NAPA AUTOPRO Upper James thrives through experience, innovation

Automotive technology is rapidly evolving and service providers must adapt to frequent changes.

At the same time, many older vehicles are still on the road, so experience is also highly valuable in an auto service shop.

The team at NAPA AUTOPRO– Upper James in Hamilton strikes that balance.

The business opened in 2016 and was purchased in 2019 by the husband-and-wife team of Andrew Ackers and Alysa Beech who, if this year’s forecast holds, will have a book of business five times larger than in their first year.

The 4,500-square-foot shop has six bays and typically services 200 to 300 vehicles per month.

“We do everything from just general vehicle repairs to deep-level diagnostics,” Andrew says, adding they have special expertise in EVs.

The business has grown from four employees to 10, with five licensed technicians.

Keys to success
Andrew offers three driving factors behind the shop’s success, with the first being treating staff well.

“Just as we want to give the highest level of service to our external customer that comes through the door, we want to take care of the people that we have,” he says, noting a focus on creating work-life balance.

Key to success number two?

“I strongly believe in a digital process,” Andrew says, noting the shop was an early adopter of a paperless system.

The third factor to success Andrew cites is a shift the team made about a year ago in its customer experience model.

They wanted to be more transparent with customers about the work technicians were doing on their vehicles.

To fix this, shop manager Sierra Belore began creating short, personalized videos for customers alongside the technicians, showing the vehicle owners exactly what was happening in the shop.

Owners’ meet cute
While Andrew and Alysa are still quite young, they both have lifelong automotive experience.

“My grandfather got me into cars at a very young age, working on them with him,” Andrew says.

Alysa’s father, Alan Beech, owned his own auto shop, Beech Motorworks, just down the road from what is now NAPA AUTOPRO – Upper James.

Andrew attended college at the Automotive Business School of Canada and got a co-op placement with CAR Holdings, through which he met Alysa.

He attended a service advisor training program led by Alan in which Alysa also took part. On the second day, Alysa and Andrew were sent out as mystery shoppers to see how other businesses operated, and they decided to pretend to be a couple as part of that.

Two or three months later, as part of his co-op at CAR Holdings, Andrew was sent to work at Beech Motorworks, where Alysa was also working.

Andrew’s job during his co-op was to onboard shops that CAR had recently acquired, a process that took about a month at each shop.

“It gave me a pretty good crash course on shop operation and implementing process and getting the correct service level into all of those retail locations that they had,” he says.

Andrew and Alysa took the leap and purchased their own shop when CAR decided to sell and it became NAPA AUTOPRO – Upper James.

Family connections
Yet another remarkable connection between Andrew, Alysa and their business is their shop foreman, Jeff Hunt, who used to work for Alysa’s father.

Jeff joined NAPA AutoPro – Upper James from the start and has continued to adapt to new technologies. He has NexDrive Level 5 EV Certification and advanced training in servicing many European vehicles.

EVs are a key focus of the business, Andrew says.

“I always joke that we’ve gone off the deep end because we were probably one of the first to actually pull batteries out of vehicles and replace cells and actually really start to dig into high-voltage repairs and utilize our training,” he says.

We were probably one of the first to actually pull batteries out of vehicles and replace cells and actually really start to dig into high-voltage repairs – Andrew Ackers, owner/operator NAPA AUTOPRO Upper James

If an EV battery needs to be replaced, NAPA AUTOPRO – Upper James uses refurbished batteries from Quebec-based DCF, which are guaranteed to be at least 90% state of health.

Some other shops use refurbished batteries that are only guaranteed to be 70% state of health, Andrew says.

Eyes on expansion
Looking to the future, Andrew says the team plans to continue specializing in EV repairs and aims to serve business clients with EVs in their fleets.

He also says the plan is to expand, probably to a second location at a different site.

As for a succession plan, Andrew and Alysa have a son, Mason, who may one day take over the business.

“He’s two years old right now, though, so he’s got a little ways to go,” Andrew says with a chuckle.