How This Shop Owner Beat A Road Construction Project

Speaker 1 00:00:00  This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network.

Brian Walker 00:00:09  Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Auto Repair Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Walker, and today Kim is back in the studio with me as my co-host. And our guest today is Brandon Miller from Miller Auto in Wisconsin. And I'm really excited to let him tell a story today about what he did with a road construction project and a podcast. But before we get started, let's take a moment to thank our sponsors. Declined repairs don't have to be lost. AppFueled call center schedules, follow up calls, and equips your team with everything they need to close the deal. Get started now at appfueled.com. Well, hey, Brandon, how are you? I'm wonderful. How are you doing? I am doing well. Really excited to have you with us today. Yeah, happy.

Brandon Miller 00:01:01  To be here. And you made it back from ASTA okay I guess.

Brian Walker 00:01:04  And yeah, it was great to get to see you there.

Brian Walker 00:01:08  Kim and I walked into the class that a couple of our teammates were teaching when it was over with, and they were like, hey, you got to come talk to Brandon. So you got to hear your story about this. What we're going to talk about today.

Brandon Miller 00:01:23  Yeah, absolutely. I love sharing that too. I got to share it quite a few different times throughout the event. And, you know, that's what it's about is what's working for you. What are others doing? And that's the only reason that I was doing it was because I was paying attention to what other people were doing. So, you know, not necessarily my ideas is just, you know, that's what one of the things that makes this industry great and having, you know, ASTA and AAPEX and all of these networking events is talking to people and finding out what's working for them.

Kim Walker 00:01:53  So, yeah, that was always our favorite thing, you know, when we had our shops, we weren't connected to the industry.

Kim Walker 00:02:00  And we talk about this often, but not all the time. But getting this postcard in the mail to a class. And we were like, like other shop owners get together. What is this? And it was our introduction into the industry. And, you know, taking our classes or other people's classes is great, but nothing beats the networking, the camaraderie, the idea, sharing that happens out in the hallways or in the lobby or in the bar.

Brian Walker 00:02:30  You totally just dated us with a postcard in the mail.

Kim Walker 00:02:33  And it's true.

Brian Walker 00:02:37  Let me set the stage for this a little bit before we actually get into what we're talking about. So cam and I were shop owners, and in 2007 we drive up to our shop one day and, you know, can barely get in our parking lot because of cones that were up and road construction equipment all over the place, and we had no idea that this was happening. Our landlord. He was an elderly gentleman, really amazing guy. He didn't do this on purpose, but they had sent the notification to him because he was a business owner and he just never thought to tell us about it.

Brian Walker 00:03:11  So we drive up one day, and that was the beginning of a seven month long road construction project that we had no idea was coming. You know, and I always clarify this, it was this with my lack of experience of being a businessman, that that was the thing that put us out of business and sent us into a bankruptcy and everything. And if you want to hear that whole story, you can go listen to episode two of our podcast, which you can find that at Shop Marketing. Com forward slash two. We'll get into the long details. So what we're going to talk about today is like really close to him and his heart because you had a similar situation, but you were able to handle it completely different.

Kim Walker 00:03:53  I don't know if know. Brian even knows this to this very day. I still do not encounter an orange cone where I don't feel something happen in my stomach. And to this very, you know, people always ask, what's your favorite color? Nobody ever asks, what's your least favorite color? It's orange.

Kim Walker 00:04:10  And it goes back to that.

Brandon Miller 00:04:11  Yeah, 100%.

Brian Walker 00:04:13  So Brandon, go ahead and tell us a little bit about what we're talking about today.

Brandon Miller 00:04:18  Sure. So probably the biggest difference between your story and my story is I was aware that the construction was going to happen. We'd been expecting it for about a year, a year and a half. So we did do some planning and we planned on, you know, having a backup capital or capital reserves just in case. It was really, you know, slow or what have you. I guess to set the backdrop, we're on highway 21, which is a main thoroughfare from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which is on the east side of the state to the west side of Wisconsin. And we typically, on average, have 20 to 25,000 cars per day. That passes our three locations in a row. And the road construction started and we're down to about 500. If that construction started in mid-March, I believe it was again, we knew that it was coming.

Brandon Miller 00:05:18  We kind of had planned for it a little bit, but planning is one thing. But when those barricades go up and it closes down that road, it becomes real. I mean, it's like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? So the first couple days the feeling in town was just dread. I mean, it was just not positive. Nothing. So I thought about that beard. He does a daily road report. I remember, I think I watched, a podcast with Tonnika. Jeff with Tonnika. And he was on there talking about his road report that he did and how that he really got a lot of traction from that. So one day I was I think it was the day that the construction started. It popped into my mind. I should do a daily road construction report because the gossip, the chatter on social media and then town was nobody knew what was going on. I mean, everybody knew the construction was there, but they didn't have timelines. They didn't have any plans.

Brandon Miller 00:06:23  They didn't just boom, the the roads are closed. So I spent about probably an hour that morning and I called the state of Wisconsin. I called the county sheriff's department. I called the county highway department. I called everybody the city, everybody that I could think of to gather as much details about the construction project as possible. And then I took those details, made sure that they were accurate. And then I started doing a daily road construction report for about the first two weeks. I did it daily. And then, you know, everybody kind of got to where they knew what was going on. I had multiple people telling me that they learned more in the five minute video, that I put out the first one than they've learned anywhere else. And as you know, I went to the DEP or the level of why are these roads closed? Because they had side roads closed and, you know, so forth. I was explaining why they were doing what they were doing, how long that phase, you know, each phase of the construction was going to last.

Brandon Miller 00:07:33  I always recorded the road reports as I was driving through town, and I was showing the businesses in town and showing how to access the businesses. And while the road is actually closed. Omro is still open, so if you have business that you need to do an arm roll, you can 100% still come to Omro and do that business. So that was my main goal, was to let people know not only in the community, but the people that travel from outside of the community, that Omro is still open for business. And just because there's road construction doesn't mean you can't access us. And I think that made a huge difference.

Brian Walker 00:08:13  So you obviously own an auto repair shop. You actually own three businesses on this road, right?

Brandon Miller 00:08:19  Yeah, it's all one business, all under one umbrella. But we have used car lot that is on the main highway that's just outside of town. Then we have our service center that's in the middle of town. That is where we do our breaks, our alignments, oil changes.

Brandon Miller 00:08:35  We have a quick lube bay there and then we just bought about a year ago, a third location, which is our diagnostic shop, and it's pretty much diagnostics. And them more of the time consuming jobs, if you will. So it would be nice to have one big shop, you know. So everything is under one roof, but it's also kind of nice having the three locations, because that's three marketing opportunities as people are driving through town. So.

Brian Walker 00:08:59  So this road construction project started in March of 2026. Today is October 14th, 2026. While we're recording this and it's still going right.

Brandon Miller 00:09:12  Yeah. So it's still closed. Yeah. So I'm all they finish because highway 21 is Main Street in Omro. So that was closed through about I want to say July. I'm actually the July 4th parade. We were able to run down Main Street. So they had it pretty much done by July. So the road closed barricades coming from the west where at least down as of July, highway 21, in front of our sales shop where I'm at right now is still closed, so I guess.

Brandon Miller 00:09:49  Silver lining. The good thing is, is that the auto sales, if you have the cars that people are looking for, they're going to come to you. So I don't think that it hurts auto sales quite as much as it could have the auto repair aspect. So I think by me doing the road report and then the podcast, which we'll get into, kind of gave the community the impression that we were here to help the community not only auto repair, but as a whole. And the community really started supporting us and the rest of the businesses in town also.

Kim Walker 00:10:30  Would you say that the worst part is behind you, given that that stretch of the road is done?

Brandon Miller 00:10:37  Yeah. I don't have any anxiety anymore about the construction project. Even though the road is still closed, we have probably another month and it should be all open back up. I used to joke all the time that it would take me 15 minutes to walk across the street to get my mail, because there was so much traffic, and now I don't even have to look.

Brandon Miller 00:10:58  I could just walk out, walk across the street. So I never thought I would say that I'd be happy when I couldn't get my mail anymore. But I'm ready for the cars to come back.

Kim Walker 00:11:08  You know, it probably feels like it's been forever, but I mean, I don't know if that's a city project or a state project, but our project lasted forever. And down here in Louisiana, road construction projects can go on for years. That sounds like it was. Thankfully, in your case, it sounds like it's pretty efficient project, but still, like you said, you still had anxiety about it, so I'm just glad to hear that better than originally thought.

Brandon Miller 00:11:36  It's a state project. There was some county projects that were going on at the same time on the east west secondary roads. So they had another major secondary road closed the same time that they had the main highway closed. And that really caused an uproar too, because it was it made it even more difficult to get to, you know, Amur from Oshkosh and vice versa.

Brandon Miller 00:12:00  So, you know, and I that was a lot of the stuff that I talked about in the rotary report also is how can you get here from where you are? And after I started doing it, what was awesome was there was probably 2 or 3 other businesses that started doing their own road construction reports, or at least, you know, showing how to get to their business. So, you know, we were all sharing each other's posts and getting it out to the public. And it was phenomenal. I mean, it was really great.

Brian Walker 00:12:28  Now, at some point, this evolved from the road report into a podcast. Tell us about that.

Brandon Miller 00:12:33  Yeah. So Austin is my son, his 50% owner in the company along with me, and we had started doing another podcast, an automotive podcast called Automotive Integrity. We had done probably ten or so episodes on that, which was more automotive in general as far as, you know, identifying good shops and things like that. More consumer related, if you will.

Brandon Miller 00:12:59  So we were about ten episodes into that. The road construction started. We talked. I'm like, I think we should pause this project that we're working on and let's focus on the community. So I created branding for Inside Omro, which is a community podcast, and I just started putting people on the schedule to other businesses on the schedule. And I went to their place of business set up so that, you know, their lobby or counter or whatever was the backdrop. And we just started interviewing local businesses, and I think we did 15, 16 different episodes and just talked about the community, talked about the construction, talked about their business, how they got their start, just kind of gave the community a back door view into their business. It was beneficial for us to do it. I mean, it took time and it took effort. We had the podcast equipment, you know, the know how my daughter Hannah's our salesperson, and she does help with our marketing also. So, you know, she's the producer, if you will, of the podcast does the, you know, camera switching and editing of the videos afterwards and so forth.

Brandon Miller 00:14:20  So I mean, Miller auto put a lot of time and effort and payroll and so forth into doing the project, but it was sponsored by Miller Auto. So, you know, every episode the opening was, in a nutshell, welcome to Omro. Sponsored by Miller Auto and in conjunction with the local chamber and so forth. So we were getting our name out there. Plus it was me doing the interview for all of them. Also.

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Brian Walker 00:15:23  Build loyalty with your customers to your brand and boost your shop's growth. Get your first app in 30 days or less, all without breaking the bank. Ready to start? Let AppFueled take your business to the next level. Go to appfueled.com or meet founder Jeremy Glasco and book your complimentary app revision session at appfueled.com. Jeremy. That's appfueled. That's something that I talk about in an episode that I did. It's been a couple of years ago now. Episode 57. You know, because I've had people ask me before, should my auto repair shop have a podcast? And, you know, the people who are your clients, they probably don't care about listening to a podcast about auto repair. You know, that's something that's going to attract other people in the auto repair space that are not really going to be your clients, but for your business to have a podcast that it's about your community and then your shop is the sponsor of that podcast. Maybe you have a little auto repair segment or something on it.

Brian Walker 00:16:34  That's an incredible way to get people to learn about your shop 100%.

Brandon Miller 00:16:41  And that podcast that you just referred to is exactly where I got the idea to do the community podcast, because I watched quite a few podcasts, and when I have time anyway, and for some reason, that episode stuck in my mind. Should an automotive repair shop. I could almost vision you saying it on the podcast. Should an automotive repair shop have a podcast? Yes, but not about your business, about the community. And I just took it and I ran with it. So thank you for the idea for sure.

Brian Walker 00:17:15  Yeah, that's episode 57. So for our listeners, if you want to go listen to that, it's shop marketing comm five seven. We'll take you right to it. But you started getting so much traction, and I don't know if this was back in the Road report days or the podcast that you mentioned, that the mayor came to you to start getting information out from the city's behalf?

Brandon Miller 00:17:36  Yes. So there's a bridge, and it's the only bridge that allows you to get.

Brandon Miller 00:17:41  Well, I shouldn't say it's only one. It's only a bridge. Without going about 15 miles out of your way to get from the road to the west side of the state. During that road construction project, there was going to be originally, I think it was 12 weeks or something along those lines that that bridge was going to be closed. So you're going to have to take a huge detour in order to get to Omro. So the city worked with the state, big community uproar about that. And bad thing is, is the Fox River splits. So there's a north side of the Fox River and the south side of the Fox River. So the residents that were on the north side of the Fox River would not have access to the south side without taking a 15 or 20 minute drive, where it typically would take them about three minutes. The city worked with the state to shorten the timeline for that bridge closure, and it also moved it up in the project, so I don't remember what the date was, but everybody was expecting it between this date and that date.

Brandon Miller 00:18:46  And then it changed. So yeah, the mirror reached out to me and said, hey, you're getting traction. People are watching your videos. Can you post an update of the changes for the bridge closure? So yeah, it was pretty cool to have the mayor reach out to me and ask to update the community, and I did. Reception was great. What was really cool is road construction is a negative subject. I mean, it's a pain point for people. I did my best to always have a positive spin on it. You know, I think the road construction workers, I showed what a good job they were doing. And it was just. There wasn't anything that was negative in my post. And I had multiple people say that you were so positive. It made me feel positive about the project. So it was cool.

Brian Walker 00:19:40  You took something that was really bad. But talk about your years so far. How's your year been with this road construction project?

Brandon Miller 00:19:49  Yeah, so our car sales are down just a tickled bit, but they're pretty flat.

Brandon Miller 00:19:53  So flat in a construction era. I'm super happy with. Our auto repair business. Is actually better than it was last year. During road construction.

Kim Walker 00:20:03  It's just unreal.

Brandon Miller 00:20:04  It is. It's. I'm feeling very blessed. It could have been a whole lot worse for sure.

Kim Walker 00:20:09  I wonder, have you, besides the road report and the podcast, have you done anything different with regard to your marketing as it relates to the road construction project.

Brandon Miller 00:20:23  Nothing tangible. You know, often I do social media posts. I wouldn't say frequently, less frequently than what we should, but we usually are trying to do, you know, diagnostic videos and kind of showing people what our area of expertise are. I, we work on a lot of tasks. So I do a lot of Tesla videos and, and show how to repair Tesla's on some circumstances. We're always trying to do some marketing, but as far as dollar spend, we don't spend a whole lot on marketing. You know, most of it is money spent internally in order to buy podcast equipment or subscribe to AI.

Brandon Miller 00:21:08  Things that make our jobs easier, which is getting very good. I mean, we we're very careful not to put AI slop out there, but like even during our inside podcast, I had ChatGPT doing a deep dive into the businesses that I was going to interview, so I had an idea of what what we were talking about so I could keep conversation going and so forth. So I guess back to I'm kind of going on a tangent, but to get back to your original question. Not a whole lot of marketing other than the road report and podcast, so.

Kim Walker 00:21:43  Well, and that's what I was wondering, was like, are you attributing your growth this year that probably you were expecting it to be a loss, maybe even a significant loss is pretty much tied directly to the new thing you did, which was that. So that's why I was wondering. I didn't know if it was kind of a one two effect like we did that, but we're also helping our Google ads or we're also doing this or whatever.

Kim Walker 00:22:07  So thanks.

Brandon Miller 00:22:09  No, we haven't run any paid ad campaigns all summer long. So 100%, you know, the road report and the podcast. The telltale sign is when you have customers that are standing at your counter saying that they were there because they saw your podcast. There's no no doubt.

Brian Walker 00:22:27  So what would you say for that person listening? You know, obviously you had the road construction, you know, so kind of a different animal. But for that person that's just looking for a way to grow their shop, they don't have a road construction project going on. But, you know, do you see the podcast for a shop about their community? Is the viable way to do that?

Brandon Miller 00:22:49  Yeah. And actually we've had a lot of discussion. So our sales shop, we have a detailing day. We have a fairly so I can probably fit 5 or 6 cars in there. It used to be our main repair shop before we got our service center. I am looking at taking a good portion of that shop.

Brandon Miller 00:23:10  Probably leave enough room that I can put 2 or 3 cars in there, and the rest of that shop is going to turn into a podcast studio. We're actually going to build a podcast studio. It's going to be a double use. It'll be a podcast studio. Plus it's going to be a training conference room or what have you. We're big about training, teaching our technicians. We send the whole shop to Asda once a year to get training, so I want to expand on that. Yeah, not everybody has a road construction project or, you know, a big pain point like that. But just taking the time, sponsoring a podcast, if you can be the face of it all, the more better. But you don't have to be. If you can find a personality or somebody that would be good at doing it, which is kind of was. My goal is I'd love to have the Chamber of Commerce or somebody take over the podcast. We'll continue to sponsor it, use our equipment and so forth.

Brandon Miller 00:24:09  But first meet up to do other things. I guess my advice is find something that is informative that people want to know about, whether it's businesses in town or, you know, events we did a lot of are a couple different podcast episodes with non-profits saying, you know, telling people about what their events were and so forth. If you get the community involved and you put your name out in front of it, it's only going to benefit you. And it's a pretty quick turnaround as far as when people I can't go to the grocery store without somebody saying, hey, nice road report or I appreciate it, or, you know, what, have you.

Kim Walker 00:24:53  Brian and I get that because it's crazy. And Tonnika and I are like super close friends. We've talked about this before as well. Something I think people don't expect when they're doing a podcast is the level of exposure it brings to you. Because Brian and I, we say our toggle switch is on from the time if we're going to a conference like Asta for example.

Kim Walker 00:25:15  From the time we leave our house, go to the airport, get on a plane, fly, do all the things to the conference until we get back to our house. We have to be on because people see us all over their place and they're like, oh yeah, we know you from the podcast.

Brian Walker 00:25:31  We'll be on the airplane.

Kim Walker 00:25:32  Absolutely.

Brandon Miller 00:25:33  Yeah, it's pretty exciting. That's when you know that your efforts are working. It's a pretty easy thing to measure.

Kim Walker 00:25:41  No doubt Brian doesn't know this, but if we had a shop today, I would do a podcast focused on kids in our community because every kid has some crazy story, something they're doing. I remember when our church had kids answer some question. It was about Christmas and they did this compilation video. This was like years ago. Every Christmas that video comes back up because mamas and daddies are sharing it from their kid, answering some simple question. And so I can see. You know, we talk about sponsoring the Little League, you know, the soccer team or the baseball team, but doing a podcast where you're talking to kids and they say the craziest things and they're just funny.

Kim Walker 00:26:28  And these moms, they're going to be sharing about. My kid got picked to be on this podcast before it's done. They're going to take pictures while it's happening, post about that, then they're going to post about it afterwards. And then it's probably going to get shared every year on the anniversary. So I would love to see some shop doing a podcast that somehow focuses on the kids in their community. And who doesn't like a shop? Who attaches their name to highlighting kids?

Brandon Miller 00:26:54  Like, we've got a community Facebook group that it's a gossip page. I mean, it's really what it amounts to and some negative, some positive. And somebody brought it to my attention. Somebody had just moved to the area and asked for a recommendation on an auto repair shop to take their vehicle to its US in town, Miller Auto and Main Tire as kind of kitty corner across the street from us now main tire in us have a great working relationship. We have tow trucks also, which I guess we didn't mention beforehand.

Brandon Miller 00:27:30  So 90% of the time if something needs to be towed into main tire, they're calling us to tow it in because we know that they know that we're not going to steal their customers, try and get them the, you know, so forth. So at any rate, we have a great working relationship. So it was about 50/50 between Main Tire and us for recommendations to take the car to, which is great. They do a great job. We do a great job. Again, we work great together. One of the comments in that though was go to Miller Auto because did you see what they were doing with Inside Omro so specifically said and actually they put a link to our page and everything else said, check this out. This is why you go to Miller Auto. So. That was powerful to me.

Kim Walker 00:28:14  They care about the community.

Brian Walker 00:28:16  As we wrap up, what's the future of inside Omro?

Brandon Miller 00:28:19  Right now I have to get. So that was another hurdle that we had. This year was in early June.

Brandon Miller 00:28:27  I had straight line winds that were estimates were 90 mile an hour, and we had both of our overhead doors open on our sail shop, and it ballooned our building and lifted our whole roof up and slammed it backed out. Wow.

Kim Walker 00:28:42  Oh my gosh.

Brandon Miller 00:28:44  Yeah. So our podcast studio inside the shop that we had set up isn't there anymore. Hanna's office is destroyed. Everybody was okay. No injuries or anything like that. So right now we're just starting to get the roof fixed and so forth. So we had to deal with that this summer too. Once we're past that again, I want to get the. I'm pretty convinced that we're going to dedicate a portion of our shop and build a podcast studio. We're going to continue doing Inside Omro, whether it's me hosting it or somebody else, I'm just probably not going to travel to other businesses. I'm going to have them come into our studio, and I'll put TVs up on the wall so they can put their branding and stuff like that. And it'll just to be a mobile podcast is it's an undertaking.

Brandon Miller 00:29:37  So you've got an hour set up, you've got an hour to record, you got an hour tear down, travel time, everything else. So an hour long podcast, by the time it's in production, everything, you've got a whole day into doing it. So worth every minute of it. But if I can set up a podcast studio where I can just walk into and, you know, push a button and start recording.

Brian Walker 00:30:00  I do know a guy that had an enclosed trailer that had a permanent podcast studio inside of it, and he would travel around doing the podcast with that.

Brandon Miller 00:30:09  That is not a horrible idea. Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested to see what next year looks like with being that we had a growth year and a construction season.

Brian Walker 00:30:21  And 25,000 cars passing again.

Brandon Miller 00:30:24  Yeah, that's a good feeling to know that you made it through it anyway.

Kim Walker 00:30:29  So yes indeed. Congratulations.

Brian Walker 00:30:31  Like yeah good job.

Brandon Miller 00:30:33  Well and thank you guys. you know, thank you for your podcast. Thanks. That beard for his idea.

Brandon Miller 00:30:38  Thank to everybody that is putting themselves out there, whether it's podcasts, social media and just having the conversation of what works. If we didn't have that community, I'm pretty confident that I wouldn't have my stories to share.

Kim Walker 00:30:57  So I love it. It's a great testament. Thank you so much.

Brian Walker 00:31:00  Yeah.

Brandon Miller 00:31:01  Thank you. Yeah. My pleasure.

Brian Walker 00:31:02  So if anyone wants to listen to Inside Omro, I'm assuming they can find it on Spotify and iTunes.

Brandon Miller 00:31:09  YouTube, all of the things Yelp, Facebook, YouTube.

Kim Walker 00:31:14  And just spell Omro again for people that miss it in the beginning.

Brandon Miller 00:31:18  It is. O M R O.

Kim Walker 00:31:20  There you go.

Brian Walker 00:31:21  Well, thank you to our listeners for listening in. Remember, we are just one of a handful of podcasts on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Find the others at AutomotiveRepairPodcastNetwork.com. Hope you'll listen in again next week. And until then, we'll fill those bays.

Speaker 1 00:31:39  You've been listening to the Auto Repair Marketing podcast with Kim and Brian Walker on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network.

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