Do It For A Living

Steven Aghakhani is a 13 year old who races exotic cars for a living! Everything from McClarens, Porsches, Lamborghinis, and even Formula 1 cars. His racing career began when he was 6 in go carts and it quickly morphed into something more serious. He has participated in several half mile events as well as raced at numerous circuit tracks. Even though money is an obvious help in getting started racing super cars, Steven explains that there is a ton of mental and physical training required to sustain the strain of racing at 100% for hours at a time. He trains all the time and is at the track almost every day. But he has to balance this racing life with his school life with hopes that he can attend UCLA to study law and follow in his father’s footsteps.

Jay Payson’s love of motored vehicles goes all the way back before he can remember. He began working at a repair shop / filling station in his late teens where he learned a ton of information about cars. He gave college a try but that wasn’t quite his thing. So he found an automotive program through General Motors at a community college which really peaked his interest. He worked at a few dealerships and then transitioned to a testing facility. His various jobs over the years moved him to Michigan to go where the work was. In 1999, he went to work for SuperChips as a calibrator. Things have come a long way from floppy drive flash tunes! He moved into upper management by 2004 where he helped them grow several hundred percent over the years. He then moved to HP Tuners where he has been for almost 10 years. He has helped grow this company as well and focuses on creating mutually beneficial relationships with other companies.

Ravi Dolwani is a 4th generation member of the CSF Radiator company and is the CEO of the High Performance Division. This division is something that he started around 2010 with the intent of expanding the business to markets besides OEM manufacturers (such as Isuzu, John Deere, Mercedes Benz, etc.). He thought this expansion would be very seamless, but he soon found out this was not the case at all. He had to hit the pavement and go out to meet shops and spread the word about what he wanted to provide. Over the years, he grew the brand and proved that CSF could make a superior product. Ravi put a lot of thought into how they sell their products. He made the decision to only sell through distributors and not go direct to consumers. The margins may be less, but this allows his team to focus on developing great products and not spend so much time on customer service inquiries. This all falls on the shoulders of the retailers who sell the product. Ravi has also been able to leverage economies of scale by piggybac

Lee Sweitzer has been around Mustangs all his life and even had a 1984 5.0 Mustang for his first car. At 17, he graduated high school and joined the service to become a Marine. He was stationed in Southern California and continued to race Mustangs. He has spent several years planning and preparing to open up his own performance shop to follow his passion. Lee has seen shop owners work themselves to the bone and is trying very hard to avoid falling into those pitfalls. He understands that it takes a bunch of hard work, but he wants to avoid making mistakes by researching ways to operate more efficiently. He has attended the Essentials of Operating a Shop seminar, many business seminars, talked with business coaches, and read business books. He has just received the keys to his initial shop space and has begun to get the business going part time. It is a very small space but he really isn’t tied down to a lease agreement so he has the option to move out whenever he needs more space. Lee already plans to work pa

Carlos Tirado remembers reading car enthusiast magazines while riding the school bus every day. His brother bought a 1995 DSM and he fell in love with imports. His brother sold the car but Carlos was able to track it down and purchase it back when he was in high school. After graduation, he went to college to work with electronics and it just didn’t interest him as much as he hoped. He shifted gears and changed his major to automotive refinishing. This is where he found how he could turn his passion for cars into a way to make money. He stumbled into powder coating when he saw some people posting on the forum needing their DSM valve covers to be powder coated. Carlos met Jorge of JMS Racing and they formed a business and personal relationship of working together. The business officially started when Carlos asked his forum buddies what he should call his business. He has since moved locations to be right by JMS Racing and continues to capitalize on that business relationship. He now rents a 1000 square foot fa

Jack McGee’s earliest memories of working on electronics, and even repairing VCR’s when he was 8. All of this was taking place in Jack’s home country of Spain and a little bit in Italy. It wasn’t until he was 15 that his father retired from the military and they moved to Colorado Springs, CO where he still lives today. His first real business venture was partnering with local electronic stores and repair various items these stores would collect. This was a great venture for a while but he could see the market beginning to shrink and decided to stop this side repair business. He entered the workforce as a typical employee: guaranteed work, benefits, overtime pay, etc. But it just didn’t satisfy his need for exciting work. So he left this job and spent some time taking a break from life responsibilities. A few years go by and Jack ended up purchasing a Galant VR4 which he eventually rebuilt the trans for. Word spread that he was doing this and he started doing more and more work on these cars. One thing led to

Jeremy is a 4th generation gearhead. He grew up working on everything from go carts to dune buggies to race cars while growing up. And he still has the same passion today as he did when he was a kid. The traditional college path just didn’t feel right and Jeremy decided to go back to work with his dad at one of his body shops. This is when he began transitioning towards working on hot rods. He got a job at a small hot rod shop and eventually purchased the shop. They have since moved from the original location and have grown to 50,000 square feet and employ 60 people. Jeremy is very focused on making improvements at the shop. As the business has grown, he and his brother have had to take on more professional roles and drift away from getting their hands dirty. This means implementing new software to manage and track the workflow called GlobalShop. They work hard to ensure their fabricators have all the parts and tools they need within easy reach. They talk with the chassis guys to hear ways to speed up and sim

Don explains the ins and outs of running a successful dealership. While dealerships are often considered in a negative light, they are in the business of making money and are pretty efficient at doing so. Don provides valuable insight about the methods and metrics they use to gauge success and make decisions. They hold weekly status meetings and utilize software to track and delegate every aspect of the business. Listen in to gain knowledge about ways that you can improve operations at your shop!   Don Herring Jr. started his automotive career at 12 when he began washing cars at a dealership. During high school, he moved up to work in the parts department. He went off to college thinking he was going to become a doctor, then changed plans with the hopes of entering the air force. Unfortunately, his timing coincided with the end of the cold war and his aspirations of entering the air force diminished. So he again turned his attention to the automotive industry. He was making very good money being a car salesma

In this episode, we go down a slightly different path and interview a smaller shop owner to get his perspective on running a performance shop. Justin Miller started working as a dealer tech at age 17in Raleigh, NC. He began doing work and selling parts online in his free time. Justin has worked hard to grow his business with an initial investment of his own $1200. He now rents a 4200 sq ft building with a dyno and several lifts. And he employees 1 full time technician and a receptionist.

In the first Do It For A Living roundtable discussion, we discuss the idea of certifying shops, tuners, and engine builders to work on customer cars. Kevin Dubois assumes the role of a shop owner. Ben Strader takes on the task from an education standpoint. And Todd Earsley will act as a consumer. The idea is to bring a sense of legitimacy into an otherwise fragmented market. Think of something like ASE certification for mechanics, or Better Business Bureau for businesses, or even Master Plumber certification. We go over topics such as: Does the industry need some sort of standard? What might the qualifications be to become a “Certified Shop/Tuner/Engine Builder?” Who would enforce this standard? How would this benefit the consumer? And many more!

David Localio was fortunate enough to have a family who fully supported his addiction to horsepower! He bought his first car in 6th grade. (That’s correct. 6th grade!) His first experience with turbos came when he got ahold of a Buick Grand National and spent all of high school modifying it into the 10’s. He got a job at a local repair shop and realized that service work just wasn’t for him. So he enrolled in the School of Automotive Machinist (SAM) and ended up working there as well. He then went on to be involved with a ton of influential racers and engine builders over the years. He eventually began working on import motors because he saw a void in the market. This was the official beginning of Headgames Motorworks. David was hit really hard by the financial crisis in 2008 and barely made it out still in business. He was forced to let most of his people go and got several months behind on his bills which has wreaked havoc on his credit. But he toughed it out, worked hard, and emerged stronger than ever! No

Andrew Brilliant was gracious enough to continue to talk with us about aerodynamics. Tune in to this special Bonus Episode to hear more details about what he can do to improve aerodynamics on your car.

Andrew grew up in LA loving cars and knowing he wanted to be involved in racing. He attended Berkeley where he got his Mechanical Engineering degree. During his first job as a software engineer, he started helping the owner of the company who happened to have a couple race cars. This was his first experience with a racing team. This let to Andrew creating simulations to determine gear rations and then expanded it to aero simulations. He continued to get more and more opportunities with racing teams and decided to leave the software company. He discovered that aerodynamics was that “thing” that he wanted to do for the rest of his career. This is when he created AMB-Aero. The chips started to fall into place and he moved to Japan where all the most advanced aero cars were racing. He has worked on some very famous Time Attack cars from all over the world. And he is available to visit your team and discuss ways to improve the aerodynamics of your race car…without breaking the bank. But if you want to go all out,

His passion for performance really got started when he went to college for mechanic engineering and joined the Formula SAE team. While at a competition in 2010, he met a representative of Pratt & Miller and ended up getting a job with them at their design office. This transitioned into a job at the Cadillac Racing team with Pratt & Miller. He worked on the CTS-V team for 4 years and now works on the ATS-V team. They use complex simulations and advanced telemetry data to make the cars perform at the absolute limit. With the rules constantly changing, the team has to adapt to stay ahead of the competition.

  Alex grew up reading automotive magazines and aspiring to be one of the feature builders. He moved to Southern California with high hopes but no real direction on how to get into the racing industry. He got his first automotive job at Web Camshafts where he learned a lot about drag racing. Alex went on to build several Honda’s that got a lot of attention but the real break came when his Integra went 8’s in the ¼ mile. The side gig of making and selling manifolds out of his garage transformed into Sheepey Built. Given that Alex doesn’t actually weld, he has taken great steps to set up his process flow to be as efficient as possible. He took what he learned at Web Cams and applied it at his own shop. He has specific people dedicated to tasks in order to keep the parts moving out the door.

 Kyle Shelley is the sales director for Turn14. He was good friends with the founder of JSC Speed (and then Turn14) and got to see the business be created. He had several sales jobs before becoming the first employee at JSC Speed. He started out at the bottom and worked his way up over the years. Turn14 was actually established in 2007 and JSC Speed was sold off in 2011. This is when all the efforts were put into the wholesale business. Turn14 has a new “authorized seller” solution where the Turn14 customer must be approved by the part manufacturer to sell its parts. This allows the manufacturer to vet and validate that reseller as a legitimate business. Turn14 is trying really hard to ensure that legitimate businesses are reselling aftermarket parts. They are looking for shops and people who respect the pricing structure and give the industry a good reputation. Kyle goes over the meaning of MAP (minimum advertised price) and UPP (unilateral pricing policy) If you are a manufacturer and want to ensure nobody

Dale has been tuning turbo EFI V8’s for many years, but the American drag racing market has traditionally been dominated by carburetors and nitrous controlled by antiquated methods. Dale made his break into the US by way of a forum post to Dominator (from Street Outlaws) offering to tune his car on EFI. Since then, he has also converted the Dung Beetle car to EFI as well. This has really changed the game for the domestic drag racing market and requires a much different approach to tuning 3000+hp cars.

Steve Ciabattoni started his career in payment processing right out of college where he was recruited (by his current partner) to work for a very large payment processing company. In 2011, he and jumped ship and created 360 Payment Solutions. Now, 360 Payment Solutions serves nearly 3000 merchants and employs 28 people. They label themselves as a Payment Processing provider, meaning that they help companies accept all types of payments including: checks, gift cards, electronic payments online (paypal), as well as credit card processing In this interview, Steve discusses the new chip card technology (known in the industry as EMV - Europay MasterCard Visa), Apple pay, pay with phone, and integration with business software. Back on Oct 1, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express shifted their liability statement and said you are going to be responsible for any chargebacks that come through if you don’t have the ability to accept the chip cards. And you cannot fight it. This is a shift in responsibility and somethi

Jim McIlvaine used to play professional basketball but now he runs the social media and web-presence for Optima Batteries. While playing basketball, Jim would do freelance work for magazines where he would meet people and attend events across the country. After Jim left the NBA, he eventually joined Optima Batteries as their “E-care Manager” where he created the Facebook page and began answering questions or comments on web forums (You may be familiar with his forum handle OptimaJim on almost every forum in existence). Today, you will see him at many automotive events taking pictures, streaming videos, and answering questions from customers about Optima’s products. Jim says it is extremely important to gathering as much information about your potential customers as possible. The most important thing is to obtain an email address which can be used in Facebook to target an audience similar to this specific person (likes, location, age, sex).

Peter started TX2K back in 2000 after he went to a Supra event in Las Vegas. From the humble beginning of 40 Supras banding together to go to the drag strip, the TX2K franchise has transformed into the premier Supra, GTR, Roll Racing, and Drag Racing event in the country! TX2K16 is improving this year by showing the roll racing speeds up on the large display boards at the end of the track. This betters the experience for the attendees by allowing them to easily see the winner and how fast they were going.