Swedish Automotive expands brand loyalty

May 3, 2016
What began as a Swedish brand repair shop has expanded to better service in the Seattle market.

Fiords, Nobel prizes, Ikea furniture, Delta wing fighters and a history of making world-class cars — that’s what Sweden suggests to the mind. Volvo and Saab: the former generally considered the world’s safest car, the latter making the aforementioned jets; they were automobiles that impacted the U.S. market such that shops like David Winters’ Swedish Automotive could succeed.

“We have a big Scandinavian population here in Seattle, so Volvo goes way back,” reveals Winters. “The first Volvo dealer that I’m aware of goes back to about 1959, and they’re still in business. I mean my parents bought a 1968 140 Volvo when I was nine years old, and that’s what I grew up driving.

At a Glance:
Swedish Automotive
David Winters
Owner
Seattle, Wash.
Location
1
Number of locations
33
Years in business
Volvo, Saab, Subaru, Mini Cooper
Brands serviced
AAA, ASA Washington, ASE, BBB, Bosch Service, EnivoStars, West Seattle Chamber of Commerce
Shop affiliations, certifications
swedishauto.com
Website

“This business started as a hobby for me right out of college,” Winters relates. “I took auto classes in high school; I had always futzed around with cars as a kid, particularly that old Volvo. I was set to go for a Masters degree in geology from Washington State University, but got injured on a job. I came to Seattle to recover and realized I didn’t want to go back to school, so I started picking up old Volvos to buy and sell.”

This soon led to requests for repair work. Mentored by a couple of old hands in the industry, Winters rented a $100 a month apartment with a non-heated garage behind it. That was in 1984. By 1990 he had branched into Saabs and was able to purchase his first facility, a three-bay shop. “It was an old gas station from the 1920s set to be torn down,” he recalls. “We remodeled it, popped a fourth bay out a year later. We were there for 20 years until 2010.”

That year Winters built his own shop, despite the unique challenges presented by the West Seattle real estate market. “It’s almost impossible to find commercial property and build on it,” he reports. “The minimum [structure] for one is usually a three story building, and most are 4-6 stories. If you’re competing with a developer who’s going to put a six-story apartment on it and you’re just building a one story shop, he’s got deeper pockets because he’s going to have something with 6 times the square footage.”

But perhaps there was a solution in the problem itself. “I had been looking for close to 10 years for another piece of property, and one finally popped up four blocks from our original shop,” Winters explains. “But In the course of my search I bought three other commercial properties: one apartment building, a pizza joint, and a house. The apartment building doubled in value from ’01 to ’06, and the pizza joint and house were adjoining properties across the street from our old shop. I flipped all three of these and rolled them into one sale via a 1031 exchange, so there was no capital gains tax. Had we not invested in those other properties, there’s no way in the world we could have done the project that we did. You just don’t make enough money as a shop to be able to do that financially.”

Sufficiently capitalized for construction, Winters then caught a break through timing; after the collapse of the real estate market in 2008, he reports that it “was a really good time to borrow money and have construction done, because there were a lot of really hungry contractors.”

With an eye toward eco-friendliness, the new shop was built with utmost efficiency in mind: heavy insulation in the walls to maintain temperature; solar panels on the roof that produce 12 percent of their energy; waste oil burners to heat water pumped through the floors; even the landscaping is a wildlife habitat. 

But as the shop has grown, its market has shrunk; while Volvo is still going under Chinese ownership, 2011 was the last year of production for Saab. “We still service a fair number of Saabs; I still drive one myself,” comments Winters. “It’s probably 20 percent to 30 percent of our business.”

But as early as 2007 they saw the writing on the wall and branched into Mini Coopers and Subarus. “The Pacific Northwest is the number one market for Subaru in the whole country,” Winters reports. “Literally every third car that drives past our shop is a Subaru. They are a completely different animal: four wheel drive, horizontally opposed 4 cylinders; they are not nearly as prone to intermittent electrical failures, so they’re comparatively easy to fix.”

While Swedish cars are no longer his sole concern, Winters maintains that for him specialization has always been the answer. “We have the factory tools for every car that we service, so we can get very accurate diagnostics fairly quickly. Guys who work on everything that shows up at their door? I honestly don’t know how they do it.

“Everything is becoming so specialized,” Winters continues. “A factory tool for Volvo is really expensive, and if you don’t have it and you’re working on a ’99 or newer car, you are completely in the dark. All the diagnostic work, all the downloads are done through that tool. And Volvo is probably one of the worst as far as how much it costs to purchase that software; it used to be an annual subscription between $8000 and $8500 a year, but now we can purchase a three-day pass for about $130 any time we have to do a download. Initially I didn’t like that, but now I think that’s maybe a better way to go.”

If Winters were to add other auto lines, would he keep the Swedish name? “Yes we will,” he firmly states. “If I did expand it would be into something German, but I don’t have any plans for that at this point. We stay pretty busy just with the four lines that we’ve got. And I really think specialization is very beneficial to the shop and the customer. We’re not reinventing the wheel every time a car shows up at the door.”

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