From a Concrete Slab to This | The Royalty Auto Service Story

[00:00:00]All right, guys. Everybody sees the big shops, all the people working, all the cars that we work on. Well, today we're going to take you back to the very beginning and show you where it all started. Let's get into it.

[00:00:16]You always hear about the overnight success, and it's very rare that that ever happens. What people don't realize are the 10,000 nights that come before the overnight success. On July 26 of this year, 2026, we will officially be 30 years in business. We are so absolutely blessed to have everything that we have. But I will tell you right now, there was some hard times in it. I mean, really hard times in it. We're going to take you back in this video, actually before we even started what became Royalty Auto Service. We're going to take you over now to the very first shop that I ever had. Before we even take you to that shop, we're actually going to take you to a spot where I used to work on cars before I even worked on this shop. And then we're going to work you through. You're going to be amazed at how many different locations we really had. And I'm going to also tell you why we switched all those locations when we did. Going to be a little bit of a journey down memory lane. And we love for you to come along and be a part of it. Let's jump over to the first place I ever worked on cars for on my own. Here we are. It is 1992.

[00:01:27]And right here, that shed wasn't here and that trailer wasn't there. We had a trailer right there. And right next to it was a little wooden garage. And I worked in that wooden garage on a dirt floor. It's crazy that there's absolutely there's no sign of any of it right now. Zero. But that's where we were. That's where I very first started on working on cars on my own. I had just left somebody who was had who took the shop. you guys have met Neil. This person had gotten the shop from Neil. Uh I'll just say he was ethically challenged and after a year of working for him, I had to quit. And this is where I ended up was at my own trailer just working on people's cars. Uh I have not been down here in a very long time.

[00:02:12]If we look over this way, you see there's a bunch of houses and stuff.

[00:02:16]Absolutely.

[00:02:17]>> Yeah.

[00:02:18]>> Nothing down this. This was dirt road from here. Actually there right here.

[00:02:22]This was dirt from this point on down that way. It was a dirt road.

[00:02:27]>> Yeah.

[00:02:28]>> And there was just absolutely just trails and stuff back in there. So, >> and my memories at this point is you hitting the pucks off the floor onto me playing goalie for hockey.

[00:02:37]>> Yeah.

[00:02:38]>> And also almost taking my head off on the go-kart.

[00:02:41]>> The go-kart. You almost took your head off going into that garage underneath a Jeep going through this ditch right here and getting airborne right there. Yeah.

[00:02:50]You can't even see the the sign of a of the uh driveway anymore. Yeah.

[00:02:54]>> But yeah, I remember we used to actually hang a pot. There was a an old pot that we used to hang from the tree right there and you used to shoot the pucks up at it.

[00:03:00]>> Yep. Had a nice little porch setup and everything.

[00:03:02]>> It was a nice porch on the front of the trailer.

[00:03:04]>> Yeah. And me mom was basically in the backyard.

[00:03:06]>> Yep. My my mom lived not right behind us, which that that trailer is still there, but she lived in the one just over from that.

[00:03:13]>> Yep.

[00:03:13]>> And it's a good thing that we lived here because now we're going to show you the next place that I worked. I upgraded. It was actually was an upgrade. It's not very far from here. And there's a really good reason why it needed to not be very far from here. Let's go take a look where it is. About to pull out of here.

[00:03:28]And sure was reminiscent. He's like, I had another memory of that trailer. I'm like, yeah. He goes, "Yeah, there was no AC in it." And for a long time, we had zero air conditioning in that trailer and that is extremely hot. Those things are not known for their environmentally, you know, sealed off condition. But we eventually got a window unit, a used window unit. It was all rusty. I remember that. And um we were able to put that in the bedroom. And I will never forget until the day that I die.

[00:04:00]This is how this is how hot it can get down here. You know, on a on an older trailer, these are old trailers for those who've never lived in one. The doors the underneath the gap of the doors are very very big. And we took towels. We put that unit in there, closed the door, put towels down there.

[00:04:16]there. We're like, "We're not going to walk in there." And we didn't walk in there for hours. And then gosh, how old were you then? You were under five.

[00:04:23]Yeah.

[00:04:24]>> Had to be. And he uh we ended up Anyway, later on we're going going in there. We opened that door and it was like, "Oh, it was like heaven walking into that room with with the air conditioner in it." So, yeah, that's Hey, that was uh you had to do what you had to do. We're heading over to the other shop now.

[00:04:42]We're going to actually show you guys how close it is. So Sherwood's going to take a video going down the road. We're going to fast forward to it, but you're going to see just how close this shop is to here and why.

[00:05:09]And here we are.

[00:05:16]We just talked to the next door neighbor who has lived here forever and we were kind of reminiscing about the history of it. This was a meat market before the person that I rented it from bought it from the people who they passed away.

[00:05:28]They had the meat market that passed away. This guy the guy bought it. He had it. Never did anything with it and then he rented it to me. This was 19. So now we're in 1993 and we're going to try to come back here just a little bit and show you. There is nowhere to work inside here. So you there's nowhere to go inside and um work on a car. It's a solid just building.

[00:05:50]We're probably not going to be to go around it, but I had a little office in the front and in the back there was a metal table. Again, it was a meat market. There was a metal table. I used to rebuild carburetors on that. But there is the concrete pad. Sometimes you guys will hear me talk about the concrete pad and that's it. And it is about in the same condition now as it was when I was here.

[00:06:12]Yeah, 100%. It looks like just, you know, some concrete was thrown down and and uh, you know, it's real rough, but this is where I worked. And as you can see, you're out in the in the world. And I'm going to tell you exactly what I did. And they're probably still in here.

[00:06:29]I won't be able to find them, but I had driven I mean, you can't be working out in the sun. I mean, this was all this wasn't all this stuff wasn't here. Kind of just was cleared out back here. Could park a few cars back here. I took rebar and I drove it down in the ground.

[00:06:43]Again, didn't have any money, guys. I'm just trying to make it at this point.

[00:06:47]I'm a single dad at this point trying to make it. I drove some rebar into the ground and man, it'd be great if I could find some of that rebar. I know we won't find it, but anyway, we won't ever find it. Ain't no telling where it is on the edge right there. But I drove it in, took some pieces of PVC pipe, 20 foot pieces of PVC pipe, glued them together, and then I crossed them AC across here, right? In an X pattern, and I just did that, right? Like this, right? And then I took a tarp and I put it on top of it. Now, here's the thing.

[00:07:23]When you are when you are in the summer in here in Georgia, southeast Georgia, northeast Florida, we get torrential downpours. You guys have seen it on the videos before in the afternoons. What would happen on that is it would fill up with water because the tarp obviously would just kind of go inside all the gaps from the PVC and it would literally come down and be touching the con the concrete here. I'd have to crawl in here, walk in here, get in the middle of it, push up, and it would go and all the water would go off of it. Back to work we went. Oh, it was uh you had to be careful not to leave cars under here at night because if it rained and it went down on there, it would touch the car.

[00:08:02]So, we couldn't do that. But yeah, this is the very this is the first spot on planet Earth where I worked on cars for myself, for money, renting a place to do that with. And so again, a lot of people are out there going, "Well, there's nowhere around to rent." Listen, this is just a square building inside.

[00:08:24]There's nothing in there. It was just a place to, you know, to sit. It was a lot of room in there, but nothing you could do on cars other than rebuild the carburetors. And everything was done out here. Out here in the on this concrete pad or round it on the dirt. It's where it was. Man, I haven't been here. I have not been here since 1990.

[00:08:44]Had to be 93. had to be 93 since I've stood on this spot. That brings back some memories, boy. All right.

[00:08:51]From here, I actually the guy that came back to me that was ethically challenged and had gone through a divorce and we won't get into all that deal and wanted me to come back and I thought about it and I I actually did the the probably the worst thing I've ever done in in businesswise or with for somebody and I I kind of feel bad about it. I do feel bad about it.

[00:09:13]Uh, I told him I would come back to work for him and the the So, I was going to shut this place down. I told him, "Give me give me a couple of weeks to shut this place down." It was tough running here, guys. This just, you know, I didn't know anything about business at all. But he wanted me to come back. He actually came here and talked to me. I was working on a Chevrolet truck right here. I'll never forget this doing a distributor in it. And I said, "Yeah, I'll come back." The day I woke up, this is what I did bad with him. The day I woke up that I was supposed to go back to work for him. I had shut this place down. Boy, I had that black cloud feeling just came over me. I'm like, man, I don't want to go work back over there again. That guy was It was just a rough time over there. And I never did go back. I am I'm not not real proud about that moment. Did not go back and ended up uh going down to another place that I went to work for another guy, worked for him for a little while, and then Neil came back into the picture and said, "Hey, I'm taking the shop back over." Because the guy that I just told you about gave the shop up. Basically went out of business. Neil still owned the property. He said, "I'm coming back in there. Do you want to come run the shop?" And that's what I did. Let's walk over rock. Can't walk to this one. Oh, what was the reason why this place needed to be so close? I forgot to tell you that. Why did it need to be so close? I didn't have a car.

[00:10:27]This was in walking distance. And we just run around the block. I go walk across mom's property and literally get here in two minutes walking. I didn't have a car to get here. The only car that I had was a guy that worked for me.

[00:10:38]He was a family friend. Had his old Volkswagen Beetle. old blue Volkswagen Beetle and Chris and I, you know, he Chris would take me wherever I needed to go and we'd go fix people's cars and all around. So, yeah, that was uh I forgot about that part of it. Let's run over to the the next shop, the real shop where I actually started at that time. Turned into Royalty Auto Service, but I'll tell you the name of it in just a minute once we get over there. One thing when we were here, this was actually the name of this shop was the car doctor. And I had a guy who uh was again a friend of mine.

[00:11:11]He was an artist and he actually drew a really cool p uh poster. You know, I couldn't afford a sign. No way I could afford a sign. He got a piece of plywood painted white and did a really cool picture. I wish I had a picture of that.

[00:11:23]Back in those days, we didn't have a camera on every single device we had on our person. But it was a really cool one. We used to just it used to be propped right outside here. That's where uh the car doctor was. But after this one again, we we changed tax all the way around and we kind of upgraded. This the next one is a big upgrade. Real quick, guys, we're at the last part of our journey here. We're at our last shop and this has been this has been kind of eye opening even for me. But I want to make sure you watch this thing all the way through. You're going to find some tough times for us. You're going to see that it's been up and down for a long time.

[00:11:59]For 30 years, it's been up and down. I want you guys to watch it so you can kind of feel the ride with us. And if you're going through something, if you've got a shop or you've got a business, you've got something you're getting out there, I think you're going to learn a lot from it. So, make sure you watch this to the end. While you're here, do me a favor, jump down there, hit that subscribe button, and hit that thumbs up. Back to the video. This is where Royalty Auto Service really started. This is where the actual business started. It was not called Royalty Auto Service yet, and it didn't look like this.

[00:12:30]>> No, it did not. Originally, Neil had a building that was out here that had been here since probably the 30s or the 40s.

[00:12:36]So, we're talking 1930s and 40s here.

[00:12:38]And built this building behind it. Next door was an old wooden building that had a machine shop in it. And this building had bays down the side here. And then the front had an office. You walked in this way and it had an office. And then we had some windows on the front. And then on the be at the on the outside of it, Neil's shop was called Automotive Specialist.

[00:13:03]In July of 1996, Neil came to me. I ran it for him for about a year from about 95. Remember the last shop was 93. I went to work for somebody else. And then in '95, ended up with Neil back here, late 94, 95ish area, and came to me and said, "Listen, you know, he didn't want to be in the automotive repair business anymore. He was doing cars, used cars, wasn't really here much. And he's like, you know, do you want to just take it over? You own the shop, change it into your name, change everything. You know, you're going to have to own it's going to have to be a different business, not his business. And I'm like, yeah, let's do it. I had no money. Again, single dad trying to get started. The first money that I had was that I put in the bank was the first car we worked on. But the name Automotive Specialist, I had to come up with a name and I didn't have any money for sign. And he had lettering up there. It was like the It was red big red letters. It said automotive specialist, you know, the the plastic letters or whatever. And I thought, well, I'm going to be auto care because that way the only letter I really have to buy is the R. And I bought an R, put it up there. And we did that ourselves.

[00:14:10]I didn't pay somebody to do that. We had to take the other letters off, put that back up there, centered it up, and it was we were AutoCAR. That's what we were for a very long time. And we worked out of here until 2003.

[00:14:23]So from 1996, July 26 of 1996 to 2003, this is where we were. Got into some problems. You know, I've probably said it in in videos before. Got into some tax problems. It was one of those things that again didn't know business like I should have and got behind on that. It's a whole other story, but I lost the building. There was no way I could keep it. I was making payments at a bank, but it was going to be a problems and we lost this building, unfortunately. And you can see that somebody bought it and turned it into what it is today, which is a really nice building. It was a really great place to be because it's a really good location. We have St. Mary's Seafood next to us. And St. Mary's Seafood, first of all, in one way it was really good cuz, man, they got good seafood. In another way, it was really bad cuz they had really good sweet tea. Also, we used to jump over there and buy sweet tea. Oh my gosh.

[00:15:19]>> Lemonade, sweet tea all day long.

[00:15:20]>> Lemonade and sweet tea all day long.

[00:15:22]>> Cuz I was pretty much at this point just chilling in the the kids' room over there that y'all had.

[00:15:27]>> Yep. Had a little kids room and you used to put the two chairs together and sleep on the two chairs cuz we were here till >> Yeah. Sleeping in the chairs.

[00:15:33]>> Yep.

[00:15:34]>> Old school '9s computer games in your office.

[00:15:37]>> Yep.

[00:15:37]>> And when I got in trouble, all of this right here was rocks.

[00:15:41]>> Yeah. This was not concrete.

[00:15:43]>> Yeah. Then we had a little a little asphalt pad right up over there that was kind of in front of the bay. We had a concrete pad right outside the bays and a little asphalt past that. The rest of this was all tilled up. It was dirt and rocks. Big rocks. And he get in trouble.

[00:15:56]He has to come out and pick up rocks.

[00:15:58]>> Yeah. Put him in a bucket.

[00:15:59]>> Yep.

[00:15:59]>> I remember putting up that right there.

[00:16:01]That unroll tiger paw sign. Do you remember that sign?

[00:16:05]>> Oh, was it the wavy guy?

[00:16:07]>> No, it wasn't a guy. It was a sign.

[00:16:08]There was a unroll sign right out off the road.

[00:16:11]>> Okay. That was when you thought we thought like we're making it big now. We got a big uni roll sign on the road.

[00:16:16]>> Oh, I do remember that.

[00:16:17]>> Yeah. And we had a little car wash over there back behind on that side of the building.

[00:16:22]>> Yep. Yeah. I mean, we were we were starting to do the things that Royalty Auto Service wanted to do, but we weren't Royalty Auto Service yet, but we were starting to build the little pieces. The little blocks were starting to get put together. So, now we had to leave here. Unfortunately, we're going to take you to what a lot of people would consider a downgrade, but it had to be done. And you got to persevere.

[00:16:42]You got to uh got to do what you got to do. Let's show where that is.

[00:16:47]>> I want you to know if you're watching this video and right now you're in that struggle time, you're in that, you know, grinding it out and and and trying to figure it out, don't give up. Just set your goals. Know what you want to, you know, look at your big dream and just keep working towards it. There things are going to get put in front of you to knock you back. That's just life. It's how you deal with that is going to determine where you're going to end up.

[00:17:14]>> It is now 2003 and we are over in Kingsland now.

[00:17:20]Everything else we've done so far has been in St. Mary's. All the shops were in St. Mary's, but now we're in Kingsland, close to where our current second shop is that we started the video at that everybody sees all the time.

[00:17:32]We're just around the corner from that.

[00:17:34]At the time that we were here, there was no asphalt, right? None of this asphalt was here. It was all that dried, crushed up, you know, basically ground up asphalt that somebody had just thrown down. This little pad on the side was not here. And this part of it, right, this part where this asphalt is was about, and there's a reason I'm telling you this was about 3 or 4 feet lower than it is right now. And this was all basically a really dirty, muddy mess going back into there. It was like a clay mud. And we were here for 2 years. We were here. Two years.

[00:18:16]The person that owned the building at the time was a a friend of a friend basically. I mean, I knew the man for a long time. I knew the man since the 80s when I worked at a part store and I was a kid. Um, and you know, he had this available. We had lost the other building. We had to do something pretty quick. We came in here. We did not have all three bays. You see there's three bays here. And it's really nice. They they've cleaned this up nice and painted it and everything. It's really nice right now. But that first bay. And if you look, let's walk over this way, Sherwood. So, you can kind of see from here. We're not going to go interrupt them. We did talk to them. They said it was fine to video out here.

[00:18:56]>> I appreciate that. By South Georgia fencing.

[00:18:58]>> South Georgia fence and decking. You need something. But we might need them come over to the shop in St. Mary's. We need a fence over there, by the way. But that office was there and we were able to use that office had it's tiny. It's very tiny. Like the bed of that truck is about as big as that office is.

[00:19:16]>> The first bay, the man who owned the building still had that. He wanted to have that. There's a wall in between them and he did body work over there.

[00:19:27]Um, he really messed around with like hot rods and all that and he worked on like one I think he worked on like one car the entire time we were at this at this facility. A >> hobby.

[00:19:36]>> It was a hobby for him, not a profession.

[00:19:38]>> But he was always pretty much when we first got in the building, he wasn't here very much.

[00:19:43]>> And then he had some falling out with his This is the kind of stuff you go through, guys. What I'm about to tell you is the kind of stuff you go through when you rent buildings, you lease buildings, you're trying to make it through, you're trying to grow, you're trying to build, you're doing what you got to do. He had something going on with his wife at the time. I think they were going through divorce, something.

[00:19:59]And next thing I know, he was living here. He's got a little loft up on the other side of there. And he he lived here. That means he was here 24/7.

[00:20:09]And he was a little bit Sometimes he was a little ornery.

[00:20:16]Sometimes he was a little ornery. This is also the place where you and your little buddy used to play the NXS song.

[00:20:22]One of my favorite bands in the world, NXS. And uh Suicide Blonde, he used to play the beginning of that song at ad nauseium to try to get at me. You remember that?

[00:20:32]>> I know you remember that because you and now you got Jackson doing it.

[00:20:35]>> Yeah. Anyway, moving on.

[00:20:38]>> We worked in these two bays. We moved everything from the big shop over here ourselves. The lifts, the whole deal. We put them in trucks. We got three racks.

[00:20:49]We got three lifts in this building.

[00:20:51]There's two bays, but we were able to finagle three lifts in there. You had to kind of go in sideways in the one of them. The concrete wasn't real good and one of those lifts popped up out of the ground one time with a car on it. Thank god nothing happened. We already to get the car down. Had to have concrete reporoured on that one spot. Learned again, one of the things you learn that concrete better be good concrete and it better be thick enough. It was thick enough, but it was not good enough. It was like very watered down concrete.

[00:21:15]Anyway, we worked here for a couple of years and then out of nowhere, again, I told you the guy was a little ornery. We had a guy working for us, uh, um, Lomar, great guy, and he was up here working on a Saturday on his on his one of his own vehicles, which we had no problem with whatsoever. I'll never forget this. I was driving down St. Mary's Road. I was about to go to Jacksonville. I had a car at this point, as you can tell. You know, we had a vehicle and he called me and he's like, "Hey," I'm not going to say the guy's name, but hey, the owner is telling me I got to leave here. I got to get out of here and I'm not allow I'm not allowed here. But he was my employee. And what had happened was again remember I told you this stuff was about 3 or 4 feet down. The previous week it had poured down rain. Okay, happens a lot. And it turned into a pure mud pit and Lomar's car was in the back in which it gets really muddy and he was afraid he wasn't going to be able to get it out. So, at that same time, the owner of the building was bringing in a load of extra muddy clayy dirt, right? And it just wasn't good dirt. It wasn't Anyway, he was backing up and about to dump that load right where that fence gate is and he was going to block Lomar in. So, Lomar had come out and was trying to get out past him and Lomar just was like yelled and said, "Hey, hang on a minute." And that set the guy off. They got into an argument and Lomar's like, "I'm just trying to get my car out where I don't get stuck back here. You're about to dump a load of dirt and my car is back here." All right. Well, that was the previous week and then nothing happened while we were here other than that little, you know, tit for tat deal, whatever. And then uh that Saturday, Lomar calls me up, tells me he's got to go. I I'm coming down St. Mary's Road, which is close to here. I I come in here. By the time I got here, the police are here. And I'm like, "What in the world is going on here?" walked in and the officer meets me and he's like, "Hey, you know, your guy's here, the the the owner is telling telling me he can't be on the property." I'm like, "Well, he's my employee. I have, you know, I rent this from him." He goes, "Yeah, but you don't have a lease." I did not have a lease. It was just monthtomonth. And he's like, "Yeah, but you don't have a lease." And he's basically he knows he can tell you that you can't have him there. And I'm like, "Well, that's going to be a problem. He's my employee." So, he went and talked to the owner. The owner's like, "Well, he can be here during business hours." So the police officer came back out and he said he said you he can be here during business hours. I said well what are business hours? Because I mean you know he went back in came back out and he said the business hours are 8:30 to 4:30. I'm like I don't know. Let me tell you something that's tough business hours to be able to make a living at. Uh so and and the police officer actually looked at me and he's like listen man.

[00:23:58]He said I'm kind of new on the force. I kind of heard about this guy. There's been some rumblings. There was all kind of stuff happened.

[00:24:04]>> But that's that could be stories right there. That could be stories all on their own.

[00:24:07]>> Yeah.

[00:24:07]>> But uh he's like, "I'm just going to tell you just from talking to this guy right now, he said, "You might want to look at a different place."

[00:24:13]>> Yeah.

[00:24:13]>> And the next Friday, we were like, we were out of here. We were we got to go. We literally, that man would always go to out to eat breakfast at Stephan's restaurant every single Friday morning.

[00:24:28]And we knew he was going to be gone for about 4 hours. and we literally brought a whole bunch of people in. This is his two years of being here, but I mean this guy was he was creating a lot of issues with us and really I don't think he wanted us here anymore anyway. We rolled up in here, we took the sign down, we loaded up all the racks, all the equipment, put it in the trucks, put it into U-Hauls, and off we went. We had to do it. And he didn't have, believe me, he didn't have an issue with it because never had a problem with the guy. You know, again, I'm I'm friends with his family and it is what it is. The guy was just, you know, I think he was just wanting to be on his own. when he was kind of that hery kind of guy. So that was again 2005ish and then we head back to St. Mary's and I'm going to tell you something now.

[00:25:10]Again I I said this in a minute ago.

[00:25:13]>> A lot of people would say my gosh you went down. Of course this is nice. I mean I'm looking at this this was not nice then.

[00:25:18]>> This was not this nice then. It was still this kind of building but boy this is been some money spent on this place now.

[00:25:23]>> But a lot of people would say this is a downgrade. It went from seven bays to now two bays. We get three racks in there. You know what? At that moment in time when we were here, we actually did really well here. Obviously, we're in the middle of nowhere, just so you know.

[00:25:37]>> Yeah.

[00:25:38]>> The the there's a storage place across the road. There's nothing down this road, right? There's a little subdivision down here, >> but we're way back off of any main road.

[00:25:49]The other shop was on the main drag going into St. Mary's. And a lot of people be like, "Man, that's massively down." We did well here. It helped me to realize how to work the money, what the margins needed to be, where we needed to be financially, and work towards that and and learn some good lessons in this spot. So again, don't think just because you got to do something like this that you know, it's all over. It's not. It's just the next stepping stone to the next next place, which again, we had to make this this change pretty quick. So, let's go to the We're going to go back. We're doing this in the right order, by the way. I don't know if you guys see this. You see the hitchhikers on me? That's from the shop when we were in the woods basically in the in the car doctor shop. That's what that's from. So, we're doing this in the right order as we're going back and forth St. Mary's and Kingsley right now.

[00:26:38]So, now we're headed back to St. Mary's to show you the next shop. We're sitting here at this stop sign. And I'm reminiscing with Sherwood. He doesn't want to do this part of the video, by the way, at this particular stop sign when he was 16 years old learning how to drive. 15 years old. 15 years old.

[00:26:54]learner's permit. He pulled out of here and almost got us hit by a car right there. And I mean, for those of you that had had a young driver, you know, when you teach somebody, there's going to be that moment where it's terrifying. Well, that was our terrifying spot right there.

[00:27:12]>> Yeah. But I came through clutch and got past it cuz I'm like, "Go, go, go, go, go, go." If you were like, it is now roughly 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

[00:27:27]And we are at 8:15 Osborne Road. And you can see that this looks like a downgrade from the downgrade.

[00:27:36]It was this was actually a gas station that I think has been here since the 1940s, possibly the 50s, but I think it was even in the 40s. They everybody calls it the old golf station. People that live here, if you're from here and you watch our videos, thank you and comment down below. The old golf station, agree with me or not. But I will tell you that at the time that we had to so we had to leave that place, come here quickly. Um, a good friend of mine owned this this property. He owned this one and the one next to it, which is a metal building. And I actually worked in that building on one of mom's cabs a long time ago. Put a put an oil pump in a Ford Fairmont. Anyway, go down that path. But he owned it. Great guy.

[00:28:17]Timmy Lloyd. Timmy and I I I know he's watching. I know he's he's commenting all the time, so he'll remember this. He had it full of stuff. So, I mean, it was it was packed full of stuff. I came to him. I had about a week to make this happen. I came to him like, "Hey, need somewhere to rent?" He's like, "I got you." He emptied everything out. You can see there's two bays right here. This is a hodge podge building. I'm going to tell you that right now.

[00:28:44]I think probably originally this building was just this front with three bays and then eventually it had we can't go in the back but it had a an add-on on the back of the building. It's very convoluted inside. It had a really great bay for checking AC leaks because it is pitch black in that thing. You pull into it, there's not a window in it, you shut the door down, it is like I mean it is pitch black. But we ended up having this front office right here was just absolutely not habitable at the time.

[00:29:19]And we spent a ton of I think I have a picture of me and you up here scraping the paint. There was I don't know how many what 60 years 50 60 years worth of paint on this thing. We were trying to scrape it down trying to make it look good.

[00:29:33]>> But we ended up >> getting this thing. We painted it and we ended up I worked in that front office every single night. Oh, what was that TV show that I used to watch all the time?

[00:29:46]Oh, Roman, what was that? What is it?

[00:29:49]Everybody loves Raymond. I don't know why we used the little TV setup in there and that was on all the time.

[00:29:54]>> That's funny. I was just thinking about that TV because I used to watch TBS Braves games on that TV all the time.

[00:30:01]>> And so I worked on that thing every single night. We ended up, you know, that was obviously the front of the gas station back in the day. Our office was actually in that room there. But once we got that's nice and fixed up and everything. It was nice. I We did that really good. But you could come in there and you know, we would greet our clients in there and then we would have our little we had a little back office in that area and then we had that bay, that bay, which are very tiny by the way.

[00:30:26]It's hard to tell from here.

[00:30:28]>> Yeah. Let's show them. But you can pull in that bay right there and you have very little room on the sides to to actually work very tight areas in it.

[00:30:39]Actually, you know what? Now that I'm looking at this, look at this.

[00:30:41]>> Yeah, >> that bay was added at some point. That bay was added on. You can see where the build Where'd you go? We can see where the building ended right there. So, it probably at one point was just a two- bay garage and the gas pumps were in here. You can see there's a bay on the side of the building and that's a bay that you could work on that way. And there's bays that come back this way.

[00:31:01]We're not going to walk around there, but there's bays that come back this way. It's quite a deep building. It's got a lot of potential. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of area to work, but everything was separated. So, it was a little difficult to, you know, when you're when you're uh inside of it, there's it's not open like a lot of shops are. It's very it's very claustrophobic.

[00:31:19]Even in between these two bays right here, there's a big cinder block wall.

[00:31:23]So, it's uh it's again, it's very different. It's it's a a building that's been put together over decades, right?

[00:31:30]Added on to I doubt that that back of that building was even like it is, but we had some we had some areas to work in. It was tough to get toolboxes in here. It was tough. You had to walk around to get to your toolbox and stuff cuz you didn't know what bay you were going to work in. And none of them were connected together. But again, I can remember a lot of stuff. I can remember our first computer in this one, right, that we had back in the back. our first like uh in shop computer that we had cuz every other time we had our computers in the offices and everything and at this point we started moving computers into the shop. I can remember we built a little wood >> little thing back in the back of this one and uh had our No, that was at the same area shop. I mean that was at the that was at the Kingsland shop that we just came from and we moved that one over here.

[00:32:09]>> I remember that was in the middle that was in the middle area.

[00:32:11]>> It was in the middle area because we had to do a lot of estimating and stuff in that thing because that because that office was so tiny >> and the office was farther away. and it was further away. Now, I'm going to tell you a little something. This area right here, we did a garden. Not a garden, but we did a little I mean, I guess a garden. It wasn't for food garden, but we did some plants and stuff in here.

[00:32:31]Made it look really nice. We got an award from the St. Mary's uh garden club or the St. Mary's Garden League, I think, something like that.

[00:32:42]They came in and presented us with an award because we had this nice garden out here that was, you know, we kept, you know, pretty and everything.

[00:32:49]>> Need to get Adeline to do a thing for the shop. See if we can win another award.

[00:32:53]>> Yeah. I don't know if they're still around. Now, here's the deal. That's the St. Mary's, I think it was a garden league or garden club. Where we're at right now is the railroad tracks are right there. This is all considered historic St. Mary's. So, everything from the railroad tracks downtown. So, downtown is literally right there. And that's our waterfront and everything. So they were very particular about, you know, what happens in these kind of places. I mean, you know, obviously this is pretty run down right now, but once you start getting down there a little further, they're particular about it. We were particular about how we wanted to keep it up. We kept it clean and nice and organized. And we were here for Timmy had it and then I think he ended up selling it to another guy or something happened there with another guy. He came in, he owned it for a while. Never had any issues with either one of them. And then I think it was 2008, Neil came to me and said, "Hey, we've got this building that was a shop and would you like to rent it?" And it's in a a little more I mean, I like this location to be quite honest with you because I like the I like the downtown and everything, but it was a much cleaner, nicer building. It had four nice bays. We're going to go there and show you that next. a a much a massive upgrade from this.

[00:34:08]>> Getting closer to where you were in the beginning.

[00:34:10]>> Yes, definitely getting closer from where I was in the beginning. I >> thought you were going to mention the sign thing, the sign issue here.

[00:34:17]>> We did have a sign issue here the very first day we opened. So, remember we got here on a Friday. We moved everything over here, right? And on Monday morning, we were opening up and we had we we hadn't started doing anything at this point. We were just coming in here, you know, he had just cleaned it out. We were just pressure washed and started moving the stuff in and then over time we fixed it up. But we were going to put a sign up here. Auto care. We were still autoare at the time. We're going to put that up here. But but we didn't have the lettering yet. So we had a um just a banner that we put up and the banner was between these two posts. It was not 9:00. We put that sign up and on Sunday afternoon, it was not 9:00 on Monday morning that somebody was in the office.

[00:35:04]I heard him in that office because remember this wasn't open yet. And I was in the bay there and there's a door that was open and he was in there saying there was going to be a fine because we had the sign and everything. Had the banner up there, ordinances and all that. And I walked in, you know, people could say what they want to say about the good old boy network or whatever, but I walked in and it was somebody that I knew very well and I was like, "Hey."

[00:35:24]I was like, "What's going on?" Oh, hey Sherwood. is this your place? I'm like, "Yeah, we moved in. It's blah blah blah." He's like, "Oh, man. It was great to have you in here." "Hey, you know, that banner's got to be, you know, you got to have there's an ordinance for that. You can only have it up so many days a year. Um he said, you know, normally there'd be a fine, but I'm going to go ahead and sign it. Go downtown, pay your 15 bucks, so you can put it up, but you only have it up like was 45 days a year or something like that." And I we're going to have our sign put up here. But anyway, that helped me out to I mean, I've lived here my whole life, you know, since I was 12 years old.

[00:35:51]>> Here you are trying to get a business going.

[00:35:53]>> Just trying to get a business going. But again, the the turmoil and the tribul what are the the tribulations, I guess, whatever it's the the things you go through when you go through business when you're just trying to make it again. Not, you know, we're going to get to when it started to get when I started to get kind of a little more professional. I mean, the shops were run professionally at this point. I was taking care of people and everything, but the moving and all that stuff up until this point, we were doing this all on our own. We were literally moving all these racks and bolting them in and doing everything and running the electrical. We were doing all that on our own. We weren't hiring people to do that. And when we left here, we did the same thing. We we we didn't leave here in a, you know, in a hurry. Obviously, the last couple places we did. And this one, we were just like, "Hey, we're going to we're going to move." And the guy was like, "Cool, no problem. Glad to see you're moving up." And we got all our stuff, you know, after it probably took us a good month because we had to get the other place going. And then we went from here. So we've gone, how have we gone here? We went from here over to Kingsland and then back past the first shop. So right now we are past our first shop all the way back into downtown. So we've gone all over the place right now and now we're headed back the other way towards Kingsland.

[00:37:10]Now this shop that we're about to go to is actually almost in the middle of the two. We're still auto care at this point. When we get to the next shop, then we're going to show you what happened, why we left AutoAR. We no longer became, you know, we changed our name from Autoare. We went to something else and then we had to make an emergency change from that name to something else. So, that's coming when we get to the next shop. It is now 2008 and I think we've done an upgrade here.

[00:37:35]We came out here. Now, we are behind.

[00:37:37]So, if we look out here, you can see there's a main road right there. And that actually is the main that's the same road that the shop in downtown St. Mary's is on, just obviously busier. And it is the same road that the Kingsland current shop is on. It just goes straight through. But we're behind the car lot. No big deal. Got a nice shop here. Big shop. It's four bays, but you can see there's lots of room in between the bays. It was built by somebody who was open, you know, knew we wanted to open up a shop. It is air conditioned, although it fights a losing battle in the middle of summer. We did paint it.

[00:38:12]We're going to get to that in a second.

[00:38:14]And this is where the name change happened. This is where we went from auto care to something else which we'll get to to immediately Royalty Auto Service. Let's go. This is the one shop where we can actually go inside. So, we're going to go inside here. And there is a little bit of remnants of Royalty Auto Service inside this shop still. So, we're going to show you that. As you can see, we've come kind of full circle.

[00:38:38]Neil is and was then the owner of this building. He's the one that's got us in here. And let's walk into the office.

[00:38:47]Look at this guy. Woo! Guys, he scared me a little bit. When we first got in here, this office was not like this. So, again, every single shop that we've been in, we've had to put our our fingers in.

[00:39:00]We've had to make our own uh kind of make it us. this one right you walked in and right about here was a wall and it came to about right there. So you walked into almost against the wall and then you had to walk down this little tiny hallway and this was a massive bathroom and shower right smack I mean almost like where this couch is right here and we're like well that that's not going to work but you know what they said you can you know do what you want to the to the place you know make it nice. They knew we were going to make it nice so we ripped all that out. We had to cut the concrete up and run the bathroom where it is now. And I haven't been in here in a long time, but we ran the bathroom back over here so that we could open all of this up so we could have our, you know, our our work area where we could greet clients and everything. We put this window in and so we were able to and this is a sliding window so our service advisor was able to, you know, talk to the people outside and the techs were able to come up here and and deal with our service advisor. We had a nice counter right there and it was really, you know, again, had to make it our own.

[00:40:08]And then come on, let's go back. I know you guys are looking at all the cool stuff in here. A lot of >> a lot of people are like, I want to buy that and buy, you know, there's going to be some there going to be some offers.

[00:40:18]There's gonna be some people having some comments out here, too.

[00:40:21]>> We did. We >> We put this bathroom in. So, we came across, went into that, put a bathroom there, and then cut across on the concrete and put this bathroom in also.

[00:40:35]And put this little wash sink in here.

[00:40:37]Again, we had to have a bathroom in the shop. Put these stairs in so we could get upstairs. And there is a a storage area up there. We're gonna get to our our signage and stuff. Let's take a look at the floor.

[00:40:50]You see this this yellow floor. All right. So, listen. I'll tell you right now, my employees, if they make a suggestion, we will take that suggestion and sometimes run with it. The yellow floor is here. We painted the floor yellow. This was us. One of my employees, Robert, you guys have have seen Robert in videos before. He said, "Let's make a yellow floor. brought us paint it yellow because that way we can find bolts and nuts easier. We're like, "Hey, as Robert always says, Columbus took a chance." So, we did it. Um, none of us would recommend that.

[00:41:25]>> Yeah.

[00:41:26]>> Right. Even Robert to this day is like, "Yeah, that was a bad decision."

[00:41:28]>> And our colors were blue and yellow at this point with the auto care. That's part of this whole thing.

[00:41:34]>> That is part of this story is our colors were naturally blue and yellow in and auto care. And we're going to get to this part of the story. We were a Napa Autoare Center. Three months after we opened in 1996, we became a Napa Autoare Center. So, it kind of all matched.

[00:41:50]Autoare, we were blue and yellow and we were Napa Autoare Center. We're going to get to why we got away from Nap the Autoare name. We'll do that in just a little bit. Anyway, Neil's got this thing with some cars in here right now.

[00:42:03]>> Yeah, there's not much room to walk.

[00:42:05]>> We did have There were racks. These racks were already in here when we got in here. I think there were four racks already in here.

[00:42:10]>> We took two of them out, I think. We had to replace some racks or something.

[00:42:14]Yeah, we had to replace some racks and do some stuff in here. But this was a functional shop. You can see it's got air conditioning up here, >> right? The problem is that there's not a lot of insulation in these metal buildings, but we had some benches over there. Um, it's going to be hard to walk around in here. But take a look at this.

[00:42:32]And I'm going to get some pictures of this.

[00:42:35]This is our signage that we put up here, which we are going to actually I'm looking at it now. And we're gonna recreate this and put this at the other shops. We had somebody that worked for us that was an artist. He took and set up a projector over here. All right, let's get to the name change because here we are. Royalty Auto Service. When we moved in this building, we were Auto Care. We're not going We It's a whole another story we can get into on on We had a falling out with our local Napa store. It was a big fallout. Okay. It was big enough that we had a lot of Napa stuff in this building. We had Napa stools. We had Napa cabinets. I mean, there was not a yellow and or blue thing in this building when we got done. The walls were, but that's it. The building was >> You held the grudge a little strong on >> I had a strong grudge on that one. Well, you want to hear the story on that one, you leave a comment down below. It was a big one >> before just before we we're going to tell that story, but I want people to know that the local store now here in town is not an issue anymore. We deal with them all the time. So, just >> Yes. They are different people now.

[00:43:36]>> Yeah.

[00:43:37]>> Right. They they've changed. The people who were the problem no longer are around and there's a reason for that.

[00:43:45]Anyway, we had to go through a name change. All right. We're like, we're going to we're cutting ties with with them. We're not going to be autocare anymore. And we changed it to the car nerds for about 10 seconds. We went to the car nerds and we had a little bit of an issue with a company who deals with um some automotive uh equipment. And the guy that own that company called me.

[00:44:06]He's like, "Hey, Sherwood, you know, I'm this and we're not going to get into who they are and everything. I don't want any animosity with them at all. I had no issue whatsoever with them."

[00:44:13]>> It actually worked out >> perfect for us because Royalty Auto Service is a much better fit than Car Nerds, right? For us.

[00:44:21]>> So, we changed it. We had changed it and then we changed it again right away.

[00:44:24]Pretty much right away. We changed the royalty auto service and we had a uh company Autoop Solutions who helped us out and they designed we they used to do our website. We have no problems with them at all even to this day. But they uh lady there really helped us out with making the logo. We love our logo. We're still, you know, still to this day is is is our logo. And we had a young man that worked for us who was an artist. He set up a projector over here and put this up here on the wall and painted it on the wall. And I love this. This is uh brings back some good memories, right? Because this is the very first royalty auto service anything that we had. And then we had some stickers and stuff put on the front door. And then we actually we're getting we're growing at this point. We're getting a little bigger. We got some employees. We actually put a sign by the road. Actually, our sign that is in St. Mary's now, although the sign's been replaced several times over the years, this it's basically the same box and everything that the sign came in, it got moved. It got put up here and then it got moved to St. Mary's location, which we're going to next.

[00:45:24]This is the final shop. This is where we ended up calling home or it being home.

[00:45:31]This was 2013 and this was about gosh probably August September of 2013. We actually opened the doors of this building. I think it was October 31st of 2013.

[00:45:49]We were approached by the bank. So the bank that's over there, that's a different bank now, owned this property.

[00:45:57]They they uh unfortunately were stuck with this property. It had been for sale for a few years. We had previously been contacted by the realtor and they wanted a an astronomical amount of money for it. We're like, "Yeah, no." And then they came back to us a couple of years later. The bank actually did cuz it's the bank we did business with and they made me a deal that you could not pass up. So, we bought it. We, you know, they we we actually couldn't finance it with them because they owned it. some kind of banking thing. So, we had to finance it with a different bank. But, we got in here. It was originally a repair shop.

[00:46:34]The man that owned it originally, that built it, actually owned the shop and owned this house. We'll get back to this house in just a second. He had a repair shop and a car lot. And if we look at it, you can see where the 319 is.

[00:46:50]There's like a a little, you know, bump out right there. There was a wall inside. And we you guys have seen it, but we'll walk inside there. But there was a wall in between the two. We had to open that up because we weren't having two separate businesses. They had a repair shop and they had a car lot on one side, a repair shop on the other, and they had some little little cubicle offices where I guess you would talk to the finance people. But anyway, kind of tight in here. We'll go around the other side. You can see on this side, four big bays. You guys have seen videos in this in this shop before. Some of our very first videos, all of our very first videos were done in this shop. Three bays on this side, large bays, a tight squeeze to get in and out of there, but you know, the shop itself was just an absolutely amazing thing to get. Uh we can we were able to do the floor. We we've done the floor a couple of times in this shop and got a nice waiting area up front. Hey, what we'll do is we'll walk back through here. We'll head up to the front. We'll show you the waiting area there. But here's the thing. Before we before we do all that, this is where we we went from moving all the equipment ourselves, right? And and just doing everything ourselves. When we moved from that previous shop where Neil was to here, this was the first time we had professionals actually do everything. We had lift people come in and move the lifts. We had electrical people come in, do the electrical. We had, you know, we just, you know, we had the right carpenters. We had everybody come in and just and get it done and do it right. We were able to do that.

[00:48:25]>> But don't let if there was still a lot of work that was put in by us as well.

[00:48:29]>> Oh, we chipped every single >> piece of tile up in the front of this place. We'll show you all that.

[00:48:34]>> We did that in Kingsland, too.

[00:48:35]>> And we we chipped that in Kingsland, too. So, even though we were able to do it, we still did a lot of the work ourselves. We didn't have I think we had when we first got here, it's been a while now. This was 2013 that we had we had to do this bathroom.

[00:48:48]We There was no Oh, yeah. I know. 100% we had to do the bathroom. We had to bring it in here and do the bathroom.

[00:48:53]There's two toilets in there and a sink and everything in there. We got a little parts room. Again, the floor's been done a couple of times. Shops, you're just going to be doing your floors. There's going to be really only the only way you could ever do a floor once I think is with tile. There's certain kind of tiles, but they are way expensive. If you're going to do epoxy, it's going to take some time. Jody's in here keeping the floor clean. This was the tile that was in the entire building was this. And we just didn't like the way it looked.

[00:49:20]Obviously, we've got a nice waiting area over here. A little smaller than than our Kingsland waiting area, but we tried to make it very very similar. We have the same tile over there that we have over here. Um, you know, we've got our little TV setup. Most people don't watch it anymore. They watch their phones and stuff, but it's there just in case. And we have a playroom over here that has to get refreshed quite a bit because the floors do get even though we don't you don't want to have shoes in there. And then this is where they have their again, okay, we we took over a building that wasn't, you know, it was a repair shop on one side, but it was also a car lot. This is where they had their little offices where they would, you know, do the dealings. And we're like, okay, let's make this one the the kids' room.

[00:50:00]So, we did that. And then this one is just our server room. Just got our, you know, server stuff, computer stuff.

[00:50:05]forgot to tell about the house. The person remember the person that originally owned this used to own that house. But when he lost this, he lost the house also. The bank owned it all.

[00:50:14]They had sold that to somebody else.

[00:50:17]Eventually, we wor we worked next door to the guy. He worked in there. He was like a day trader and he wanted to get rid of it. So, we did end up buying the house uh probably five or six years into owning this. We bought that and we mainly got it so we could have some parking and we do a lot of the parking around back. We're not allowed to park in the front, but we're we can park in the back. So, it's been helpful to be able to do that. And it's also helped out some friends and family and stuff that needed somewhere to stay. We're able to jump in that >> three months when we had nowhere to stay and we lived in that little one-bedroom spot with the dogs and the kids. And >> you lived right there?

[00:50:50]>> Yeah.

[00:50:51]>> And when we got here, we were able to get a little fancy with our lettering.

[00:50:54]This is actually our brand new lettering on this building. We It was dated again, 13 years old. We had lettering put up there 13 years ago and it gets this is the kind of stuff you're going to deal with when you got a shop. Put some money aside because you're going to have some expenditures on things that you've already bought. We had new lettering put up here and we had our, you know, our our slogan put on the bottom of it and we had our sign refreshed a little bit which we need to do. Actually, we need to go that again. But that's a big deal when you're a shop to be able to do that. Those that kind of stuff is not inexpensive. But when you're first starting off, listen, we had hand painted signs. We had vinyl signs that people would just they just took a piece of metal and stuck that sign over there with that with our shield on it with our logo on there. The first iteration of that was actually at the the shop we just came from in between the bays. It was just a square piece of metal, thin piece of metal with a logo, just vinyl on it. Was not expensive, but you know what? It got the job done. When we moved over here, we're like, you know what?

[00:51:58]we're going to take that and put it on the side and put Royalty Auto Service up here so we only had to buy letters. And now 13 years later, we're able to get new everything. And and it feels good to be able to do that. But again, guys, this is a journey. And if you're on this journey, whether it be an automotive repair, you know, obviously you're kind of following hopefully in our footsteps and and learning from our mistakes. If you're doing something else, we got a lot of people on here that that do other things that you just watch us and we we do appreciate that. We love that, you know, you enjoy watching our our content. But it if you're on any kind of journey to get out there and to to build your own business, to build your own brand, you know, just you got you're going to have ups and downs. You're going to have ups and downs. It is not going to be just that straight up trajectory trajectory and you just got to get through it. You just got to get through the dips and the valleys of it and keep going along and, you know, take the steps that are put in front of you.

[00:52:50]I always say that I always have the right stepping stone put in front of me at the right time. It's just a matter of if I choose to step on it or not. Choose to step on them. When you feel like it's there, step on it. Take that chance. Get out there and and build your thing. It can be life-changing. And then one day, your son might walk up and have a phone in front of you and go, "Hey, Dad, what are you doing?" And next thing you know, you're standing out in front of your your shop. So, that's it for this one, guys. Do me a favor. If there's anything extra you want to hear, any other stories that you want to hear that like if we if we told the entire story in this one video, the thing would be hours and hours long. But if there's something you heard and you're like, "Hey, I'd like for you to, you know, extrapolate on that a little bit. Maybe give us a little more detail." Leave a comment down below and let us know. While you're down there, hit that subscribe button.

[00:53:34]We're getting close to 500,000. Massive giveaway when we get there. Hit that thumbs up and leave a comment down below and let us know, are you on your journey and where you at on it? Appreciate you watching. We'll see you in the next one.

[00:53:59]Walk into the office.

[00:54:04]This is the office.

[00:54:14]where my dad sits.

[00:54:16]Does work.

[00:54:37]Outside rack.

[00:54:41]There's the car sign.

[00:55:06]I'm assuming this would be the front office.

[00:55:11]You go through here little room.

[00:55:23]And there's another room.

[00:55:31]This takes you to the two rooms you saw in the other video.