We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrick Ellefson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Patrick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

The start was the easy part, it was my dream since I was a little kid to have a car dealership where all you see are cool cars. The execution was the hard part, coming from a foreign country 10 years ago with no money and sub-par english. I started buying and selling cars at the age of 18 in the good-ol’ craigslist days. I was scouring the website hours per day looking for anything I could afford and flip for a profit of only a few hundred dollars. Started at 1 car per 2 weeks, to a car a week, to 2-3 per week. I did this for 3 years until i was able to open my first car dealership with a business partner called Fuel Motorcars. I ran that dealership for 3 years until i could afford to open a dealership on my own. And that’s when RPM Garage was born in 2018. It wasn’t an easy task to tackle a unique and specialty car dealership that caters to all types of automotive enthusiasts.

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 have been a car enthusiast since I can remember, when I was a kid I remember being with my mom in Mexico and seeing a bright green Lotus Elise, I automatically fell in love with it and told myself “One day I will own one of those.”

I worked so hard to accomplish my dreams and better myself in any way I could to be able to open up my own car dealership.

What I am the most proud of RPM Garage is our customer service, we are known for having the best in any used car dealership around, at RPM Garage we have something that not many car dealerships have which is the “wow” factor, if someone walks into our dealership and the first word out of their mouth aren’t “wow”, we haven’t done our job correctly.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Coming from a foreign country and knowing very little English, it was not a simple task to get big businesses to take you seriously. They just shrug their shoulders at you and make you feel insignificant. You have to work 10x harder than anyone born without an accent to succeed.

When I was first starting RPM Garage, I went to different banks attempting to secure loans for more inventory. Every single one of them said no. To overcome this, I decided to do it on my own and show them what I’m capable of. I woke up every day for 2 years on a nonstop grind to show how many cars I can sell and how much money I can make.

In 2020 I was able to show RPM Garage’s outstanding improvement and growth as a company and over-achieved the goals that I set out.

Here in 2022, we’ve sold an outstanding 2500 cars generating over 60 million in revenue since our doors opened.

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

Social media was always one of the most important things for me, my advice is just to be consistent in the posting and to keep posting good content that people won’t skip on their social media feed.

At least once or twice a day we have customers that come in from different cities and states that say they saw us on social media and just wanted to come check us out because they loved our content.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rpmgaragetx.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rpmgaragedallas
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rpmgaragedallas/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQEWMKi47h-3nId68Ye99fg
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@rpmgaragedallas?lang=en

Image Credits
RPM Garage Social Media Team