Posts Tagged ‘ Restorer Profile ’

Editor’s Corner: Checking in With The 401k Club

By Ashley Smissen , December 14, 2011 in Editor's Corner, Rod Shops

The 401k Club Staff (left to right): Andy Martaus, Trevor Dick, Mike Skipps, owner Dana Manier, Osmar Mata, Jim Johnston and Bernt Karlsson

Back in December 2008, I wrote a Restorer Profile about The 401k Club. At the time, the owners of the Anaheim, California-based rod shop were working hard to build the business, which, at the time, was servicing mostly 1950s and 1960s hot rods and classic trucks. They had big plans for the shop.

A lot has changed in the hot rod industry in the last three years, so I decided to check back in with The 401k Club and see what’s happened to the shop since we profiled it three years ago.

Since then, the shop, which in 2008 was owned by three people, has undergone a major change of ownership. Dana Manier is now the sole owner of the business. His staff has also changed dramatically in the three years since we last visited. In 2008, the shop had about 11 employees; today Manier employs six people.

“Last year was a tough year for us,” Manier told me. “It kicked our butt, but this year has been all about getting back to normal and 2011 has been a good year for us.”

Restorer Profile: Why Kindig-It Design Diversified Its Offerings

By Devlin Smith , December 7, 2011 in Rod Shops

Dave and Charity Kindig recently returned from the SEMA Show, their first time at the show as exhibitors.

“We’ve had many vehicles there on display for the last seven, eight years, but this was the first time that Kindig-It Design has ever had a booth at the SEMA Show and it couldn’t have gone any better,” Dave, who owns the Salt Lake City-based shop with wife Charity, said. “I think that we [beat] it by tenfold what I expected to have out of it as far as business and recognition.”

The couple was at the show promoting Kindig-It Design’s new line of door handles, a product that was designed for in-house use but is now being offered to the masses.

“When you’re building these one-off cars, you build hundreds of parts prototypes,” Dave explained. “The door handles [were] put together back in 2006 for a 1956 Chevy. The theme of that car was to smooth over what the original car was, one of those parts included making the door handle disappear into the car yet they still looked like they were chrome door handles. After developing those, the guys and I got together and I was like, ‘I think we could probably sell a lot of these,’ and so we started looking into manufacturing and then we started realizing that this was going to go really well, and went forward with getting a patent on it.”

The door handle parts are manufactured by an outside company and assembled at Kindig-It Design. A few shops are already selling the door handles and Dave is planning to add more parts to the line.

Restorer Profile: How One Shop Owner Kept His Business Going Through Hard Times

By Ashley Smissen , November 16, 2011 in Rod Shops

Like so many business owners, Bob Alford (above, center) faced some tough choices as the economy slid downward.

“I did have to drop some labor because the amount of work slowed down so I didn’t have enough work,” the owner of Pro Street Customs in Orlando, Florida, said. “At one point [I] had five full-time employees, plus myself, and a couple of part-time guys, but when the economy went into the tank, I had to lay off three guys because I didn’t have enough work to keep them busy.”

Alford also found other places to reduce his expenses and keep his shop going.

“My landlord adjusted my rent for a while just so that I could keep my doors open,” he said. “I didn’t have to close my doors because I did work with my landlord. He was really accommodating for me, so I just kept going and made it through the slow time.”

Though his workload had diminished, Alford was able to bring in enough work to get him, and the employees he had remaining, through the rough times.

Restorer Profile: Why Dan Holohan Expanded His Shop

By Devlin Smith , October 24, 2011 in Rod Shops

Dan Holohan is about to expand his Mooresville, North Carolina shop for the second time in two years.

Dan Holohan’s been working on cars most of his life, but it wasn’t always his intention to open his own restoration shop. He developed his fabrication and metal working skills at his father’s commercial/industrial sheet metal shop, then put those skills into practice on friends’ cars.

That work got the attention of Troy Trepanier with RadRides by Troy, who enlisted Holohan to do metal work on a 1950 Buick that won numerous awards. Holohan did more contract work for Trepanier before joining his staff in 2001.

“I had a good opportunity to be involved with that for a while and got to work on some really great stuff up there,” Holohan said of his time at Manteno, Illinois-based RadRides by Troy. “The majority of my exposure came through him, through that shop.”

Holohan worked at Rad Rides by Troy for six years, leaving the shop in 2007 when he moved to North Carolina and took a job at Detroit Speed. During his two years at Detroit Speed, Holohan began considering opening his own shop.

“Back in late 2009 I decided to go out on my own and make this happen because I’m not getting any younger,” Holohan said. “Being exposed in the industry through the people that I’ve worked for and being involved in the projects that I’ve worked on, I did get some exposure in the industry and my name out there so I had a good jump on things.”

Getting Started

Holohan used the exposure he’d gained and the connections he’d made from the work he’d done at Rad Rides by Troy and Detroit Speed, which included being featured in “Build Book: From Concept to Reality” and various enthusiast magazines, to get Holohan’s Hot Rod Shop Inc., his Mooresville, North Carolina, shop off the ground, both in terms of attracting customers and finding a location.

“I was initially putting things together as far as turning my application in for my business name and doing all the legwork that it takes to open the doors [and] in order to keep some cash flow coming, I was doing some freelance welding for this guy,” Holohan said. “He was in this space and I was sitting in there welding one day and looking at this space, and I started asking him about who the landlord was and what his rent was, so I just contacted the landlord and ended up putting my first space here.”

That first space was 2,500 square feet, just enough room for Holohan to do custom fabrication and metal work, his specialty being custom headers and exhausts. Soon, the projects started backing up and Holohan needed more space, so he rented out the 2,500-square-foot space next door.

Editor’s Corner: Why Steve Chambers Is Selling His Business

By Devlin Smith , October 4, 2011 in E-News, Editor's Corner

Steve Chambers has operated Lockhart Machine for 28 years. He recently decided to put the machine shop up for sale.

Quite often when I’m interviewing a shop owner for an article, I’ll get an idea for another story. In an answer or the chit-chat at the end of an interview, the owner will mention a project they’re working on, an event they’re hosting or an expansion they’re planning, and as soon as I finish the first article, I’m already contacting the owner for another interview.

When I was interviewing Steve Chambers, owner of Lockhart Machine in Jasper, Ontario, Canada, for the September Better Business article about shop websites, he mentioned that he was considering selling his business. I asked him to keep me posted on his decision because that process was something I definitely felt would make an interesting story.

A Look Inside a ‘Chop Cut Rebuild’ Shop: CW Restoration Shop

By Devlin Smith , September 14, 2011 in Rod Shops

Chris Womack was watching “Chop Cut Rebuild,” a Speed channel show that charts the progress of a custom build, when he thought his shop might be great for the show. On a whim, he e-mailed the show’s production company, but didn’t expect a call or e-mail in return.

“I got really lucky because within two hours the host, Dan Woods, called me and it turned out that they were actually in the process of trying to find a shop to build a car,” Womack, owner of CW Restoration Shop in Huntington Beach, California, said. “It just happened to be lucky timing on my part. If I had waited a few more weeks, we would not have been able to do the show.”

At the time he e-mailed the show, Womack had several Corvettes, a 1969 Camaro and a 1955 Nomad in his shop, any of which he believed “Chop Cut Rebuild” would want to document. The show’s producers had other ideas.

“Dan wasn’t necessarily interested in some of the cars we had because this is season eight that we’re filming and over the past seven seasons they’ve done two or three Camaros and last season they did a Corvette, and so all the cars that I had in here, he wasn’t really interested in,” Womack said.

The show had also just signed a deal with General Motors to feature one of its E-Rod LS3 motors in a build, so Womack would need to find a GM vehicle. Luckily, a potential client had just the car.

A Look Inside Schraders Speed & Style

By Devlin Smith , August 17, 2011 in Business Resources, Rod Shops

Mike Abssy recently changed his shop hours. With summer afternoon temperatures passing the 100-degree mark in Azusa, California, the owner of Schraders Speed & Style starts work as early as 5 a.m. so he can close his doors by 2 p.m. to avoid the worst of the afternoon heat.

Making his own hours is one of the benefits Abssy is afforded by running a one-man shop. He can also work offsite, spending whole days working on customers’ cars at their homes.

“I have 100-percent flexibility,” he said. “I have one client [that has] a beautiful shop and I do work for them at their facility and I charge an hourly rate just like I would here, so that’s one great example of flexibility, being able to go to do work like that.”

Abssy didn’t always have this kind of flexibility. When he started Schraders in 2002, his plan was to create a restoration brand complete with a huge shop, multiple employees, and a line of products and branded merchandise.

“Business at the shop was always steady,” he said. “Almost from the very beginning it seemed like there was a lot of work out there. I started as a one-man show in 1,500 square feet and within two years, I was just bursting at the seams, so I expanded into another unit and I was in 3,000 square feet.

“About a year after that, I expanded [to a shop totaling] 5,500 square feet, and at that point I had a product line [and] I tried to get more involved in setting up online retail because I was a dealer for all kinds of product lines,” he said.

Abssy was also employing four installers during this busy time. But as his business grew, he started feeling it was unsustainable.

“I kept running more and more money through the business and it was less and less profitable,” he said. “I wasn’t really sure why that was happening but it was a lot of a headache and it took the passion out of why I did this in the first place.”

Editor’s Corner: Benefiting From Someone Else’s Hard-Learned Lessons

By Devlin Smith , July 27, 2011 in Editor's Corner, Rod Shops

By Devlin Smith

I don’t always get the chance to visit the shops I write about each month in “Restorer Profile,” but I will jump at the opportunity whenever it comes up. For our upcoming August issue, I profiled Schraders Speed & Style , located about 30 minutes from my house, so I drove out there to photograph the shop and meet owner Mike Abssy face-to-face.

Abssy and I expanded on the topics we’d discussed during our phone interview the week before while I snapped picture of the work bay and four projects currently in progress at Schraders. As Abssy talked about the different things he’s been doing to run his downsized business more efficiently, he often mentioned the more-experienced builders in Southern California who he’s turned to for advice. More than once Abssy said that the builders who have acted as mentors and sounding boards to him have gone through so many of the same situations he has in running a business and have been more than happy to share the lessons they’ve learned with him.

Restorer Profile: A Look Inside Johnny’s Auto Trim

By Devlin Smith , July 19, 2011 in Rod Shops

John Martin stands with his staff and the 1962 Corvette they built.

John Martin is about to lose one of his employees. That’s a big hit for any busy shop, but the pain is multiplied for Martin not just because that employee is his college-bound son, Ryan, but because his departure will also reduce Martin’s core staff of four down to three.

This year, Johnny’s Auto Trim, the shop Martin and his family have operated in Alamosa, Colorado, since 1989, gained national attention when a 1962 Corvette built at his shop was named to the “Great 8” at the Detroit Autorama in February. That attention, furthered by Martin’s travels to car shows around the country with the honored Corvette (which you can read more about on Page 38), is bringing in more customers and demanding tough choices be made at the small shop.

“We’re kind of at a breaking point right now,” Martin said. “This Corvette has brought in a lot of new customers to us, so we’re at a spot in the game where we need to decide if we’re going to get bigger or if we’re comfortable with the size we’re at, and take it from there.”

Restorer Profile: Using Racing Knowledge to Build Street Rods

By Devlin Smith , June 14, 2011 in Rod Shops

Jeff Spraker founded his company 31 years ago working only on race cars. Today, street rod builds account for half of his business.

Jeff Spraker knew from the time he was 12 years old that he wanted to spend his life working on cars. He’d grown up around cars—his father was a car dealer and his mother sold advertising for car dealerships. He became a race fan and worked on cars with his friends.

After high school, Spraker got his degree in mechanical engineering, focusing his studies on automotive design and vehicle dynamics. With this background, Spraker decided to start his own business at the age of 19.

“In the business of racing, it takes capital, and I really couldn’t find anybody that wanted to back me so what I did was I sold stock in myself,” he said. “We started with a few people that bought stock in us and over the years I’ve managed to buy everybody out but one gentleman who [still] owns a small percentage of the company.”

Spraker Racing Enterprises got its start in upstate New York, doing design, development and engineering work for race teams and the automotive industry. Within a few years, clients started asking Spraker if he could do street rod builds for them as well.

“A fellow approached me about doing a 1934 Willys sedan with a big-block,” he said. “That’s just where it all took off.”

Today, muscle car and street rod builds account for 50 percent of the business at Spraker Racing Enterprises, which relocated from upstate New York to Mooresville, North Carolina, in 2001 after the shop was hired by Dale Earnhardt Sr. to develop a laser alignment system for his race cars. The company still operates a small location in Schenectady, New York.