We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sean Mathis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sean below.

Sean, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

I don’t necessarily care about my specific legacy, but I do care about the legacy of the nonprofit museum I created, Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. I started the museum with only one car (59 Cadillac) I inherited from my grandpa (Pop). I had no experience, no collection of any kind, and no money in 2017.

The museum has moved once and expanded twice. Vintage Garage Antiques was created to help support the nonprofit museum in 2021. Today the museum averages over 130 full-size vehicles on display, 5,000+ model cars, pedal cars, bicycles, motorcycles, and other historical memorabilia.

Over 40 vehicles have been donated to the museum since 2020. Many of them are cherished family heirlooms that have been entrusted to the museum to continue to share their story.

My legacy will be that I created Miles Through Time Automotive Museum to be able to share automotive stories and history long after I am gone.

Sean, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I have always been into cars. By the time I created Miles Through Time Automotive Museum in 2017, I had been to 2 car museums in my life. All of a sudden at 32 years old I found myself creating a car museum of my own despite only owning one classic car.

I had the idea to create a car museum supplied by family heirlooms like my Pop’s 59 Cadillac, but I had no intention of pursuing the idea anytime soon. As luck would have it though I had the opportunity presented to me to see what I could do in 2017.

For three years I ran the museum entirely by myself, fumbling through the challenges of not actually knowing what I was doing. I researched other automotive museums for guidance and discovered a whole world of automotive museums. Rather than waste my research I organized it and created automotivemuseumguide.com to make it easy for museums to be found.

Eventually, more and more people got involved with the museum in one aspect or another and MTT has been growing ever since. What started in an old 8,000-square-foot dealership has grown into a 50,000-square-foot tourist destination.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I bootstrapped the museum from the very beginning. I had marketing resources that most people in my position of trying to create a car museum wouldn’t have because my wife owns Lake Shark Media. That enabled me to create a brand for the museum from nothing and then I was able to fill it in overtime. ”

When I moved the museum in 2020, there still wasn’t any money so I had to rely on volunteers and do many things by myself. When it came time to build an entire replica town in the museum, it was all done by using reclaimed and recycled materials.

Eventually, the museum was growing too fast, and the facility that the museum was expanding in required massive amounts of renovations. I did have to use the SBA Loan that was given out during COVID which is what really expedited the growth of the museum.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I initially started Miles Through Time to be able to get my car out of the garage and put it on display along with others in a similar situation so we could share our cars. The idea was to store the cars as museum exhibits when they weren’t being driven.

The location where I was able to create the museum was rural. I quickly found out people didn’t need storage. I offered consignment as a means of getting more cars on display which worked, but I also quickly found out that is not what I wanted to do.

After three years of running the museum as a for-profit storage and consignment business and turned the museum into a nonprofit and eliminated consignment and backed off on storage.

The location the museum was moved to in 2020 was inside of an old textile mill and we took up a large portion of unused flea market space. The flea market allowed the museum to be open all year long without me having to be the one at the museum to be open.

After about 15 months the owner of the flea market decided not to renew his lease which left the museum in jeopardy. Miles Through Time could not afford to pay for the entire lease when the only source of revenue came from museum admission.

I decided to take over the entire lease and created Vintage Garage Antiques. I removed the flea market and optimized every foot of space I could to sell to vendors. The vendors would pay for the lease and utilities for the antique store and the museum and would become a giant gift shop for the museum.

This was not a part of the original plan but has worked out so well. I was able to add a fourth gallery to the museum when the antique store was expanded which has over 120 vendor booths.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://milesthroughtime.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seantmathis/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mathis.sean
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmathis/
• Twitter: https://x.com/seanmathis
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@milesthroughtime
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/miles-through-time-automotive-museum-clarkesville

Image Credits

Sean Mathis