Jeremy Gerber runs Roadster Shop outside Chicago with his brother Phil. When this episode was recorded in 2016, the shop built complete custom classic cars and Pro Touring builds, with bodywork, metal shaping, paint and engine work under one roof. It also manufactured bolt-on performance chassis for muscle cars. In 2014 its 1970 Camaro won the Grand Turismo Car of the Year award at SEMA.
Jeremy was 33 at the time and had about 60 employees. He took over a shop that was, in his words, a name, a couple of drill presses and a few rusty chassis, and grew it into a 50,000 square foot operation.
This article covers how he split the business into departments, why he stopped doing his own fabrication, how he hired, why he dropped retail parts and general service, and how he kept thousands of chassis parts organized.
From $5 an hour to owner
Jeremy came from a family of self-employed car people. His great-grandfather started an auto glass business in the early 1930s. His father turned the family business into an auto collision company with about 15 locations, and Jeremy grew up working in it as a kid, learning bodywork from the preppers and painters.
School didn't stick. He enrolled in an autobody program at Ferris State and found he already knew more than the course taught. He finished the class work in about a month and quit after a semester. A second semester at a school in Iowa didn't work either. He went home, worked full time as a body man for his father, then took a job at a small hot rod shop called Roadster Shop for five dollars an hour. He worked around the clock and loved it.
About two years later the owner, an old-school hot rodder, died of cancer within about a month of his diagnosis. His son didn't want the business. Jeremy's brother was finishing college and his father had just sold his collision business, so the three of them bought what was left of the shop.
Stepping off the tools to manage the shop
The biggest change Jeremy described was getting out of the work. As the shop grew, he spent all his time fabricating. He was fast and good at it, so it felt productive. His father kept pushing him to stop.
You can't keep your head down working all day. You got to start managing the guys and teach guys and be patient with guys.
Jeremy called that the biggest success he'd had in the business, and also a hit to his pride. He realized that by managing well he could get ten people working fast instead of one. He still jumped in on sheet metal now and then, but his job became managing projects, new products and the direction of the company.
He also learned the hard way that you can't hand the business to someone else. As the shop grew from 3 to 60 employees, he started doubting his own skills and hired a production manager to take over day-to-day operations. It lasted about four months. Jeremy said he lost his connection with the crew and the shop drifted off the path he wanted, so he made changes and took it back. He called it the most damaging move he had made.
Departments, foremen and a brand built on the team
By 2016 the shop was split into clear departments. Up front were two inside chassis salespeople, one outside salesperson who handled shows, accountants and office staff. In the shop were a two-person CNC department, a four-person final assembly department for installs and service work, and one person running parts. The custom build side had about five body shop staff and about ten fabricators. The chassis side had frame rail builders, parts builders, chassis assemblers and shipping and receiving, with two full-time engineers above them.
Each side had a foreman who had worked his way up. Until about a year earlier Jeremy had run everything himself. With good people in place, he said keeping them on task wasn't hard. The real work was making sure they had parts, materials and clear direction.
He deliberately didn't put his name on the shop. He pointed out that most hot rod shops carry the owner's name, and he wanted to build Roadster Shop as a team. He believed the crew wouldn't push as hard for a shop named after him.
Hiring for passion and paying honestly
Staffing the hot rod side was the hardest part. Early on Jeremy hired people with collision backgrounds and spent more time redoing their work than it was worth. He learned to look for metal shaping and fabrication experience, and above all a real love of hot rods. In his view the job has to be your hobby and your life.
He found people through Instagram and Facebook, but the best fabricators came to him. They saw the cars, liked how the shop ran, and asked to work there. Many relocated from across the country.
Keeping them came down to running a real business. Jeremy described a hot rod industry full of shops going broke, people paid under the table and overtime not paid. His crew got honest paychecks, and he said his wages were well above the rest of the industry. He also reinvested the profits into equipment and the building where the crew could see it.
You can throw money at guys and you're only gonna keep them so happy. You've got to make it an enjoyable place to work.
Saying no to work that costs more than it pays
Revenue used to split evenly between custom builds and chassis manufacturing. By 2016 chassis made up about 70 percent of the business, because a chassis is an easier product to price and market. The shop built almost every part in-house, including frame rails, control arms and spindles, and bought out only shocks, steering racks and rear ends. Every chassis was going under a car with a 600-plus horsepower LS engine. Most sales went to other shops, some buying ten or more chassis a year, and most customers never set foot in the building.
Jeremy cut two things. He dropped retail parts after spending weekends laying out a $50 brake system for someone who returned it all on Monday. He also turned away general service work like a leaky water pump, though he took substantial installs such as superchargers and suspension upgrades.
Marketing started with print ads in magazines before social media existed. In 2016 Instagram was the shop's best channel, with about 160,000 followers, plus about 40,000 on Facebook and activity on Pro Touring and Chevy forums. Jeremy said you have to keep marketing until your name becomes a mainstay.
Organizing thousands of parts
With hundreds of chassis versions, each with dozens of parts, organization was one of Jeremy's biggest challenges. He was constantly watching for weak points with the chassis crew. That could mean giving each builder his own clamps and a workstation stocked with every component he needed, so nobody walked back and forth to the bolt bin. Lessons from the old building went into the new chassis facility, which had pallet racking full of labeled blue bins with part numbers and pictures. He said they couldn't do their volume without it.
His brother handled scheduling and the business side, and the shop was moving to manufacturing software to track materials and print better work orders. Jeremy himself liked printed lists, clipboards and spreadsheets on the wall. He had never written a formal business plan, and set daily and monthly goals instead of revenue targets. He worked 60 to 70 hours a week, down from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week, and said getting more organized was what let him scale back.
Key takeaways
- The owner's job is managing people and projects. A fast fabricator can only finish one car at a time.
- Don't hand day-to-day control to an outsider before your systems and foremen are ready.
- Hire for passion and the right skills, and pay honestly and on the books.
- Drop work that costs more time than it earns, such as small retail parts sales.
- Give every builder a station with the parts and tools the job needs.
- Getting organized is what lets the owner work fewer hours.
Building a team-run shop with My Shop Assist
Jeremy's move from builder to manager depends on seeing every project without standing over it. My Shop Assist puts tasks, parts and time on every job, so foremen and owners can see where each build stands and what it is costing. Zones and a kanban board show what is in body, fab or assembly, and QR codes let techs pull up a job from the car. Purchase orders track the parts each build needs, and progress billing fits long builds that are paid in stages. Learn how MSA works for restoration and hot rod shops.
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