2 East Memphis auto shops sharing space
It’s like if your go-to clothes shop started sharing space with your favorite shoe store.
Or if your favorite dessert spot moved in with your favorite restaurant. Or if Edwin Watts was your preferred golf store and it moved into the clubhouse of your regular golf course.
Welcome to Holt Tire Pros/Oak Court Auto, now sharing service bays and a lobby in the heart of East Memphis at 572 S. Mendenhall.
Walk to the back of the sunlit lobby. Look to your right to see Bill or Bubba Holt for buying or repairing a tire, alignments and related services.
Look to your left to see Oak Court Auto’s John Smith for issues with your vehicle’s engine, timing belt, struts, water pump, alternator and tune-ups.
Turns out that customer Kenny Farrell turned both ways Tuesday morning. Left to get the air-conditioning fixed in his wife’s car. Right for a tire repair and replacement.
Farrell has been a Holt Tire Pros customer for 30 years and a Oak Court Auto customer about 20 years. But Tuesday was the first time he had visited since the car repair service moved in from a mile away where it had operated at the corner of Poplar and Perkins Extended, 4505 Poplar.
“That is handy,” Farrell said. “To have somebody with the experience that Holt has, not just in selling tires but servicing them. To have that combined with John Smith, who is just the greatest at nuts and bolts. Most anything in the vehicle, his team can fix.
“Both combined, it’s a serious convenience.”
Holt Tire Pros was started by the Holt brothers’ late father, William D. Holt Sr., in 1964 at other locations before establishing in 1979 what was then a branch at 572 S. Mendenhall. It’s one of the few tire stores that can claim being a continuous Michelin dealer for 50 years, Bill Holt said.
John Smith had managed Oak Court Auto for 18 years when it was housed at the full-service Ballinger’s Oak Court Shell at 4505 Poplar. That property was recently sold.
Holt Tire Pros has had extra space since it stopped warehousing tires and a tenant business that repaired dents moved out. Owners Bill, 67, and Bubba, 65, are preparing for retirement.
So when Oak Court Auto needed a new home, the Holts struck a deal with repair shop co-owners Smith and Bill Shoup. Smith and Shoup are leasing the Holts’ entire property comprising a 5,000-square-foot building on fourtenths of an acre, but leasing back the half that Holt Tire Pros is already using.
The arrangement gives Oak Court Auto assurance that once the Holts call it quits, the repair shop can expand into the space with a 20-year lease.
“It made sense for both parties,” Bill Holt said. “It secured our future (in retirement) as well as secured their long-term future because they now have a home for the next 20 years.”
Until the brothers retire, the tandem businesses will try “to provide the motoring public with a one-stop shopping concept,” Bill said. “That they can pretty much get anything fixed on their car they need to have fixed by simply coming here.”
Many of the Holt Tire Pros customers live in the surrounding 38117 ZIP code and have been loyal through the years, Bubba Holt said.
Asked to explain their recipe for such an enduring success, Bubba replied, “I think a lot of it has to do with our father and what he brought us up in the business doing: Being fair and honest people.”
Smith of Oak Court Auto acknowledged the strong reputation that Holt Tire Pros has built over the years. His own business also has enjoyed strong word-of-mouth support from customers “because I’m a firm believer in treating people the way you want to be treated and being fair to people,” Smith said.
“Don’t sell people stuff they don’t need,” he said. “Main thing is, back what you say you are going to do.”