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

Josh, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I always loved hot rods, fast, cool, & crazy cars. I started working on them as soon as I was old enough. I went to a tech college and started working at a general repair shop. I hated it. I had a great boss and it was a great shop, but I hated working on “normal” cars. One day I decided I wanted to start my own shop, a shop that only works on hot rods. I had no idea if it would work, I had no idea if I would get customers. I felt my dream was worth the risk. My main emotion was excitement, wanting to do something different, on my own and see if I could figure it out. Hot rodding is not new, many great people have done it for decades. I wanted to see if I could add my name to the amazing list American hot rod builders. That to me was worth the risk and unknowing.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a hot rodder, a car and part builder. We build, modify, and restore pre-1972 American cars and trucks. We try to build things as true to the car as possible, taking what the customer and the car want to hopefully make something really cool. It takes a lot of different skills to bring cars back from the dead and into the spotlight. We do metal work, body work, wiring, welding, machining, right down to good old fashioned mechanical work. The main thing that we feel sets us aside from most is our attention to detail. Nothing is too small or unimportant. We try to make the most perfect cars we can. We feel the great vehicles we work on deserve that.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

The way we build a social media fan base is easy: We haven’t. We have all the normal accounts, we try to post cool photos of what we build as often as we can. We don’t put much time into it. I have a hard time with posting a photo of something that took us a year to build, years and years of skill to learn, all boiled down to a simple photo. It feels like it cheapens the build and the experience for our “fans.” It’s like a great natural landscape trapped in a 2×2” square. I think art deserves more. So we try to instead hold contests and games. It would be cool to have thousands of people see our cars, and like the photos, but we are even more excited that the customer loves them in person.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

99% of our new customers come from existing ones. Word of mouth is the number one tool in a business like this. If you do a great job, do more than a customer expects, and try to come through for them, they will be your biggest ad. Showing their friends, talking you and your business up. Do great work, come through for your customers and you won’t need to try and find work.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.oylersspeedshop.com
• Instagram: @oylers_speed_shop
• Facebook: @oylersspeedshop
• Twitter: @oylersspeedshop