Roberts Auto & Home Electronics, Louisville, KY operates out of an old two-storey fire station but that is not the most unusual part of its business.
Roberts is a full fledged car audio shop with custom fabrication and OEM integration but it has a specialty in radio repair.
The shop started back in 1983 and moved into the fire station in 1999. It can fit 11 cars into the install bays, large enough for….firetrucks. Roberts grosses about $1.6 million a year in car stereo alone, plus over $3 million in other areas (window tint, vinyl wraps and even used cars). It got its start repairing car radios, and it also repairs electrical system problems such as windows that won’t roll up or batteries that drain overnight.
Radio repair is almost a third of the car stereo business. Why, you ask, do people pay to repair a radio when they are so cheap these days? Owner Joe Roberts says, “Say you have a 2007 BMW and the sound cracks and pops. What are you going to do, you can’t take out the radio so you have to fix what’s there. Most of the OEM repairs are things that are expensive to fix.”
He handles a lot of Mercedes’, and European car radios. Also, sometimes seniors don’t want newer radios that are complicated to work. Roberts said, “We’ll tell them you can buy a new radio cheaper but 9 out of 10 of them will demand you fix their old radio.”
“Say someone has a 2007 Impala and auxiliary jack is broke. That’s a $275 repair. A lot of them just want to fix it. We make $250 for taking out the radio and repairing it and putting it back in the car,” he said. “If someone sends us a navigation radio, if we sent that out it costs $600.” But it does the work in-house and makes a good profit.
Did we mention the used car lot? There’s one adjacent to the shop and Roberts is part owner. It sells about 15 to 20 cars a month and grosses about $1.5 million. He’s also partnered up for an on site window tinting business (that brings in $500,000 a year) and for a vinyl wraps business outgrew the shop so now it’s off site ($1 million annually).
You should know that many employees at the shop have worked there for more than 15 years. They are paid on commission and make good money, said Roberts. There are six installers besides him. Their average age is about 40. “The whole crew has worked together for a long time. Whatever one person doesn’t know, another one does. We pay them well and we treat people like want to be treated ourselves,” said Roberts adding, “It’s easy to retain people who love what they do…”
He added, “It’s also a matter of paying them what they deserve. I see a lot of shops pay their installers $11 an hour. What are you going to get for that? We don’t want to overpay so they get stagnant…this way, they may not be true entrepreneurs, but its as close as you are going to get.”
Next year he’s planning to get into the car diagnostics business, which requires a $10 to $20,000 investment in diagnostic equipment.
Great looking store!