Colorado shop's catchphrase defines its yes-we-can attitude

Nov. 30, 2016
Being a ‘yes we can’ organization is crucial to this Ft. Collins, CO-based company.

Can a catch phrase effectively encapsulate an attitude? Take Bryan Gossel’s trademark ‘heck yeah’: “If you hang around me, that’s what I say all the time,” explains the owner of BG Automotive. While Gossel probably didn’t even realize he was saying it till encouraged to repeat it in a marketing campaign, being a ‘yes we can’ organization is crucial to this Ft. Collins, CO-based company.

At a Glance:
BG Automotive
Bryan Gossel
Owner
1
No. of shops
10
Years in business
4
No. of technicians
9
Total no. of employees
6,000
Square footage of shop
6
No. of bays
90
No. of customer vehicles per week
$530
Average weekly restoration ticket
$2.5 million
Annual gross revenue
ASA, Napa Auto Care, ATI, Tech Net
Affiliations

“I don’t know how to say ‘no’”, Gossel reports. “We’ll give anything a shot; we’ll work on a small engine to a semi-truck. We had a customer who couldn’t get his lawnmower started; we said absolutely, bring it down. We had another guy with a fleet who had a generator that wouldn’t start; now he loves us.”

Doubt their commitment? While the shop isn’t exactly big, BG opened up two of their doors to accommodate larger vehicles, one being at least 12’ tall. “We can fit some of the bigger stuff in here,” Gossel confirms, “but one of our customers has a big charter bus company and we’ll just work on them outside — doesn’t matter; we’ll make it happen.”

And the know-how to cover such a wide variety of vehicles? Gossel waves it off. “It’s just nuts and bolts. Of course diagnostics for diesels are different, but you build friendships. There are a couple big diesel shops here in town, and I could run over to one of them and plug into their scanners. It doesn’t happen that often, but when they’ve got a loyal customer with a car, they’ll it send over here.

“Life throws you a curve ball, you just have to figure out how to deal with it,” Gossel reasons. Good with people and cars, when the opportunity arose to start his own company, he and his wife “took money out of our house and said ‘here we go.’ I started with a metal bench, four jack stands, a jack and my toolbox. I had gotten a couple little used car lots through word of mouth, having people who had followed me forever, and things just kept going and going.”

He was making a good living--but with only one fulltime employee Gossel realized he was working himself to death. Then came ATI; one boot camp later and he was ‘just blown away.’ “Holy cow, I knew nothing,” he acknowledges. “The one thing I really took away from (ATI) is that they wanted me to be able to have employees, pay them well, pay their health and life insurance, pay for a 401K—be able to do all that and still make money. But how? It didn’t seem possible to me.”

After joining ATI, Gossel began taking “baby steps” into the world of management. “At that time I didn’t think I could afford to fly to classes,” he recalls. “I thought if I left, the shop was going to be toast. My coach had really been staying on me about hiring more people, so I hired an ASE Master Tech — and wow, all of a sudden things were easier.”

Another important step Gossel took was to adopt the Wonderlic personality test, though he was reticent at first. “I had used it but didn’t really understand it,” he says. “I finally took it myself and I was blown away; it was 100% spot on accurate. Scary. It’s got four desirable traits; Driver, Motivator, Thinker and Supporter. You really want a Driver and Motivator up front.”

To help achieve the right balance of characteristics on his team, Gossel had hoped to hire Phil Christensen. “He was a guy I really liked, a manager who had lots of contacts, but I was afraid I couldn’t afford him. My coach said give it a shot, but Phil didn’t want to take the leap because he was about to become general manager of his own store.

“Then about a year later Phil texted me that if I offered him this and this, he was mine. I was scared because I gave him a good guaranteed salary and he didn’t bonus until we started doing around $12,000 a week,” notes Gossel. He needn’t have worried; the shop was going like gangbusters, due in part to the systems he’d adopted.

“Phil’s been with me three years now and man, we work very well together,” Gossel proclaims. “I’m still doing the classes and learning how to ‘work on the business and not in it.’ When you make a mistake you’ve got to figure out where you’re at; you hire somebody who’s not up to our expectations, is it our training? I’m a good leader, and I lead by example, but I can see that I’ve got to change and get better at training instead of just taking over and doing it myself. I’ve got to be more like, ‘what do you think needs to be done?’

“It’s a struggle for me because that’s not who I am,” Gossel admits. “Like I’m not good with reading and math, but I’m forcing myself to get good at them; actually right now I’m working on revising some policies and procedures so Phil and can get better at training and making people accountable to our high customer service expectations--because that got us to where we are at.”

And that’s on the verge of expansion. “I’m kind of stressed right now because I’m working on multiple locations,” Gossel explains. Between looking at property and more people to hire, he’s had to cut back a ton on his favorite pastime, Sprint Car racing. “I ran 59 races one year; the pros run about 80-100. Last year I only raced 6-8 times; I know I’m not going to get retirement out of racing, but I’m happy if it supports itself.

“You’ve just to take a breath and grab life by the horns and just go with it,” he concludes. “Every year I’ve been open has been a record year; last year was huge, and now we’re setting the benchmark to kill it even more this year.”

Heck yeah!

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