How new investors can help your shop

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Mergers and acquisitions are on the rise in the automotive aftermarket as investors see the industry as an ideal place to put their money.

There’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines that companies and investors are itching to put to use. They see the strong financial results of the automotive aftermarket and they want in on the strong, relatively stable times.

But if you’re not looking to sell your shop, you can still explore the possibility of bringing in an investor to add equity and help fuel growth, said Bryan Stasch, vice president of product and content development at the Automotive Training Institute.

“How many of you are looking to open multiple locations?” He asked shop owners at NAPA Expo 2022. “If you want [growth], you want to open more locations. There’s a great way to get more capital [so] we’re able to do that.”

He didn’t mean the following in a condescending way but observed that a typical shop owner’s mindset and abilities will only take a shop so far. It’s something many owners don’t realize or want to admit, Stasch said.

He told the audience during his presentation, Finding Money by Understanding your Financial Numbers, that he ran reports on the shops he works with and found most of them eventually hit plateaus. It takes one kind of mindset to hit the million-dollar mark, he said. But then a different mindset to go to even further.

When a shop gets to a certain size, that breeds new and different challenges. So the owner should be looking at separating parts of the business and having different people in charge of different areas. In other words, the owner can’t be overseeing everything because the barriers will eventually become too much. So looking for investors can help the business grow and better manage the company.

“Somebody with a different mindset may help you break those barriers and carry you into a big growth mode,” he said.