
The History of Any BODY’S Garage
Some time during the summer of 1977, while visiting my grandfather’s garage in Kansas City Missouri, my uncle placed me on a vehicle lift and raised me up into the air. I was hooked! Everything about the environment had me amazed. I knew then I wanted to be around cars and mechanical things. I guess you could say it was in my blood. Both of my grandfathers were in the business and several of my uncles also.
As time went on, all the kids in the neighborhood looked to me to repair their bicycles and even some of the neighbors would ask me repair their lawn mowers. My dad and I restored an MG when I was a teenager. The more I was around this stuff, the more I enjoyed it.
The summer of 1986 I was hired at Clayton and Baxter Amoco in St. Louis, Missouri as a gas pumper. While observing the lead technician, I was amazed at his level of skill and, more importantly, how he interacted with his customers. He respected them and they respected him. Lynn Boyd was an amazing person.
Customers would come to our shop with horror stories of being over charged or having had repairs that did not work. Lynn had a great deal of integrity and would never talk bad about the other shop, just offer a solution which comforted the vehicle owner and gave them hope. He was highly respected in our community.
I now had a new passion–helping others by turning a seemingly bad situation with their vehicle into a positive. I knew in order to accomplish this I would need to become the best I can be. The only way to achieve this was to engage in as much training as I could.
In 1992 I graduated from Ranken Technical College, St. Louis, Missouri, Summa Cum Laude, with an Associates of Technology in Automotive Repair and achieved my Master Certified Technician certificate from Automotive Service Excellence (ASE). I continued on to Southern Illinois University and graduated at the top of my class with a Bachelor of Science in Automotive Technology in 1994.
After graduation, my wife and I moved to California to work for Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. The training I received from Toyota was invaluable. In 2000, my wife and I decided to move back to Missouri and open an Auto Repair Shop. We searched the entire state and found a shop for sale in Branson, Missouri (John’s Automotive). We purchased the shop and converted it to Eagle Eye Automotive, Inc. in May of 2000. For seven years we pursued our passion and built an amazing business that still remains today. In May of 2007 we decided to sell Eagle Eye Automotive to pursue another business opportunity.
Things were going pretty well until the summer of 2009 when I began to receive multiple requests from previous customers to return to the business. After researching the local repair shops, it became evident that very few had the true passion to help customers with their problems and were only concerned with the money they would make. I decided to apply for a job at several shops hoping to once again apply my passion of helping others. I was turned down by seven shops with the statement that I was over qualified.
After analyzing the situation, we came to the conclusion that we live in the greatest country on earth full of opportunity–America. If there are no jobs available, then create one. We opened our new shop Any BODY’S Garage on June 7,2010 with one employee and a huge vision. Today we have five employees and are seeing continued growth every day.
All our employees are passionate about our purpose and realize that our customers are not a dollar…they are a person needing our services. Our vision is to grow our current facility to 18 bays with 9 Technicians. We are proud to be a growing business in the Branson area and are pursuing many community projects. We have a sincere desire to change the way Auto Repair shops are perceived.
