We were lucky to catch up with Armand Hindrichs recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Armand thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

The path of scaling was only natural with the way business went. Some businesses focus on increasing what they set out to do initially while I swayed my business towards a different objective than I started out with. In 2013 I was still working in oil field as an engineer so I spent my nights and weekends doing light mechanical work and detailing. In 2014 I got enough demand from people outside of the normal friend circle that I decided to form an LLC. I was just offering detailing until I had customers ask me to perform light mechanic work in addition to my automotive detailing offerings. I gained some notoriety and pulled enough business to keep myself busy throughout all of my free time. I was laid off in second quarter 2015 and decided it was time to give the automotive industry a shot. After 2 years of day-in-day-out working in my driveway I had enough business to justify moving into a shop location. In 2017 I opened doors into a 2500sqft shop and hired on several employees. For the first few years we offered both detailing and mechanic work but it was shown easily on paper that detailing work didn’t make much profit if any in some instances. The industry for detailing really is meant for those that can dedicate all of their resources to doing just detailing. I worked to try to push into the automotive performance and maintenance industry more and stray away from detailing as much as possible over the next few years. In 2020 we officially removed detailing from our offerings and have not looked back. The demand grew large enough for my business offerings that in Sept 2021 we moved into a 3750sqft location (in the same business park, conveniently) to allow me to bring on more employees and take on more concurrent projects. Now we are up to 5 employees including one office manager, 3 full-time techs, one assistant, and I am able to work on research and development now. Using my engineering knowledge I have started designing products to meet the needs of the automotive performance community and add parts onto our new website webstore. We now boast out-of-state and cross-country customers that are shipping their cars to us to have work done! While the scaling almost seemed natural in retrospect it was not intuitive from the beginning moving forward.

Armand, 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 loved taking things apart and putting them back together. I have also had a great interest in the automotive world. It seemed to fall into place that I met my best opportunities when I moved to Houston to work in oilfield back in 2011. Houston is a hot spot for automotive performance and I likely could not have made this happen anywhere else. I am now known very well in my immediate community for my automotive work, I’m known within the surrounding states as a Miata specific shop, as well as around the world when it comes specifically to 3rd generation Miata model since I have a large online presence. I moderate several facebook groups regarding Miatas and from them I have been able to gather a following of people. I constantly strive to help my community by bringing honest and transparent work, publicizing all of the projects we work on, and by also breaking the barrier of gatekeeping information that other vendors do. My shop offers automotive maintenance, performance upgrades, modifications, fabrication, and consulting in all aspects as well. We differ from other shops in that we know from experience how modifications will affect the car and we try not to make suggestions that only benefit our cashflow. That may work on the short term but my goal as a shop owner is to earn trust for being transparent and keeping my customers best interests in mind.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

My fortunate dive into the Miata community was completely on accident. Miatas have been known as the one of the best platforms to start with when getting into amateur racing. I picked one up and decided to go visit my local Miata club to try to make some friends. This was already after I had started offering detailing and light mechanic work out of my garage as a side business so I wasn’t there to try to pick business up by any means. It turns out the local community was hurting badly for somebody with mechanical inclination and also somebody to work on their Miatas. Not long before I visited this group they had another person that had since pivoted his business to cater towards other vehicles and no longer Miatas so they were hung out to try so to speak. Little did I know I had effectively joined a car cult and they would be transforming my small operation into something huge over the next few years. Social media was almost the entirety of the basis for my growth as there are several thousand people on the local Houston Miata facebook pages. This meant that my reach jumped from being my local neighborhood to being several thousand Miata owners in a matter of weeks. All I started doing was posting up about the cars I was working on and where I was located and the rest was the natural course of events.

Any advice for managing a team?

Part of maintaining high morale is to make sure you understand the needs of your employees. The best kind of employees is a self motivated one that wants to do good. Unfortunately the bulk of employees that I have been through were not this way. I have had several employees that felt they shouldn’t have to work, like the world owed them a large paycheck for them to do nothing, and also other employees that couldn’t be motivated no matter how much you offer or how little you had them do. It’s a matter of finding the right people. Currently I have a team of highly self motivated and ethical people working for me. It has changed the entire dynamic of how my shop has been able to run. When I take a day off I don’t have to worry about people sitting around doing nothing, I don’t have to worry about the shop falling apart due to lack of management, and it’s really the biggest relief I’ve had in years. The high morale around here is almost self perpetuating at this point since the employees I have create happy customers which create happy employees which create happy customers and the cycle continues.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.arhindrichs.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/arhindrichsllc
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/arhindrichsllc