. That’s just how we’ve tried to operate, especially on the days it would’ve been easier not to.
Nobody teaches you how to run a shop while you’re learning how to run a shop. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve fixed them. We keep going. Some weeks feel like we finally figured something out, and the next week reminds us we’re still figuring it out. That’s just how it goes.
We tried things that didn’t work. We kept the ones that did. That’s really the whole strategy.
What’s caught us off guard is how many people in this industry actually want to see small shops like ours make it. Other owners, suppliers, people who didn’t owe us anything but helped anyway. We didn’t expect that, and we don’t take it for granted.
Some days the hardest part isn’t the car up on the lift. It’s your own head. Staying steady when things are slow, staying grounded when things get busy, remembering why you started this in the first place.
We used to catch ourselves checking what other shops down the road were charging. We don’t do that anymore. Our pricing is ours. It reflects what the work actually costs and what our people are worth. That’s it.
And maybe the biggest thing we’ve learned is to respect what other people bring to the table. Every small business owner out there is working harder than most people ever see. We know what it feels like to be shortchanged, and we’re not going to do that to anybody else.
Four years down. Still figuring it out. Still glad we did it.
📸 First photo: celebrating one year in business. Same faces, same pride but these days, we’re celebrating alcohol-free.
