Specialized Auto Inc.: A bradening specialized service center

While the genesis of Specialized Auto Inc. was in the retail of used Volkswagen parts, since becoming "specialized" it ironically has broadened its market base to include other services and Euro-marques like Volvo, Saab, Audi, BMW and Mercedes.

Founded in 1982 by Tom Cook, Import Auto Recycling serviced Santa Cruz, Calif.'s considerable VW crowd for more than a decade before Cook decided to retire and sell the store. Billed as ripe for conversion into a full service shop, Mercedes Master Technician Bob Emmert jumped at the opportunity to go independent, and with financing from Cook, reopened the shop as Specialized Auto Inc. in 1994.

"I could've just started from scratch and hung out a shingle," explains Emmert. "But what attracted me to this business was that it was well known in the community, was well-established, had plenty of room with cheap rent to open a repair shop and it would be fairly easy to convert a pretty good percentage of (the old client base)...So it just naturally evolved. We've had double-digit growth every year (since then)."

Today, the used parts business is a very small portion of Specialized. "We still do some retail in the context that we are a specialty shop and have access to vendors with prices that a lot of independent shops don't have," Emmert observes. "Because of our size, we buy parts at a pretty good price and have a pretty good inventory, so smaller shops will buy parts from us. But we are not a direct dealer for any of those cars."

Emmert instead modeled his shop after the customer service practiced at his old dealership, one of the best in Northern California, "but not after their level of price," he points out.

"Providing an extremely high level of customer service, we were able to grow our business from one tech, then two, (to the point that) four years later we were looking for real estate to try to build our own shop, which if you knew the property prices in our area is not easy to do," he adds. "We were very fortunate...to obtain some raw land at a price that was difficult, but manageable."

Breaking ground in 1998 on an acre of land, Emmert opened his new 8,100-square-foot facility in 2000. "People were calling it the 'Garage Mahal,'" he notes. "No one thought that an independent repair shop in a little beach town could ever support such a facility. We were able to obtain some parking from our neighbor, because we could never do the volume without it. Parking really is the key to growth of this business, and it's still a problem."

This is especially true after he expanded his business further by downsizing the parts warehouse. Now at the saturation point on his original store, Emmert currently is expanding into another site 15 miles to the south in Freedom, Calif. Located in more of a rural location, the new shop was once a heavy truck repair facility, to which Emmert is adapting his approach.

"We're trying to recapture the truck fleet business," he outlines, having rechristened the new store Specialized Auto and Fleet. "We are going to market ourselves, cold calling outside sales to fleet accounts and try to find that midsize contracting company with 15 to 20 trucks or vans, and try to give them the same level of customer service that we give our highline car drivers. Now with three different business models in this new facility (parts retail, import auto repair, truck repair), we're just going to go with whatever catches traction."