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Brad Updegraff is the Owner of Dave’s Ultimate Automotive, which has six locations in Texas. He started as a lube technician in a small, Austin-based gas station and repair shop in 1998 and moved into the front office as an advisor in 2001. Brad worked his way up to being a manager, acquired his ASE certification, and started working for Dave’s Ultimate Automotive as an advisor in 2010. He bought the original location in 2012 and expanded to six locations by 2016.
In this episode…
If you’re an employee at a tire and auto repair shop, you probably enjoy what you do. Have you ever thought about moving up within the industry? Are you a good technician? Do you like communicating with people? If so, you may have what it takes! To hear the story of someone who successfully navigated his way to the top, check out this episode of Gain Traction!
Brad Updegraff of Dave’s Ultimate Automotive started as a lube technician and now owns six locations. He said he had been working in the industry for about two years, and one day, “I just remember stopping when I was under the hood and realizing that I actually understood more of the mechanics than I had in previous days, and it gave me this confidence that I needed to continue to build on this, and move forward and see what that turned into.” Brad built on his passion for helping people solve their car problems.
On this episode of Gain Traction, you’ll hear from Brad, who joins Mike Edge for a conversation about advancing through the automotive industry. He shares how he got his start, gained confidence in his abilities, embraced his passion for helping people, and developed his leadership skills — “I was the first to show up and the last one to leave. I was accountable for everything” — shaping the culture of his shop. Tune in to hear Brad talk about how a positive environment can impact a customer’s day!
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- When Brad Updegraff knew he wanted to own his own tire and auto repair shop
- How a robbery at a pizza restaurant motivated Brad to work in the automotive industry
- Why each Dave’s Ultimate Automotive shop is in its specific location
- How leadership can positively impact business culture
- The perspective Brad has gained from being deaf in his right ear
- Brad’s top travel destination
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Transcription
Announcer:
Welcome to the Gain Traction Podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Mike Edge:
Welcome To the Gain Traction Podcast, Mike Edge here. I am one of the hosts of Gain Traction where I talk with automotive business leaders about their personal journey and experiences in the tire and auto repair industry.
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So I’m excited about our guest today. My guest today is Brad Updegraff, owner of Dave’s Ultimate Automotive. Brad got into the industry in 1998 as a lube technician in a small gas station repair shop in Austin. Worked under some great folks and learned a lot, moved into the front office as an advisor in 2001, worked up to manager in a short period of time. He acquired his ASE certification and went to work for Dave’s as an advisor in 2010. He killed it there and had an opportunity to buy the first location in 2012. Expanded to six locations by 2016 and has been optimized and grown the company ever since. Brad, welcome to the program.
Brad Updegraff:
Thank you, Mike. It’s great to be here today.
Mike:
Glad to have you. So we got a little taste of how you got in the business. What made you step into it? Was it like a first job? I mean, what made you get into the tech side when you got started?
Brad:
It’s funny, I actually took some high school automotive classes mainly because I wanted to make sure I knew how to change my own tire and check my own oil as my dad recommended. But definitely I felt an attachment to that and I had the opportunity to get into the industry when I had a short assistant manager role at a pizza place that turned negative when I got robbed so I decided, “You know what? Food service is not for me, let’s try automotive.” And I got to really get into it from there.
Mike:
So how old were you?
Brad:
That would’ve put me at 17.
Mike:
Okay. Excellent. So you’ve gone forward and never looked back and now you’re an owner. I mean, at what point did you know you wanted to stay in the industry?
Brad:
There was about a two year mark of being a general service technician where I walked into the shop. I even remember the car, it was a Buick with the 3.8 liter and I was going into diagnose or basically to check out a battery. I just remember stopping when I was under the hood and just realizing that I actually understood more of the mechanics than I had in previous days and it just kind of gave me this confidence that I needed to continue to build on this and move forward and see what that turned into. I thought I’d wind up as a technician just based on how my instincts and my desire were for technical, but I realized that helping people was actually more attractive when it was all said and done and having that face to face interaction and helping be kind of a problem solver for people that were having car trouble and to definitely changed the passion for what I was doing in the industry. But yeah, I just kind of ran with it from there.
Mike:
That’s awesome. I mean, you liked the technical side but then you ended up really liking the people side?
Brad:
Yeah.
Mike:
Okay.
Brad:
In fact, I actually kind of studied both while I was learning how to be an all around better manager and service advisor. I actually was still going to a lot of technician training classes. So I wound up actually getting master technician certified without really professionally turning a wrench. It’s really learning a lot from the folks I was working with.
Mike:
That’s awesome. So I take it you’ve got that personality where you want to walk people through the problem. I mean look at it this way, I guess. And you know this. I mean, nobody wants to call you. I mean, in our industry that’s just the light, right?
Brad:
Right.
Mike:
I mean we solve problems, we fix their problems but we try to make it as friendly as we can.
Brad:
Absolutely. Yeah, auto repair’s kind of a harsh reality. Everybody kind of has to deal with it. So certainly our job at Dave’s is to make that experiences unimpactful to somebody’s everyday business and just kind of going about their day and as welcoming and as positive as it can possibly be when somebody’s handing you a credit card at the end of the day.
Mike:
So I had a quick question, it just came through my head here. So you do retail but do you do any small commercial fleets?
Brad:
Yeah. Yeah, we actually have some local fleets that have brought in business. It really started out with just simple helping them out in the parking lot scenarios and just our willingness to give them a hand and at a hard time give us an opportunity to have some pretty cool accounts along the way.
Mike:
That’s awesome. I mean I think that’s obviously a right business. And at the end of the day, their trucks or vehicles have to be back on the road. They’re losing money if they’re not there and that’s where they rely on you guys. Do you guys do contracts with them or how’s that set up?
Brad:
We don’t actually build contracts for them simply because it’s benefited us and the companies we’ve worked with to remain somewhat fluid. Some cases your drivers aren’t necessarily in the same part of town that your shop is. So having some fluidity to working in the other shops. We have six locations in the Austin area so it gives them some flexibility there. We do contract on certain things like price structure just to make sure that they understand that we’re billing at a certain rate or if we have a specific discount program that we work with and certainly payment terms. But outside of that, there’s really not much else.
Mike:
I gotcha. Well, that’s good. I think it’s healthy too and it’s built around service and what you do for them. When you grew the company to six locations with… Obviously our audience can’t see a map right now but how did you space them out and know how far out you wanted to be from the next one? Because you are primarily in the Austin market.
Brad:
Sure.
Mike:
So how did you grow that?
Brad:
Well, as small as Austin really is, it’s still quite a big city. And fortunately, the first acquisition we had was the North Austin location. So Dave originally had two stores existing. One was in the heart of downtown Austin and then one was in North Austin, very close to the border of Pflugerville. We took over the North Austin first and our next growth was actually in Pflugerville just due to an opportunity that came up. It was the ideal building size we were looking for. So we kind of have a minimum requirement of 10 bays, it needs to be at least that. We had the best opportunity kind of come up really at the right time so we moved into that.
And I will say definitely geographically that was probably not the best logistical move because we did see quite a few customers that realized, “Hey, you’re closer to home.” So naturally they’d move their business. We probably saw about 15% of our customers just transfer simply for just a closer location. I was a little nervous with that, but to be honest with you, it sounds like what we learned after the fact is that we really just had to turn the faucets back on and let the rest of the traffic that we’ve been holding off on being able to help come in. So we were able to replace that customer base quite quickly.
Mike:
Oh man, that’s awesome. Do you guys see yourselves growing in the next 1, 3, 5 years?
Brad:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Okay. Yeah.
Brad:
Expansion’s on our mind all the time.
Mike:
Have you done any greenfield? Build new ones?
Brad:
No. No, we haven’t. Closest thing we’ve had is kind of a full renovation, for lack of a better term, at our Cedar Park location. It needed kind of an overhaul from the inside out. Pflugerville was similar too. We kind of had an open shell that we’d had to put equipment and everything else into. But we’re tenants in each one of our properties, we do not own any of them.
Mike:
Okay. I mean long term you don’t see yourself ever owning? Your just not wanting to getting that side?
Brad:
If it was the right deal, yes. The challenge you run into obviously with building a business is you’re not able to turn revenue certainly until it’s built and then afterwards you still have to build a bit of a customer base up to it. So you can be dealing with a couple years of operating in the red. So your company’s certainly got to be financially healthy enough to support that. But it certainly had… That aspect alone has really just kept it less attractive to me. But I’m always open to the right deal.
Mike:
No, I hear you. And it makes sense. I mean, I get it. You can jump right into business, you already know what you need. Granted, revenue may be a little slow in the beginning, but you’re not in a bigger hole, you know?
Brad:
Yeah.
Mike:
I get it. Well let me ask you this, just from a personal side, do you have somebody that might have been a big influence in your life in regards to professionally kind of the mentor? Was that Dave or was it a dad or anybody else?
Brad:
Dave was definitely one of them. I’d say probably my last automotive mentor. My first was actually my old boss at the gas station repair shop that gave me my first opportunity. He was this old angry german weightlifter guy that always had some one liner to say as he was walking out the door and slamming it. He reminded me a lot of my dad and I just kind of grew to really appreciate the guy for his knowledge and information. But he also had a really soft heart and knew how to take care of people and customers in a very unique way. That’s really what got me just totally excited for what I was doing inside the office.
Coming over to Dave’s, I had already known of Dave having just an amazing reputation for his company in our industry for being kind of just a trailblazers and pioneers, especially as the internet started to open up to the automotive world. And so I knew I needed to join up with this guy at some point. I actually had a mutual vendor of ours kind of make the connection so I could actually get to meet Dave. We sat down for what I thought was an awesome lunch and kind of shook hands and it was, “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got an idea in mind.” And about a year later I still hadn’t heard from the guy, so I was like, “Well, maybe it wasn’t that great of a lunch.”
But true to form, he, about a year later, gave me a call and said, “Man, I’ve got a spot. You’re going to have to really think outside the box with me on this one, but I’m going to bring you in as an advisor. I think you can do the work of two people, so I’m going to test that out. And if so, then you’ve got a heck of an opportunity in front of you.” So I came in and did my part and put myself in a good position for Dave.
But with kind of going back to the mentorship, the guy just had an amazing tool belt of things I could apply to helping customers to making the shop more efficient to just everything, how we estimate. And so really just being able to have somebody that was that open minded and free thinking and really had the big picture. I mean, I think he had the mindset of what it was like to be a technician and staffed and built his shop that way. Stockroom was something I’d never seen before. It actually had every shop supply you could possibly need in your shop. Just things that seemed just very smart for being efficient in this industry. And so really I just couldn’t get enough anything he had to say. He’d come back from a super conference with a 20 different podcast, or not podcast at the time, but little audio cast that I’d sit there and listen to on my truck, driving to work and back. I mean, I couldn’t get enough info. I was a sponge at that point.
Mike:
That’s awesome. So you sound like you’re just a sponge for information probably then? You like to just constantly learn?
Brad:
Definitely.
Mike:
Yeah. What’s a big milestone you feel like you guys have overcome or a milestone you’ve reached or something you’ve overcome and the growth for your business?
Brad:
That’s a fantastic question. I think we’ve got a few. I had a business partner for a short amount of time-
Mike:
Oh [inaudible 00:12:36]. Okay.
Brad:
… that when we initially bought out with Dave. And our third investment was the Round Rock location that we expanded to. That was a store where the seller had cooked the books terribly.
Mike:
Oh, my god.
Brad:
We took over a business that was terribly underrepresented. It took a considerable amount of time to turn that around. But I consider that really one of my bigger successes because we just went all in with this thing. We knew and we felt good about what we were doing and the processes that we had put in place that were successful at our other two locations at that time. And we just stuck to the script and it turned into now one of our best businesses from a profitability standpoint. It happens to be one of our smaller shops.
Mike:
Man, that’s a big deal though. I mean, [inaudible 00:13:24] coming. Yeah. Because you got to make up your mind, man. “What do we do here? Go forward or we stop?” But that’s impressive. But obviously like you said, you were confident in the processes you had already put in place and it was just grind it out. So how’s that location doing now?
Brad:
It’s actually, from a performance standpoint, top on the profitability side of things. From a just generalized output, they’ve got a higher productivity rating than any of my other shops. Their customer service ratings on Google and Yelp are stand up there with the shops that have been performing at the beginning. So I couldn’t be happier honestly.
Mike:
Oh man, that’s fantastic. So in your professionalism, what is a daily ritual that you find most important? One or two that you that feel like you, in order to be successful, “I got to do these one or two things every day.” At least. Not that it’s only one or two things, but…
Brad:
I’m going to give you an answer that’s not at the 5,000 foot level. At store level, coming in every day and walking the talk, making sure that I’m leading by example. When I was running the store, I was the first to show up and the last one to leave. I was accountable for everything. I audited the success or how good we were about following the processes internally on a daily basis. There was just a lot of accountability. I think that everybody working around me up their game just because of the fact that I wasn’t going to settle for anything less. So it creates a really good culture for your team when you’re able to operate at a high level in the management side.
In my day to day position now, I find that I can be the best advocate for my store managers and my regional manager if I’m in the right place mentally. So I wake up every day and think about what I need to be grateful for in my life. I make sure that I take some time to exercise and to get my head right about everything. And I come in and regardless of what might be going on in the personal life, at work I’m acting like this is the best thing in my life every day because I owe my employees that.
Mike:
Man, that is awesome. I mean, you really try to work on having just that positive mental attitude then no matter what.
Brad:
Absolutely.
Mike:
And then when you get to the stores, it’s work time and be happy, right?
Brad:
Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah, because I mean at the end of the day, like I said, we talked about earlier that your customers, they don’t really want to be there in the first place. It’s not like it’s a hobby for purchase. It’s not like, “Hey, I’m buying golf clubs today because I like golf.” But no, that’s awesome. It’s very inspiring to hear you say that because you make the effort to do it. It’s not like it’s just your personality, but “I’m going to focus on giving my best for my employees.”
I heard a guy say this one time in business, it wasn’t the same industry but he said, “The first thing I do is I try to treat my first level… My first set of customers is really my employees. They’re my customers to me personally. And I got to make them believe in what I’m doing and who I am to them. And if they do buy in, I know they’ll take care of my secondary customer, which is the one paying the bill.”
Brad:
That’s exactly right. Coming back to your point of it not being a very fun visit to go to the repair shop, it’s a lot easier to swallow when that team that you walk into and that front door is smiling at you when you walk in instead of a bunch of frowning faces or somebody that’s indifferent that you’re there.
Mike:
Well, and the other thing I think everybody’s always talked about in the industry, and this is old school, I’m going back, and you’ll probably remember meeting these kind of guys, but the mechanics, they used to talk down to people. Almost like, “You don’t know this.” You know what I mean? And it was kind of like… But now everybody I think recognizes that customer service, I mean in this industry, I don’t know about you, but I feel like it goes so much further in this industry than any other industry because first of all, some people just don’t have an interest in their car. They just want to know, “Man, I turned that key. I hit the gas pedal. I put it in drive. I hit the gas pedal and it goes where I want it to go.” That’s as much as they’re interested in their vehicle.
Brad:
No, you’re absolutely right. To further that point, I mean your customer base has actually made a pretty large shift where actually the majority is female now. So making sure that we have an environment that is female-friendly and to be able to not mansplain the repair needs and put it down into simple facts that are understandable.
We use a digital vehicle inspection program at all of our shops that helps with pictures and tangibility and really just helps build those relationships along the way. So it feels like whether we’re dealing with Mr or Mrs. Smith, they feel like they’re 100% in charge of the decision making process when it comes to what we’re doing with their vehicle. We’re just there to advise. We’re not really salespeople. It’s really just there for education and explaining and helping prioritize if necessary.
Mike:
Yeah. And I think you’re touching on a point that’s really important, it’s transparency. And if they feel like you’re being transparent with them and not hiding, then they’re more likely to do what they need to do for their vehicle. They don’t feel like they’re being, like you mentioned, sold, or you’re the sales guy just trying to make a profit off of them.
Brad:
Yep, absolutely.
Mike:
Absolutely. Well, what’s something on a personal level… I don’t ask this one a lot, but I think it’s fun to ask and you seem like you got a good personality for it. What’s something that most people don’t know about you? A quirk, strange habit, hobby, something like that.
Brad:
It’s one I wish more people did know just so it would avoid the confusion, but I’m deaf in my right ear.
Mike:
Really?
Brad:
Which as you can imagine, creates some challenges. I had a lot of people thinking I’m just a big giant jerk for ignoring them. And in reality, my wife’s in the background trying to go, “No, no, no, he’s just deaf.” That’s one thing that has given me kind of a different perspective in life. You try to learn how to live life with what the hand you’ve been dealt. Obviously, that’s a hindrance when you can’t tell direction of… Half the things you should hear, you can. And then the other half you can’t tell where it came from. There’s definitely some challenges with that, but I’d say that’s one of the unique things that not everybody knows.
Mike:
The reason I laughed is because my son played with a kid in football when they were in high school that was deaf in one of his ears and the coach was yelling at him and he didn’t hear him. The coach finally gets in his face. Now he knows he’s there, right? And then he says, “What are you deaf?” He goes, “Yeah, I’m deaf. You moron.” And then of course the coach is [inaudible 00:20:11] like, “I’m deeply sorry.”
Brad:
Yeah, probably. “Oh, I’m sorry. Don’t call the HR.”
Mike:
Exactly. But I mean it was honest mistake because football coaches get intense and if they don’t think you’re listening to them, it’s like…
Brad:
Oh yeah.
Mike:
But my son, even the kid loved it. I mean, they both got a kick out of it, whatever, but it was… yeah. But I could see where that would be a challenge. People think you’re probably ignoring them or something. I mean, you’re not ignoring them. “I can’t hear you.”
Brad:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike:
That’s great. That’s a great story. You got a great attitude about it. Well, on another personal level, I like to ask people something in regards to what they like to do. What’s one of your favorite places to visit if you like to travel?
Brad:
Oh, like a dream vacation for me, I love going to Jamaica.
Mike:
Yeah? How many times have you been? You sound like you go a lot? Or have you been-
Brad:
I’ve only been once, but we try to make the most of it. We brought my family down there and we stayed in Montego Bay, but we did everything from the Dunn’s River Falls where you climb up that big waterfall, to a haunted house, to swimming at night in a bioluminescent lagoon that kind of glows when you swim in it. The people there are amazing. The food is incredible. I mean, there was not one thing I could look at and consider that a place I wouldn’t want go back to.
Mike:
That’s fantastic.
Brad:
I’ve been in a couple places, but that’s the one that stands out the most to me.
Mike:
So Jamaica. Jamaica, Montego Bay?
Brad:
Uh-huh.
Mike:
All right. So folks, if you want to go somewhere, there’s a great recommendation for you.
Brad:
There you go.
Mike:
Well, we’ve come up on our hard stop, but I want to thank you for being on the Gain Traction Podcast. It’s been a pleasure.
Brad:
Hey, I enjoyed it, Mike. Thank you.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we’ll have you back in a year or so and see where you’re at in a number of stores and how it’s going.
Brad:
Happy to do it, and I’ll be hopefully adding some to this table.
Mike:
Excellent. So to all our listeners out there, thank you for being part of the Gain Traction podcast. If you’d like to recommend a guest to us, please email me at [email protected]. Until next time, have a great day and stay safe.
Announcer:
Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
Transcript
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