Going long in the repair shop business

F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted there are no second acts in American lives. But because he died shortly after writing this, he probably had reason to be pessimistic. The truth is America is the land of second chances. Brian Sump is living proof of that.

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This Colorado native first followed his dreams into pro football, playing briefly as a free agent for the San Diego Chargers and St. Louis Rams before joining the U.S. Arena League as a wide receiver. As part of the Chicago Rush he helped win the 2006 championship. But with the death of his mother the year before, priorities radically changed. A deeply spiritual person, Sump gave up this promising career to care for a grieving younger sibling.

Looking for a livelihood closer to his Denver home, in 2007 Sump bought Avalon Motorsports, a retailer specializing in performance parts for German makes. “Originally, I thought the performance aspect to high end cars was something I might want to do long term,” he explains. “I had worked for the previous owner for a few months back in 2004, so I had a taste of the industry — as much as you can get in a few months — and I thought maybe I could rebuild the company.”

But Sump had little practical experience in business and no background in auto repair. A once thriving endeavor, Avalon’s reputation had long since dissipated. It‘s one advantage: low overhead.

“There was no shop,” he recalls. “I had a 10-foot square office in the back of a kind of rundown shop in Aurora, Colorado.” Trading rent for installation fees on parts he sold locally, Sump soon realized he was getting nowhere fast.

“I spent six months there, a lot of days thinking how bad I hated being in that little dingy office,” he says. “I wanted to get my own technician, go find a little garage somewhere; basically have someone that could install the parts that I was selling,” along with doing some service work on the side.

Running the Offense
Tackling the first item on his new wish list, Sump put out feelers and found a kindred spirit in Phil Carpenter, a local Audi/VW technician.

“He was the first guy I interviewed,” he reveals. “Now he’s our general manager. I said, ‘Look, I don’t have any service business, but I have some local parts sales. If I pay you a salary, would you take a risk and come work?’ He said yeah. So we took a grass roots method and started telling people we serviced Audis and Volkswagens and continued to sell performance parts.”

Armed with little more than moxie, it took two more years of feeling their way through the market before they finally stopped floundering. “I didn’t know how to run an auto shop,” Sump confesses. “I had no idea about parts margins, labor margins. I just called around and made sure I was the cheapest guy in town; I thought that was the answer.”

But all became clear after a trade expo epiphany. Attending a class held by an auto industry consultant, “in the first 15 minutes I realized I could actually make money doing this,” laughs Sump. Back home in Denver, he promptly hooked up with local shops and management groups to keep himself grounded in the market. Completely re-imagined, Avalon is now a thriving service shop with master-certified dealership technicians for Porsche and BMW/Mini besides the original Volkswagen/Audi. Sump notes with no irony that their volume is now about 80 percent service, 20 percent parts sales and/or installation, as Avalon is now a Bosch service center.

“Its actually quite a diligent process to become a Bosch-certified facility,” Sump explains. “They look at everything from the quality of your technicians to what parts you’re using. They look at the facility itself, your location, and the volume of parts that you do, the territory that you’re in, the vehicles’ makes that you service. There’s only a select number of shops in the country with this designation.

“We’ve almost doubled from last year to this year,” he continues. They offer a 3-year/36,000 mile warranty on their services and free rental cars for clients, because “we’re a destination-type shop and people are getting referred to us from other cities in Colorado, some even from out of state.”

They also more than doubled in size after moving into a new building. “It was a huge step,” admits Sump. “We went from 2,600-square feet to 6,000-square feet, rent from $1,800 to $8,500 a month. So we have been doing direct mail, some radio campaigning for about six months. We spend quite a bit of attention on our online marketing, our internet presence, by way of organic search optimization. Those are really now the key areas as far as new client acquisition.”

Cheering on the Shop A considerable amount of money is also spent on client retention and internal marketing. “How do we captivate and keep our existing clients?” muses Sump. “Little ways to say thank you, to make your clients feel special, whether it’s a gift or making sure their vehicle’s clean when they pick it up, as well as customer-based integration, which helps with thank you emails and maintenance reminders.”

A neophyte businessman no more, Brian Sump still like to “feel” his way into the future, lately getting a dealers’ license to sell used cars. “That way we can use our facility outside of repair work; we also launched our own rental car company last year.” Yet with the facility’s lot and office space now maximized, he doesn’t believe in any more expansion.

“We never want to do that unless we have a need,” says Sump, “otherwise you’re splitting your staff, and your productivity and customer satisfaction is probably never as high with multiple locations as it would be at one. We’re not opposed to it, but we have to make sure we’re handling business here before looking at the next location.”

Perhaps Fitzgerald never played football.

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