Michigan shop owner builds business from scratch with right focuses

April 3, 2017
Now encompassing three stores in metropolitan Grand Rapids, Mich., John Stewart's Real Pro Auto Service, Inc. has nearly $3 million in annual sales.

“I started the company with $900,” John Stewart shrugs. “They said it couldn’t be done.” ‘They’ were obviously wrong; now encompassing three stores in metropolitan Grand Rapids, Mich., his Real Pro Auto Service, Inc. has nearly $3 million in annual sales.

At a Glance:
Real Pro Auto Service
John Stewart
Owner
3
No. of shops
25
Years in business
10
No. of technicians
18
No. of employees
6, 9, 11
No. of bays per shop
160
No. of vehicles per week combined
$450
Average weekly restoration ticket
$2.85 million
Combined annual gross revenue

Of course it’s easy to see why anyone might have thought otherwise. Back in 1992, Stewart was a 23-year-old technician fortified with raw ambition and a tax refund check. But the check was mostly gone — spent on equipment like a floor jack and stands — and a proposed partnership faded after Stewart started negotiating with a lease agent for a facility.

“We definitely started that first day off on the wrong foot,” laughs Stewart. With no money, no credit and no client base to speak of, he managed to scrap together enough money and goodwill to rent a little two-bay facility behind a used car lot.

“I didn’t have any employees at first,” he reports. “I just worked from morning till night to try to get things done one way or another. From day one — and it’s no different today — I couldn’t afford to fail. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure that we’re doing the right thing.” It must have worked like a charm, because Real Pro Auto Service practically doubled in size almost every year of its first decade.

“Nine months from the first day I started, I had to move out of that two-bay building because I had outgrown it,” Stewart reveals. “I moved into another building for four years before I outgrew that one. After five years in business I (moved into) my third building, and I’ve been here ever since. We opened the two other locations during the last eight years.”

Meanwhile Stewart had to build his client base from scratch, but didn’t do much in the way of marketing outside hanging homemade flyers on doors. “We market and advertise a ton now,” he reports, “but back then I didn’t know anything about it; how to do it, who to ask, where to go. It was all word of mouth, 100 percent. It’s just a matter of taking care of the customers.”

For roughly the first 10 years, Stewart ran the business without any external input. “Then I reached a point where I realized, hey, I don’t know what else to do here,” he notes. “I didn’t know how to make it any different, how to make it go forward; I just didn’t have the knowledge. It’s no different than working on a car — if you don’t know how to do it, you’ve got to go get the information, so it’s been an ongoing educational process. We had a really good consultant for quite a few years that I really learned a lot from.”

By the mid-90s Real Pro Auto Service had enough regular clients to get a computer system. “We started taking that customer information and mailing flyers in-house,” reports Stewart. “Then we went to direct mail, and as the technology evolved we went into online marketing. Now we’re doing all kinds of internet advertising, like Google. We still do a ton of direct mail — we even do a lot through texting. I was always told to stay away from the impersonal ads; people don’t like it. But we tried a couple of text campaigns and it just blew me away. Now we use a service that allows us to text our customers.

“I wish there was a silver bullet where you could say this is the kind of advertising you need to do,” Stewart continues. “There isn’t one. I was taught that you try to market in a variety of ways; each one makes a little creek, and when they come together they form a stream of customers coming in the door.”

Expanding into the suburbs of Grand Rapids, Stewart encountered new problems. “When you open a new store, it’s a completely different game,” he relates. “When I was here at the one store for 10 hours a day, I knew everything that was going on. When I hired the consultant, he helped me with a lot of things: how to delegate, how to find a decent manager, how to hire good employees. That made a huge difference, but when I got the second store, all of a sudden it was like, how do I do this? When you take big steps like that, you’ve got to find somebody else who knows how to do it, and hopefully they can get an education quick enough to make it fly.”

Helping ease this transition was the fact these new stores were existing properties Stewart had bought out, but he still had to bring them into line with his original shop. “It’s all in the process,” he comments. “There has to be a method with everything you do, otherwise everyone just does their own thing. As we go forward, we’ll find a new issue and try to figure out a process for it and implement that process to make sure that it stays where it’s supposed to be. A lot of this is documented, some isn’t; when we get a new person in, we just train and train and train till we get them where they need to be. I want to take care of my employees, I want them to take care of me, and together we can take care of our customers.”

For that’s still the core of Stewart’s philosophy. “I don’t think it’s very complicated,” he muses. “When you try to think about it like that, it’s so hard to put a finger on it, but I always try to treat the customers the way they want to be treated. It doesn’t take much; just look for a way to solve the customers’ problems. They might be distraught because their car didn’t start or they can’t use it. They rely on those vehicles and you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got the solution to their problem.”

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