This is a story of a successful family business and that I ran across a few years ago. At the time I was working for a company that provided B2B services and this business was a client of mine.A black man in Georgia named joined the Army in Dec of 1941, he went on to become a mechanic in the Army and served overseas for 4 years. During his time in the Army he learned how to become a pretty good mechanic.He returned to his Georgia home and married his high school sweetheart and got a job at a company nearby. In 1947 his car broke down and he discovered something.None of the local repair shops would work on a black person's car. There was a significant black population but racism was alive and well in rural Georgia. He ended up fixing his car himself.At the time his job had cut his hours back and he needed some extra money so he put an ad in the paper saying he was a backyard mechanic and willing to fix people's cars for a fair price. He made sure to mention he was perfectly fine with working on black people's cars.He was surprised by the number of calls he got, he got so many calls he decided to take a mortgage out on his family home and opened up his own repair shop. He specifically targeted the black community but he also made it clear he wasn't going to refuse anyone business based upon the color of their skin, so black, white, Hispanic, he didn't care in his eyes everyone money was the same color, green.He primarily marketed his business VIA new paper but he also started with black churches, he would go to the pastor and offer him them a larger then normal donation in return ask for the pastor to talk about his shop, that he does good honest work and he's a supporter of the church. This drove his traffic.Also he made a deal with every church, he'd fix their church vehicles for only the cost of parts IF they would mention his business. In the rural south, everyone basically went to church. And churches were segregated so it was easy to target the black population, go after the black churches.In his area there were several employers known for hiring large amounts of blacks and Hispanics. He would approach those places of business and let them know of their services. Many managers were happy to pass around his information, an employee with a working car is far more likely to show up for their shift.In addition, there was a large military base near his business, he sponsors events on the local military base in return for advertising.He also believed in what he liked to call the power of charity advertising. From time to time he'd end up with a decent old car, he would run contests to give it away he would have people write him and tell them WHY they deserve this car and he'd pick one of the stories and gift them the car. Or when the local football team bus would break down he would often fix it free of charge and ask the school to give him an honorable mention at the football game that Friday night.His biggest gift he ever gave was a building to his church for bible study. He would pay for the entire building, in return they would name the building after him. Which they did, he joked though he figures he never made his money back on that one, but it felt good to help his church out and would also joke "That was the deal I made with god to forgive my sins and let me join him in heaven when my time comes, you could say I bought my way in"He made good money, and quickly grew a reputation for doing solid work. Unlike a lot of repair shops he would often find ways to save people money. Also if a customer asked for something to be done that really didn't need to be done he'd tell them that it doesn't need to be done and lower their bill. This helped his reputation. He said at first his business was pretty much 100% black customers, and that made sense his marketing focused on the black community.However he noticed after a while whites were showing up at his shop, he treated them with respect and did the same honest, quality work he provided anyone else.His business was very successful, in fact at one point they had 5 repair shops with over 30 employees. However they've since scaled down to just one larger location after a bad hire cost them a lot of money VIA stealing. I worked with his grandson and son who still run the shop to this day (last I checked was about 3 years ago assume its still in business)I only met Mr. Brown (the original owner) once, he passed away shortly after I met him but I remember talking to him, I was curious because in his office he had newspaper clippings of his ads, story about his shop, etc. One day when I visited his shop he was visiting his grandson, and son. By this time he had long since retired and was rarely in the shop anymore.The point being Mr. Brown didn't reinvent the wheel, he didn't create some magical new idea, or create some fancy app and have a bunch of VC capital.He learned how to do something, find a demographic that needed to be serviced and he serviced it and did a good job and was paid for it. He clearly had his niche, and he made his mark in it. IN fact even to this day, his job is pretty much black customers. I would say about 70% of his customer base is black. In fact many of his customers are 2nd and 3rd generation customers. Meaning their families have been bringing their cars to be worked on for the past 70 years, to the same shop. They still routinely work with churches for advertising, primarily black churches.And well I don't know how much money they made, they never missed a bill with us, they all drove nice cars, and I know the Grandson lived in a very nice home (never saw the father or the Grand Fathers homes but I imagine they were nice as well) see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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