From car shop owner to software startup
Carolyn Coquillette took an unusual path to becoming a software developer — through the back door of her San Francisco hybrid car repair shop.
Ten years ago, Coquillette opened Luscious Garage, breaking ground in a male-dominated industry with the first shop that specialized in hybrids. Now she’s started Shop-Ware, a software company geared toward her fellow independent auto repair shop owners.
In selling the cloud-based, paper-free auto shop management system, the little-known startup is going up against five companies that are already wellestablished in the space, according to Eric Lough, director of data management at PartsTech, an auto parts search engine.
Still, shop owners interviewed for this story estimated that about half or more auto-repair garages around the country are still writing work orders for customers by hand.
So at a time when software giants like Salesforce and Oracle offer computerized programs for almost all functions in an office, Coquillette, 38, believes she can make headway in an industry that “Silicon Valley has overlooked.”
Her system, she maintains, consolidates functions like accounting, inventory, parts ordering and customer relations in a way that other, more piecemeal programs do not.
“Lots of other companies have figured out how to text you with a price for auto repair,” she said. “But nobody really tried to improve the operating system for independent auto repair shops. It was kind of this forgotten thing we took for granted.”
Customers of Luscious Garage and the 40 other repair shops that use Shop-Ware can see service orders and work estimates on their computers and
“Nobody really tried to improve the operating system for independent auto repair shops. It was kind of this forgotten thing we took for granted.” Carolyn Coquillette
mobile devices. Garage technicians can even embed photos of problems they find while working on the car.
The customer receives a text or email, pulls up the revised order and can click a button to approve or reject any additional work. The customer receives a text or email when the job is completed.
Adam Nielsen of El Granada said he’s become a loyal customer of Luscious partly because the software system makes car service less intimidating and more transparent.
For example, the garage recently transmitted a photo of his non-hybrid Subaru’s spark plugs and suggested additional work. That gave him time to do more research online and decide if he wanted to seek another estimate.
“I could see the corroded spark plugs myself,” Nielsen said. “Other mechanics can talk down to you and be almost intimidating with their jargon. Here, you can just decline it and you don’t have to be all weirded out talking to the guy on the phone. You don’t feel intimidated into getting service that you may think your car doesn’t need.”
On the repair shop side, the system saves paper. Lots of paper.
“One job would generate 15 pages of paper,” said Justin Nunes, owner of J&G Automotive of San Rafael. “The customer would get a printout of the estimate, the technician would get the repair orders, the customer would get the final bill. We’ve gone from printing reams and reams of paper every month to practically not using a single page in weeks.”
Nunes said the $350 per month fee is about $100 a month more than he paid for his previous shop system, and he had to upgrade each service bay with new computers and stands. But he’s saving about $120 per month in ink cartridges alone.
Luscious Garage, now on Ninth Street, is surrounded by the South of Market offices of tech companies like Pinterest, Zynga and Adobe Systems.
From the start, the garage billed itself as an eco-friendly business, using solar power and natural light, reclaimed water for the bathroom and an all-electronic invoice system that sent customers PDFs and email instead of printouts.
Coquillette’s first shop system was designed for Luscious. In 2012, she decided to try to sell that system to other garages, but because the underlying code was too old to add all the features she envisioned, she contracted with software developers to start from scratch the next year.
Luscious switched to the new system in 2015, and Coquillette began offering it to other shops to test. She funded ShopWare herself.
Steve Scott, owner of 47 Garage in Carmichael (Sacramento County), began testing the software in March 2015, saying it took care of all the little back-shop details better than any system he had seen, and “nobody offered a paperless version.”
Scott said he hasn’t had to hire an extra person to handle service calls because “I get an 80 percent faster response by texting.”
He noted that his garage has a lot of older customers, and some would still ask for a printed work order at first.
Some garage owners may be hard to convince too, he said.
“Because lot of shop owners are older, making the switch to an online system or a digital system is a big jump,” said Scott, 54. “It’s just an industry that’s been slow to come around. Quite frankly, we have a lot to keep up with just in the cars. It’s a huge jump to learn new software. That’s the thing that Carolyn will have to deal with the most.”
Pete Rudloff, owner of Pete’s Garage in Newark, Del., and a member of several committees for the industry group Automotive Service Association, said there are about 227,000 independent auto repair shops in America, not including official automobile dealership shops.
Like Coquillette, Rudloff has started an auto shop management software company, although his is still in stealth mode.
Many auto-repair software developers “are not nearly as invested” in the industry because they aren’t working in the trenches, he said. “Someone like myself or Carolyn knows what shop owners need. That gives us an advantage.”
Coquillette could have chosen to open more Luscious Garage locations. Instead, she steered toward creating the software system, which admittedly is “an unsexy core business.” She hopes to expand to 300 customers by the end of the year and has received positive vibes from coders.
“They don’t see this as yet another nutrition app or yet another fertility app,” she said. “They see this as solving a problem.”