Five years ago, Alex Mayea was facing a layoff as the wheel manufacturing plant he worked at was preparing to move to China. He started talking with his father Evi, the owner/operator of a trucking business, about his next move and the two discussed the possibility of Alex owning his own business.

Alex and his brother, Tom, developed a love of cars as children attending car shows with their dad, who currently owns a 1962 Ranchero and a 1975 Corvette. Alex had also been working on his own cars since high school, so the family began looking into opening an automotive business.

“First we looked into franchises [but] we felt that that’s not really ultimately what we wanted,” Alex said. “We wanted something that we actually owned and could do what we wanted with. Ultimately, we found an ad [from] the shop owner that was selling Huntington Beach Muffler.”

The Huntington Beach, California, business was a one-man shop specializing in exhaust system work, including mufflers, welding and catalytic converters. It was that targeted services offering that interested the Mayeas in buying the shop.

“He wasn’t doing a lot of technical, mechanical, diagnostic stuff,” Alex said. “We didn’t have any background on the technical side of it. I knew a little bit about welding and we figured we could make it a go.”

The original owner stayed on a few months to show Alex and Evi the ropes at the shop, which was renamed Automotive Excellence. Even with the original owner there to guide them, the Mayeas did face a few challenges.

“[The biggest challenges were] getting good at the welds, dealing with the customers, figuring out all the paperwork and how the business ran in general,” Alex said. “My dad has a lot of business experience being in the trucking business, but we had to get used to the automotive side of everything.”

The father and son soon found their footing in the business with help from Tom, who runs the shop’s website, and wife and mother Connie, who helps in the office and does shuttle service, and began planning its expansion. In 2006, they bought a muffler shop that was located around the corner from Automotive Excellence.

“The owner of that shop was looking to sell the business because he was moving out of state,” Alex said. “We got a lot of his equipment, his customer list, and pretty much brought all the business over to this location and ran it out of one spot.”

The Mayeas also added mechanical services to their offerings, then motor work, rearend work, transmission work and suspension work to meet customer demand. In 2009, they hired ASE-certified lead technician/fabricator Tony Andrade.

Joining the Local Car Scene

Since its beginnings as Huntington Beach Muffler, the shop has serviced a mix of classic and late-model vehicles. The Mayeas have worked to develop the classic car side of the business by reaching out to local car clubs and enthusiasts by attending weekend cruises and hosting a car show last summer.

“We did it to bring attention to the shop, we were trying to stay pretty big in the car show scene down here in Orange County,” Alex said of the Surf City Car Show, held at Automotive Excellence in July. “We got four or five new customers within the month after the show [that] brought their cars in for work.”

The show was promoted on the SoCal Car Culture website, which attracted the attention of participants and the six vendors that set up booths.

“[We wanted] to give the car show participants something else to look at and something else to do … as opposed to just having some cars in the parking lot,” Alex said of the decision to have vendors at the show. “[We] formed a couple of relationships out of that, like [with] Smart Wax, a product we’re probably going to start selling here in the shop.”

The show attracted 50–60 cars to the industrial complex where Automotive Excellence is located.

Customers have already been asking when the next Surf City Car Show will be held. The date may be moved up earlier in the summer.

“Depending on the interest, [we may use] a different location because we were pretty close to the max capacity at the last show,” Alex said. “If it grows, or we have more participants than last year, we might have to have it at a different location just because of the space issue.”

Dedicated Space for Classics

Space hasn’t only been an issue at the car show; it’s also been an issue at the Automotive Excellence shop. The 2,200-square-foot installation bay has four lifts, benders, plasma cutters and other specialty equipment. The Mayeas would like to purchase a dyno and have more work space for their classic car projects.

The dyno is still being investigated but the Mayeas have found room for two additional lifts at a unit they rented across the way from Automotive Excellence.

“We got a new compressor in there, and the electrical [is being] wired in and switched over to 220, and we’re going to put two more lifts in that unit,” Alex said. “We’re trying to dedicate that unit as the hot rod shop; we’d only do classic cars and hot rods over there and leave the other unit more for the general repair and maintenance stuff.”

The new space (pictured below) was targeted for completion at the end of the year. Once completed, it should have benefits for Automotive Excellence employees and customers.

“[It will] make things a lot easier for the techs [and] should make things more efficient,” Alex said. “We could take a lot more time on the custom show cars, as opposed to rushing through them to do an oil change on a Honda Civic or something like that. We can take our time with them and not pull them off the rack until they’re done, [which] provides the customers with better service.”    

Thanking Every Customer

The shop’s customers are coming in for custom services like exhaust work and also regular maintenance on both their classic cars and late-model daily drivers.

“Sometimes we’ll work on someone’s classic car and do a full exhaust, and a couple of weeks later they’ll bring in their daily driver that needs a tune-up or something like that,” Alex said. “What we try to offer to them [is] a shop where they can bring their classic car to get worked on or they can bring their daily driver to get serviced and worked on.”

Regardless of what type of vehicle they’re bringing in or what type of service they’re having done, all Automotive Excellence customers get a thank-you note.

“We send out weekly thank-you notes [that are] hand-signed,” said Alex. “We’ve actually gotten some people that called us up and thanked us for the thank-you card because it was the first time they ever got a thank-you note from an auto repair shop.

“It’s something we thought should be done, [because] we appreciate their business,” he added. “It’s something we would appreciate as customers.”

Stat Sheet:

Address: 7522 Slater Ave., No. 100, Huntington Beach, California 92647

Phone: (714) 841-1285

Owners:Alex and Evi Mayea

Services Offered: General repair and maintenance, performance and custom upgrades and installation, custom fabrication work

Number of Employees: 5

Number of Current Project Cars: Varies weekly

Current Project Cars:1967 RS Camaro, 1934 Ford coupe

Website: www.autoexcellenceonline.com

Approximate Shop Size: 3,000 square feet

Years in Business: 23

Tags: Car Shows, Exhaust Systems & Components, Expansion, Restorer Profile, West Coast Rod Shops