We recently connected with Jeremy Bumpus and have shared our conversation below.

Jeremy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

I do today what we did in the beginning. It seems to work for us but with the profession we are in its very hard to know what you’re actually getting as an employee. We always take an application and do an interview as most businesses would. We fill out the person, try to get a feel more for their personality and how well we think they would jive with us. If we feel good about them we do a 30 day trial period to test them on their skills they have told us they have. In that 30 days we can base their skill level, personality, where we think they fall on the pay scale and then re-evaluate them. I think building a team in our industry is one of the most important things we can do.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

When I was in high school is when I really got the itch to have the coolest car or truck, so I was working on them all the time but never had any intention of doing it professionally. I was playing baseball and had scholarship opportunities to a few different schools. I went to college to become a teacher majoring in literature. My goal was to teach and be a coach to be able to stay in the sport after college. This is where team building really came into play for me as a business later on. Playing baseball you 100 percent have to depend on other people to get a good end result……a win. You could never play the sport by yourself and have the outcome you are looking for. I apply this to what I do today. As I was in college I continued to build cars. Next thing I knew I had people asking me to do work for them. Then later the bright idea hit me to go to a votech school, learn a little more and then become a votech teacher. By this time car building/fabrication was all I was concerned with. I couldn’t get enough of it. I attended VC tech in Alabama. Every instructor there was from wyotech. Once I left I needed to get a few years of on the job experience in order to become a teacher in the trade. I started working at the shop I own now, The Hot Rod Shop. Everything took off from there. I was building cars during the day and going home at night and working into the early hours of the morning building my personal cars. At a show with my mustang I had just finished, it won a few cool awards and got shot for a magazine over that weekend where I had a gentleman approach me and ask had I though about doing tv. At this point it never crossed my mind but I sent in a short vid they requested, went in for an interview that week and was on set the next week. It was crazy but it all came together at that point, I was teaching for millions of people and I’m still doing that today hosting CARFIX on Motortrend with my co-host and good friend Bryan Fuller.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

There are a few effective strategies for me. One is being honest about the build and the process. I have found that has gotten us so far. We know this is an expensive hobby. We don’t sugar coat it. We lay everything out on the table up front. We know we can’t give a final figure or sometimes even get close and we make sure thats understood on the front end before we ever touch a car. People like that, even if sometimes it’s out of there reach.

The second and I think one of the most important is our billing. We don’t bill anything up front. We work ahead of the customer and invoice every two weeks or month. This way we are never in debt to anyone and there’s no way to get yourself in a bad position. For example….we have many builds here now and in the past that have come from other shops that never finished the build and the story is always the same. The customer payed a lump sum up front. Lets say this may have been for a body restoration. The shop starts on it but never gets anywhere, then say they are out of money, the customer then pays more. Long story short, it never gets finished. We had one where he came to us first, my guess at an estimate was to high for him, the scenario above happened to him. He then took it to another shop and it happened again. After that it found its way back to us. By this time between those two shops he had more in it than my initial estimate and we had to start over, so he ended up having so much more in it, so I think you being ahead of the customer is a plus, they see the itemized invoice and time before they ever pay the bill and are agreeing with the work you have performed.

This leads to the third…… I believe I have found a good way to build for any client. Meaning whether they are wealthy or just make an average living but have the dream of having cool build by us. We keep enough builds in house that if a customer needs a break we can hop over to another build and give the the financial break they may need. This will make the build go longer but is a good way to build for everyone. As long as you have enough work to do it this way.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I started doing television that taught me more about business that I didn’t know I needed. You have to wear multiple hats. You have to do the work, run the business, but you also need marketing and sales. Just learning how to talk to people and other business’ will go a long way. Also having a good business manager. My wife luckily is a car person and understands what we do and even can build, so having her to run the day to day makes everything go that much smoother.

Contact Info:

• Website: thehotrodshopms.com
• Instagram: thehotrodshopms
• Facebook: thehotrodshopms
• Linkedin: Jeremy Bumpus
• Youtube: The Hot Rod Shop