Sean Dehestani of Hi-Tech Car Audio posts three short videos a day. He said the secret isn’t talent or a big budget. It’s showing up.
Most shop owners I talk to say they’ll try a video on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sean Dehestani of Hi-Tech Car Audio in Berkeley, California, posts three a day.
“Anybody can do what I do. Anybody,” Sean said. “The only thing that separates me from them is I will put my heart on my sleeve and I will go and embarrass myself in front of a camera.”
It’s working. Sean said his videos pull in almost 2.35M views a month on Facebook alone, with YouTube and Instagram on top of that.
A Shop Built From Nothing
Sean’s story starts with his father, who fled Iran in 1983 and arrived in Berkeley as a refugee. He found he had a knack for sourcing car audio, and that grew into Hi-Tech Stereo and later Hi-Tech Car Audio.
“I was never so much an audiophile,” Sean said. “I was intrigued that a man who knew no English, had nothing and was on welfare, was able to use this industry to support himself and his family.”
Sean started helping at the shop at 14 and learned the hard way. He once told a customer a sealed box was better than a bandpass box “because the sealed box takes out the bad bass.”
“That’s how ignorant I was,” he said.
From Rhetoric to Reels
At 21, after a customer chewed him out, Sean quit the industry and went back to school. He earned a degree in rhetoric, the study of persuasion, from UC Berkeley, built an online business publishing books on Amazon, and later wrote marketing copy for The Motley Fool in Virginia.
“I had made them millions of dollars at that point, but I was kind of building somebody else’s dream,” he said.
He came home in 2022 to help his father take the shop online. The brands were slow to sign off, so Sean set out to prove the shop was in it for the long haul. He took advice from Gary Vaynerchuk and started posting short videos.
“I sucked at it. I was terrible at it,” Sean said. “This was 2023.”
He kept going. “I noticed that the more reels I posted, the more business we’d get into the shop,” he said. It took about a year and a half, but the brands came around, and online sales followed.
The Tech Talks, Sean Translates
Sean works closely with his lead tech, Warren Williams, who rarely appears on camera. Williams breaks down the technical side, and Sean turns it into plain talk.
“If you can take what your installer does, that magic, that reason why you charge $150, $200 an hour, and communicate that to the general public in a way that’s palatable, you’ve got a great business right there,” Sean said.
The mix is product reviews, how-tos, myths and rants. No studio, no crew. “Nobody can film me,” he said. So he films himself.
The Presale
Sean said customers now walk in already sold. They come in educated, with “zero resistance,” and some come in starstruck. He recently signed an amp for a longtime customer’s son, who asked to buy it from Sean himself.
“It’s a presale, almost 100%,” he said. “It’s kind of like trailers at a movie.”
It helps with vendors too. “When you’re working with vendors and you need something, you want an extra five percent, you want some more merch, you want maybe some better service when it comes to defects, they’ll do it for you because you’ve also built that trust,” Sean said.
He compared it to the old days of paying for print ads. “You can go cold calling leads all day long,” he said. “Or you can create a YouTube channel that brings leads to you, warmed up, ready to go.”
His Advice to Shop Owners
Shops don’t need to post three times a day, Sean said, but they do need to be consistent and explain what products actually do.
“Don’t overthink it,” he said. “Be consistent and don’t worry if you don’t get results in the first thirty, sixty, or ninety days. Results will come. Just be consistent. That’s it.”
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Sean, your doing a killer job.
Great seeing you and your wife st SEMA!
Keep it up!!