Richard Fielder had been Kevin Dubois's partner at Evolution Dynamics, the Texas Mitsubishi Evo shop where My Shop Assist was built, for about 15 years when this episode was recorded in late 2024. He handles most of the Evo X tuning and installs and much of the shop's product design. By day he is a manufacturing engineering manager at Peterbilt.
This episode introduced Richard as Kevin's new co-host. The first half covers his background and what he learned designing a fuel surge tank. The second half is a round-table on whether a performance shop can scale, and how.
The short answer they reached is that you have to get efficient first. Here is how they got there.
From West Texas trucks to the Evo X
Richard grew up in West Texas working on Jeeps and pickups with his dad, doing shocks, carburetors and engine rebuilds. He met Kevin through the Formula SAE team at the University of Texas at Arlington. He tried to modify a turbo Volkswagen Jetta but couldn't afford the tuning software on a college budget. Then Kevin took him for a ride in his white Evo 8, around 2005 or 2006. Richard sold the Jetta and bought a 2008 Evo X. Within the first 150 miles he had the manifold off and was porting it.
His day job started in high school. He swept floors and ran parts after school at Tesmec, a Mansfield, Texas maker of tracked trenching machines with 300 to 1,500 horsepower diesels. He moved into engineering while in school, and the company reimbursed part of his tuition for a mechanical engineering degree. He learned mechanical design, plant floor work and how to coordinate with the Italian parent company's offshore engineering groups.
Evolution Dynamics started in Kevin's garage until the HOA shut it down. Their first rented shop was about 1,200 square feet, and it was full within a month. Their first worry was making rent. Within three or four months they had rented the unit next door, then the next one, and cut holes through the walls with a reciprocating saw. They tripled in size in the first six months to a year, learning to hire, fire and grow by trial and error.
Test on your own car first
Richard learned to tune on his own Evo X and figures he flashed the ECU 400 to 500 times. Early on, nobody had good definitions for the tables. Getting the load tables right for low-load cruising and idle took most of that work, so customer cars wouldn't throw check engine lights when they ran more boost than the tune expected. The automatic dual-clutch cars doubled the work.
He kept the risky experiments off customer cars. If you break a customer's car, the shop owns the repair. His own car spun a bearing and melted a piston at Eagles Canyon Raceway when it went lean in a hard left-hand corner. That taught them the value of a surge tank. They also found that heavy valve springs on the Evo X's variable exhaust cam hurt oil pressure at idle and spun bearings. For years they told street customers to avoid heavy springs, until an aftermarket part fixed the problem.
Kevin pointed out what 20 years on one platform buys you. A customer says how much power he wants, and the shop already knows the parts, the price and that the car will run right. A shop that works on everything can't match that depth from reading forums.
What the surge tank taught them about products
Customers who road raced with NASA reported fuel cut below half a tank, especially in certain turns and elevation changes. The shop logged fuel pressure to pin down the forces involved and looked at an earlier surge tank they had built for an Evo 8. They sized the new one to cover one minute of maximum fuel burn with the largest injector available then, a 2,000cc unit. They packaged it behind the trunk and focused on safety, since a leak in a street car's trunk is dangerous. On track testing, Richard could run the main tank down to the gas light with no fuel cut. Without it, some cars on sticky tires cut by the fifth lap on a full tank.
The mistakes were on the business side. They chose cheap hose from a local supplier, and installers got blisters assembling four fittings, so they switched to proper race hose. They also priced the first version too low and offered too many pump and plumbing combinations. Every order was different, and some of the more complex setups lost money. The redesign used billet end caps drawn in SolidWorks with ports for any setup, and limited the choice to one or two pumps.
Richard said product work means learning research, design, packaging, parts selection, install instructions, marketing and pricing against everyone else who makes something similar.
Assembly-line habits in a small shop
At Peterbilt, Richard runs the engineering of the tools that build the trucks, including robots and manipulators. Two lessons carried over. The first is communication. Engineers tend to talk too technically, and he learned to explain a build to a customer who doesn't know what he's buying. The second is efficiency. Assembly lines count every move it takes to grab a tool, walk to the work and put it back. They keep only the needed tools at the line, on shadow boards, with parts in kits.
Kevin and Richard used to work 80 to 90 hours a week with messy toolboxes. They set up shadow foam drawers in the engine room with only the tools needed for a given engine, so one drawer holds the whole job. A missing tool is obvious at a glance. The only real problem over the years has been the foam wearing out.
What a performance shop can scale
Richard described three steps up. Install parts customers bring. Sell and install your own parts. Design, make and sell your own parts, which pays the most. Kevin pushed on what is actually scalable at each step.
Service grows only by adding people, and each tech needs a lift, tools and space. Hands-on dyno tuning doesn't scale at all, since every car has to be tuned in person. A web store scales better but still needs shipping, receiving and phone staff.
The office side is where Kevin sees real leverage. A shop that hand-types every labor line on every invoice is doing the opposite of scaling. Define a task once and reuse it, and that step is scaled. Shops often run one service advisor per three techs, but because Evolution Dynamics has an estimate template for nearly every Evo job, Kevin said he could quote anything in about 30 seconds and support far more techs with one writer.
The role is scalable but the work is not.
They talked about why chains exist for car audio and lifted trucks and not for performance shops. Richard thought the industry is fractured, with every shop doing the same car a different way. When chains grow, tech pay and quality tend to drop. Kevin's answer was to pay specialists well enough that they don't leave to open their own shop. He laid out the math on going solo. A tuner on his own has to tune six cars a month to make rent, 15 once you add insurance and utilities, and 25 before you pay yourself anything.
Market size matters too. The shop has sold thousands of Evo boost controllers, and lately sells almost none because every car already has one. Their dyno ran maybe three times a week because they had already tuned most Evos in the area. Meanwhile a Mustang shop with two dynos was booked three months out on a car still being built. Richard suggested a simple formula. Count registrations of a model within 50 or 100 miles, estimate the share that get modified, and check how many shops already serve them.
You don't want to scale an inefficient process.
Kevin added that the shop management talks they used to give at SEMA and PRI showed many owners their overhead for the first time. A lot of shops hire because 20 cars are waiting, when the real problem is that one tech can't move because the cars are in his way.
Key takeaways
- Try new parts and tunes on your own car before a customer's.
- Keep product options simple and price from a real bill of materials.
- Use shadow boards and kitted parts to cut wasted steps at the bench.
- Define tasks and estimates once and reuse them. That is the part of a shop that scales.
- Get efficient before you hire. More techs won't fix a shop where the cars are in each other's way.
- Size your market before you pick a platform, and watch for saturation.
Making your shop repeatable with My Shop Assist
Most of what Kevin and Richard called scalable comes down to doing the office work once. My Shop Assist lets you save tasks and parts as templates so an estimate takes seconds. Checklists and forms standardize check-in and quality control, and time tracking on every job and task shows how efficient the shop is before you hire. Parts and purchase orders stay attached to the work, and invoices export to QuickBooks. See how MSA works for performance and racing shops.
If you want to find out how efficient your shop really is, start a free 30-day trial.
