Auto shop owner’s unusual business model: Give it away
Jerry Greeff donates his garage to the nonprofit Vehicles for Change
Vehicles for Change, a pioneering Maryland nonprofit, has received foundation grants and corporate sponsorships, but no gift ever looked quite like this: a fully functioning auto repair business.
Jerry Greeff’s unusual donation of his One Stop Auto Repair garage came with a request to keep alive the $2.5 million-ayear business that he has operated in Waverly with his wife, Pam, since 1991.
At 64, Greeff said, his wife encouraged him to leave behind his taxing12-hour days at the shop and concentrate instead on the family’s commercial real estate interests.
“My wife said it was either her or the business,” Greeff said.
The shop — on the site of the old Talbott Motors Co. that later became a Ford dealership on Greenmount Avenue — was transferred right after Christmas to the nonprofit, which fixes donated cars and awards them to low-income families at minimal cost. All that was missing was a giant red bow. Martin Schwartz, the organization’s president, said he was happy to oblige Greeff’s request. Not only will the 18-yearold nonprofit keep the shop — with its familiar red-brick storefront and 17 lifts — open, it will use the property as an extension of its re-entry program in Halethorpe, in which dozens of exprisoners are trained to become auto mechanics.
“It’s highly unusual to receive an ongoing business,” Schwartz said. He plans to retain the shop’s three technicians and two other employees, and to honor existing warranties to customers.
“He is donating the business and all the equipment inside. Jerry has a huge heart. He calls five times a day with ideas of how we can better serve the community.”
Under the arrangement, Greeff still owns the building. Vehicles for Change, which has an annual budget of about $4 million, is leasing the space with an option to buy.
The shop, filled with shelves of batteries and old parts, has a musty charm.
But security is a concern. The garage has extensive video surveillance and retains a former Baltimore police officer part-time to keep an eye on the property.
“We take security very, very seriously,” Greeff said. “We’ve been held up one time,
and that was 24 years ago. The manthat was held up is still with me.”
Schwartz said the garage is in the sort of economically challenged neighborhood that illustrates the need for affordable cars.
“Even in regions with a strong transit system, many low-income families have trouble reaching jobs for which they’re qualified,” Vehicles for Change says on its website. “Some are forced to turn down good positions in favor of lower paying ones with transit access. A car gives them access to better job opportunities and the flexibility to work extra shifts or overtime.”
Vehicles for Change has awarded more than 5,000 cars in Maryland, Virginia and Michigan, where it started a car donation program in 2015. The nonprofit sells cars to low-income buyers for an average of $900 with a 12-month loan and a six-month warranty.
Greeff, a self-described Type A personality who works weekdays and most Saturdays, considered selling the business last year, but said he couldn’t find a buyer with enough capital.
He said it will be easier now to step aside, knowing his shop is going to support a worthy cause. He is helping guide the transition by remaining at the garage for the first few months of the year.
Most of his life, Greeff said, has been focused on “business and family.” He has been married 41 years and has three children.
“I’ve been very successful because I have been focused — two-dimensional. I have not been as active in the community as I perhaps should have been, could have been,” he said.
Vehicles for Change plans to use the garage as a starter program for its automotive training program for former inmates.
“Ninety-five percent of them have come directly out of prisons to us,” Schwartz said. “We go into the prison system quarterly and we identify those guys that are ready to come out and are recommended.”
The 18-month-old training program, based on Washington Boulevard in Halethorpe, has placed 30 graduates into jobs. Another 14 are in training, working 40 hours per week and earning $8.50 an hour.
“Some guys who graduated are in Clarksville at Eyre Bus, two guys are in body work in Bel Air, we’ve got some guys at Antwerpen [dealerships] and at Mile One,” Schwartz said. One graduate, he said, got involved in drugs and is back in prison.
Eduard Baxter, 29, is among the program’s grateful graduates. He was released Jerry Greeff gave away his One Stop Auto Repair. He has operated the business since 1991, working 12-hour days. “My wife said it was either her or the business,” Greeff said. from prison in March after serving three years for theft. The training program “was like a jump-start for my life, the way you jump-start a car,” he said.
His automotive training, first in prison and then at the nonprofit, “gave me a lifestyle I thought I would never get,” Baxter said. “I had plenty of jobs — at McDonald’s, at Taco Bell. I just couldn’t keep them.”
Baxter completed his training last year and now works at a Mazda dealership in Pasadena.
“He just wanted to learn as much as he could,” Schwartz said. “At night he was delivering pizzas.”
Greeff said the training program not only fills a need for ex-prisoners, but for the business he has devoted his life to.
“There is definitely a shortage of qualified people in almost every aspect of this industry,” he said.
“There is an opportunity here for trained people.” Maryland try to guide potential candidates over hurdles that block more from running.
Martha McKenna, president of the Emerge board, said black women play an important role in their families, communities and churches, and political involvement is a natural extension.
McKenna, who worked on Dixon’s mayoral campaign this year, said both Dixon and Sneed, for example, took similar paths to office, albeit 30 years apart and from opposite sides of the city. “They are representatives of other African-American women in our city: They have taken very active roles in making neighborhoods safer,” she said.
Among the members of Emerge’s latest class is Robbyn Lewis, who was nominated recently to replace former Del. Pete Hammen in the House of Delegates. Hammen, who represented the 46th legislative district, joined Pugh’s administration this month.
The gains of women in Baltimore come as the retirement of Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski leaves Maryland’s congressional delegation without a woman for the first time in 46 years.
Women hold less than a third of the 188 seats in the Maryland General Assembly. About 20 state lawmakers are black women.
On local councils and commissions across Maryland, women make up less than 15 percent of the elected leaders.
But in Baltimore, Kromer said, three consecutive black women mayors will encourage girls to one day run for office.
“For voters who grow up in the city, it is not a new normal — it is just normal,” Kromer said. “These little girls will begin to assume leadership roles, and it will continue the pipeline.”