JOE MILLS Testimonial
JOE MILLS Testimonial
Hi, I’m Joe Mills with The Steel Shop at Garages of America. I’ve been doing car audio since 1985. It’s my passion. Working here has allowed me to work on Ferraris, Bentleys, and Maseratis. Riding around and listening to the motor every day, all day, has got to be boring. It has got to be boring. If you don’t like a good stereo, you haven’t had a good stereo.
The customer brings us a car, we finish it, and the next thing you know, he hands us the keys to his next car and says, “Do what you do.” So we wind up doing lots of cars for the same customer. We know the customer better. It’s easier for us to do exactly what the customer wants. That makes it a lot easier for us.
We do a lot of restores, custom builds, and we have completely built air streams from the ground up. We do fully integrated radar detectors. So we do all kinds of different things. We keep as much garage space as possible. You get the car for a week. Well, it takes us two days to do the car, so I have the car for four extra days, which is no big deal, but we need the space.
So up front, we have a showroom area. It allows customers to drop off their car or, if it’s a quick drop-off, I have a comfortable waiting area up front. Creating the upstairs mezzanine allowed me to have an office away from everybody, a storage room upstairs, and a stock room to keep all my products upstairs. It keeps them entertained. They spend a little time up there, have a good time, and then their car’s finished. And guess what? They bring their next car. They get comfortable with this. They can’t wait to drop off their next car.
One of our customers from Garages America was celebrating his 50th birthday, so we cleaned out all the cars, straightened everything up, and created a nice, open area for a band. He hosted 75 of his closest friends for a birthday celebration.
My house is eight-tenths of a mile from here. I could literally walk home. Customers will call me and say, “Man, is there any way I can drop my car off on Sunday or Saturday?” He feels like I’ve done this amazing thing for him. He doesn’t know that I only drove eight-tenths of a mile. You know, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s so nice being close.
Having the car shows every first Saturday of the month has been an amazing deal. They come in, they see what we do, they know what we do, they see our shop, how clean it is, how nice it is, and they wind up dropping their car off here. We have done more business since we’ve been here than we’ve ever done before. At the car shows on the weekends, sometimes there are 300 cars here. We’re talking about a thousand cars here on a weekend that you can pick from to do stuff on. We’ve done it for five years, every first Saturday. It’s exactly the clientele we like being around, and this place is full of it.
