From Charity To Empowerment: Why Susan Bought An Auto Shop

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She Didn’t Just Give Money. She Bought Them A Job.

I work a lot with women in the trades and other businesses, so when you hear a woman owning an auto shop, you’re like, oh, that’s one interesting thing. Susan did something that most people would never think to do. After sponsoring two Ukrainian families and seeing how difficult it was for them to stabilize here in the United States, she didn’t want to stop at just temporary support. She bought an existing auto repair shop in Point Loma here in California and created a real pathway for them to have work and dignity and community.

It started the day the war started in Ukraine. Susan had just retired after 30 years of employment and was home watching the news, in disbelief about watching this country be destroyed, the invasion, and she decided that day she needed to do something. She didn’t want to be the person who sits around and does nothing.

She didn’t know what that looked like at first. She had technical skills, database programming, things like that, so she thought she would use those. She started with an organization that had just formed called Volunteers for Ukraine, and then had an opportunity to go to Lithuania, Poland, and Spain where she got to meet people who fled Ukraine. But on that trip, what inspired her the most was the people who stopped everything, opened their homes, their businesses, their churches.

So she came home and signed up to host a family through World Relief. She decided she could do two weeks. That sounded good. So she signed up to host a family for two weeks. And then that turned into a month, and then a couple months, and then a couple years, and a second family.

San Diego has maybe 5,000 Ukrainians, a huge community. She’s come to love all of these people, and they were having a good time and meeting people and doing lots of things. And then last summer, she realized that they’re having issues with their temporary status, their humanitarian parole, their work authorization, all these complicated things. She had done everything she could to support the community, everything within her power.

A year ago, the business piece started. She had sponsored these families and both of the men are fantastic mechanics. They had their own businesses and they’re just really talented, but they came with a suitcase and a family. Both of them have two small kids and not a lot of language. They don’t speak English, and she could see the talent.

So she originally said to Greca, who’s the first family she sponsored, when you find something, I’ll invest in you. She really wanted to invest because she could see that he’s very talented. And she thought that would be like buying him some tools or something like that. She didn’t think it would be a business.

She has a friend who has a big auto dismantling company and kept trying to get a job for Greca and Sasha at his company. And then one day he reaches out and says, “Hey, I know this guy who’s retiring and he’s selling his business. It might be the perfect thing for you.” So she showed up 15 minutes later to this shop and walked in, in her little leopard print skirt, and said, “I hear you have a business for sale.” And he just kind of looks at her. He’s an older Polish guy, just over his glasses, like, “Really?” And she’s like, “Yeah, and I have the perfect guy for you.” And he’s just looking at her, but she was serious.

So she met with him a couple times. And Greca actually, as soon as they found out it was for sale, dropped everything and went to work for him just to see if it was a good match.

And so then she came to trying to buy the business, and she’s a woman, no auto experience, never owned a business. So there’s all these hurdles. No, she couldn’t get a loan. She had the money in her retirement fund, but her advisor was saying, “Don’t take that much out. You should find another way.” So she went to the owner and said, “This is what I can offer you. 25% down in payments.” And he said, “Okay.” And she was like, “Really?”

So she bought it. She was terrified. Absolutely terrified. But knowing that she has two amazing, very talented men standing behind her in this. She took it over April 1st of last year, and they’ve been operating it for a little over a year now. So it’s going well, and the first year they spent a lot of time cleaning it, painting it, freshening it up, organizing. It’s very different than when they bought it. This year they want to expand their customer base and start advertising, because it’s a small shop and people don’t know they’re there.

Buying The Business

There’s a lot that goes into buying an existing business and taking over customers and reputation and managing all of these things while also carrying a much bigger mission.

She had no idea what it would be like to go in. She tends to be a caring person, wants to please people, wants to make people happy, wants to do a good job. One hard lesson is that not everybody is nice in the world. They’ve had a couple of things where people didn’t turn out to be who she thought they were, but lesson learned, moving on.

She really just trusts her mechanics, and they work really well together. She listens to them, and they’re synergistic. She works the front, they work the back, and they’re really skilled. She’s really just kind of protecting them, and that’s her role, to protect them and let them do what they do well, and they let her do what she does well.

The hardest part, or maybe not the hardest but the learning curve, is all the bookkeeping and licensing and taxes and payroll, all those things. It’s a lot. So she’s learning about all the things you have to do to own a business. But the business itself is healthy and doing well, and they’re planning to advertise and expand this year.

 

The Business Lessons

Buying an existing business is usually easier than starting from scratch because there’s already customers, but it also comes with baggage. In Susan’s case, they cleaned up the place aesthetically, but it was pretty clean. They had an existing customer base that was pretty loyal, and they’ve kept a large portion of those customers. There’s a couple customers they’ve probably priced out, or who had really older cars they’re choosing not to work on. But it felt pretty clean and seamless, because cars, you come in, you fix them, and then they leave. So there wasn’t a whole lot of baggage, and they made the transaction very clean.

Now they’re carving out their niche. One phrase Greca likes to tell her all the time is not everyone is our customer. So now they’re targeting who those people are that they’d like to service.

On the financial side, she went to her financial advisor and was told, “Nope, do not take this money out.” So instead she leveraged seller financing, owner financing, giving a down payment and then making payments. Most people don’t even think about that as an option, even though it’s probably one of the best ways to do it. It’s your price on my terms, or my price on your terms. So many people don’t even come up with that. They think they have to have all the money right now if they want to do this, and that’s absolutely not true.

She also priced people accordingly instead of underpricing out of fear of losing somebody. Small percentage increases only serve to put more money back in the owner’s pocket, money that can be invested back into the business, into the team, into the causes she cares about. The math is skewed in your favor when you do that, even though you think everybody’s going to leave. Not true.

And defining a niche is key. Now they specialize in European vehicles. European vehicles are usually tougher to work on, and the owners probably care a lot more about those vehicles. They pay better, and that’s established the shop a certain way.

Operationally, it was a really small shop. The previous owner had one technician underneath him and a junior technician who helped. Then Greca came and started working there, so it was really two technicians. Since then the other technician left, and the second family she sponsored, Sasha, came on. So they have two technicians now and aren’t working at full capacity. They have three racks and could hire a third technician. She’s actually just hired someone to run the front desk who’s also very skilled and talented, doesn’t know cars but loves cars, is talented, young, energetic, and wants to come help grow the business.

She wants somebody who answers the phone, who knows cars, and can really make the customers feel comfortable, so she can just run the backend stuff and run the business. She doesn’t need to be there every day. She’s extracting herself from the operations of the business, delegating well, and putting herself in the actual owner and CEO seat of the vision of the company and the direction and the foundation of everything.

 

Empowerment, Not Just Charity

It’s been such a blessing for Susan to watch them flourish in their skills. Sasha, her other mechanic, the second family she sponsored, is an artisan welder. He would make custom exhaust systems back home and has all these skills. He’s just fantastic. She actually asked him just yesterday if he could make some samples so she could show people what he does. He’s a man of very few words, doesn’t like to talk a lot. They just give him the cars and he’s dead focused on them and does amazing repairs.

She knows in her heart that these two families, she wants to help everybody, but she can’t help everyone. But she can help these two families. And they don’t know their future. Their status here is very temporary. That’s why she’s doing the advocacy, to try and get Washington to at least let them work legally, because there are issues there. But in the long run, she’s hopeful that they can somehow find a pathway to stay here, and this is the beginning of their life here and their future.

She hears so many stories from Ukrainian people who came literally with a suitcase. They left everything, their families, their friends, their stuff, and they just show up in another country and have to start over. With nothing.

It feels really good to know that they’ve started something and want to make it grow. This is the year of growth for them. She doesn’t really know the future, but they’re at least doing something. She always comes back to: I can do nothing, or I can do something. I have two choices. So these are her somethings. She bought the business. They’ll make it work. They’ll figure it out. That’s their favorite phrase, we’ll figure it out. They just have to do it.

 

The Advocacy Work

With the advocacy side, as she was seeing everybody struggle, she said, I could do nothing or I could do something, and I’m choosing to do something. Last summer she noticed everyone was suffering about their status and work authorizations. She had this idea: she’s out of resources, they need to go to Washington, that’s the only place this kind of change can happen.

She talked to a pastor friend about it, and literally 15 minutes later, walked into a paddleboard store to get wheels, and the owner of that store was a woman. They were chatting, and at the end the woman mentioned she had a second business, a governmental affairs consulting firm. Just 15 minutes after saying they needed to go to Washington. They met with her firm and the people who are very into helping Ukrainians in San Diego, a small group, met a couple times, and decided to hire that firm through a GoFundMe. She calls it a project, not a nonprofit, because she wants it to have a good positive ending. It’s called Voice for UA, and they’ve raised money to hire professional lobbyists to go to Washington to try and make a difference for these families, not just the ones in San Diego but for all of them in the United States who came because of the war.

She boils it down to two phrases: short-term stabilization, and long-term legalization or pathway forward. Everybody who came because of the invasion of 2022 is pretty much here on a temporary status. They either entered through humanitarian parole, which is legal entry but not legal status and can end abruptly, or if they came before a certain date they could apply for temporary protected status, which is more protected, protected from deportation, but that’s ending for all of them on October 19th of this year. TPS is around 18 months, and humanitarian parole is around two years. Every year they also have to reapply for work authorization, and that expires every year. They’re applying, and the government isn’t renewing it.

They’ve applied, paid thousands of dollars for these statuses, and they’re just in a holding pattern, not knowing their future. This is impacting people very close to her. The work authorization is somebody just saying, “Yeah, renew their authorization, prioritize it, let them work legally.” It doesn’t make sense to her, as America, to let people come into the country, contribute, pay taxes, and then leave them in limbo. The October 19th date is coming very soon, and many people right now have expired work authorizations, trying to figure out what to do, because if you work without that authorization, you’re jeopardizing any pathway forward, and you could be picked up by ICE.

Their first goal is to get somebody in Washington to say yes, let them work legally while they’re here. The second is to give them the option, if they want to stay, to apply for a green card or something like that, because right now there’s no option to stay. The two families she sponsored have been here three and a half and four years. They have small kids who speak perfect English now, learning American history. You would not know they weren’t born in California. And to send them back, their country is destroyed.

What the community needs most isn’t financial support. They’re hardworking, entrepreneurial, educated. They really just need documentation, to let them figure out their lives. It’s within just one person making a signature and saying, let’s let them work. It’s that simple. So she just needs more voices advocating on their behalf, calling congressmen, pushing.

 

What Susan Would Tell Someone Considering This

Make sure you’re employing and working with really good people, because that’s where she’s putting her trust, in the people she’s working with. They all depend on each other, and sometimes they disagree, but that disagreement sharpens them because they have to battle through to get to the next level. Making sure you have dependable people is key. Their phrase is, let’s figure it out.

She believes in trying things. She has two sons and tells them to just try things, because you never know. Going to Washington, she never dreamed in a million years she’d be doing that, advocating, and she’s found along the way it’s really exciting, worth the effort and the journey.

One of the women who goes with her to Washington for Voice for UA came from Ukraine, now has her own business in San Diego, and is now working for a senator, an internship. You just don’t know the outcome and the journey, and it’s worth it. You just have to have good people surrounding you.

That confidence comes from the action, not the reverse. You don’t build up all the confidence and skills and then go do it. You go do it, and then things start to fall into place. Not without challenges every step of the way, but that’s where the reward is, and that’s where the growth is.

 

What’s Next

They’re trying to figure out how to target their customers, their niche. They want to work on higher-end German cars, and the guys are really good, can do engine replacements, all kinds of things. They’re trying to find their customer set and really develop that. They want to expand to where they can hire a third mechanic so they’re working at full capacity. And if they can get stabilized with a pathway forward, they have a big dream of having a very large facility.

Right now, because everything’s temporary and they’re not sure of the outcome, they’re staying lean and mean, really developing their name and everything about it. Once they understand the families’ future, then they’ll expand to a bigger facility.

If you want to support Voice for UA, you can reach out directly, donate, or advocate, call your congressman, push for these families. There’s no shortage of ways to get involved, and Susan would be happy for anybody to reach out and connect.

Website: Www.voice4ua.org

Instagram: @voice4u