A repair shop succeeds in the city of excellence

There must be something about Cary, N.C., beyond its location in the state’s famed research triangle, its massive growth in the new millennium and its incredibly low crime rate. It also must have some of the best automotive repair facilities in the country, for at least three different shops from the town have submitted entries for Motor Age’s Top Shop consideration.

“I don’t know offhand,” offers Anthony Blackman, owner of Atlantic Tire & Service and one of the submitters. “In 2008, we were selected tire dealer of the year by Tire Review Magazine, and that got a lot of exposure down here. It also could be because this area is growing so fast, even with the recession; there are new companies wanting to relocate here. And we do have a lot of very good repair facilities.”

Atlantic Tire is actually a chain of three tire retail/auto repair stores, with locations in Raleigh, Durham and the headquarters in Cary. “Between the three stores, we do close to $10 million,” Blackman reports. “Sixty to 65 percent of that number are automotive repairs, and the rest are tires.”

Ironically enough, Blackman didn’t enter the market as a car guy.

“I knew absolutely nothing about automotive repairs or tires or anything like that,” he reports. That aptitude was the province of his brother, but he wound up being a dentist. So after attending college, it was probably a big surprise to his family when Blackman started with Goodyear.

“I stayed with them nearly 10 years,” he says. “I got my training through Goodyear, which was exceptional. I still think it’s some of the best when it comes to tire management. But I always knew that I wanted to go into business for myself; it was just a matter of when, where and how soon I could learn the business.”

Those answers turned out to be Raleigh, N.C., 1988, as Blackman and a partner opened their first store, Atlantic Avenue Tire, and work started in true earnestness.

“I hadn’t planned to be open that first day,” he relates. “But a lady came in. She was pregnant, had two children with her and needed some tires. I told I wasn’t open yet — I needed to get my stuff uncrated — but if she came back at 1 p.m. I would be, and we started that afternoon.”

After a decade in business, the partners decided to split up, and Blackman began looking outside Raleigh for a new location. A good friend and major client was being transferred to Cary; the town seemed as good as any, so in 1998 Blackman decided to follow him, dropping “Avenue” from the shop’s name.

“Cary is a great place, one of the top cities in the country to live in,” he happily reports. “I went out and bought some property, out in the middle of nowhere, but my real estate agent promised that within a year there would be a shopping center across the street. Sure enough, that’s what happened, and within our second year we did close to $2.5 million and we’ve never looked back.”

Recently, Atlantic Tire received a Torch Award from the Better Business Bureau, which Blackman reports “is one of the nicest awards we’ve ever gotten. Sometimes the relationship between small business and the BBB is not real positive, but we got the award for being the most outstanding large business in Eastern North Carolina. So we’re constantly out there promoting, digging up accounts; we really hustle.”

That hustle shows in the community, where he notes that people ask him often how the company can be so successful.

“You surround yourself with good people and let them buy into the business, share your growth with them. It’s worked great for us. If the model works here (in Cary), we just replicate it and take it to another location,” he states. “Trust is not a factor; we give them a partnership in the business and we’ve had no issues as a consequence. That’s the key.”

For example, Blackman hired one employee right out of high school, and he now is one of the company’s general managers over the three stores.

When an employee gets to the point where we feel they’ve been trained, we offer them a partnership. They pay so much to get into it and at year’s end we just share the profitability of that with them,” he explains. “When we do that, we don’t lose people and they do extremely well. These guys work hard; sometimes they’ll call me when they’ve had a real good day, like one who had made $24,000 that day — he was so excited about that.”

What if someone says no to a partnership? “I’ve never had anybody do that,” Blackman admits. “As we open up our fourth store in the next year or two, we’ve already got the people plugged in for that.”

It takes about 18 months to assemble a complete staff for a new store, and Blackman prefers to hire people, who like himself, start off with little experience in the business, but are willing to learn — like Blackman still is.

“I love marketing, but I also knew very little about social media,” he admits. “I knew that was where the industry was heading, so at one time I thought about going back to school just because I felt so lost. So we partnered with a PR firm that does all of that for us, and they’ve done a fine job of building our website and getting us out there on networks like LinkedIn and Facebook.”

For Atlantic Tire made a decision years ago to not be intimidated by technology. “If we weren’t willing to invest in new technology, then it really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to stay in this business, for without technology you can’t diagnose. So we made the commitment, made the investment. We trained our people in hybrids years before they hit the market, so we stayed ahead of that curve.

“It’s been a great journey in this business,” Blackman concludes.

Or just another day in the City of Excellence.

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