Owner, Ryan Rugg
Bio:
My name is Ryan Rugg, I am a recently new to the business ownership aspect of my career. Although within this business I have been running day to day operations for more than 6 years at our current location.
I have been in the automotive field for more than 19 years, where my background lies within heavy line repairs (engines, transmissions, etc.) and diagnostics. I learned early in my career as to how the future was pointing towards electronics controlling vehicles more and more. I then, pointed myself in attempting to learn all I could about the electrical and computer-based diagnostics within our vehicles today. This seems to be a never-ending study session, as our cars become smarter and smarter every day.
Why did I choose auto repair as my profession? This is a long story so I will try and shorten to the best of my capabilities. As an aspiring 2 sport athlete growing up, I loved working on sports cars though high school with friends. My true love was baseball though. I had received offers to play baseball around the country but couldn’t commit myself to the right school. When I did commit to a school, they were no longer committed to myself. I found myself three weeks prior to school starting for my freshman year of college, without a college to attend. Through some sort of higher power, I received a phone call shortly after, asking me to come and play baseball at Rochester Community and Technical College. I was then asked what I was looking to major in. At that time, I had no idea. He asked, what do you like to do? I said, working on cars as I was working on my own at the time of the call. After 1 year of playing baseball and moving through the automotive program, I had then learned that, automotive is what I wanted to do with my life. Since then it’s been a ride.
As a company we are part of a few associations. We are a longstanding Napa Auto Care Center, Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association, and part of the Alliance of Automotive Service Providers of Minnesota. We carry ASE, MACS certified techs. Some techs have received other certifications they carry with them from their previous training.
We are one of the very few specialty shops around in our metro area. In a world full of drive-thru oil changes and car washes. Although our name leads more toward only performing transmission repairs, we can do it all here (well almost). Our mechanics all started their automotive careers in other specialized fields of the industry.
Our shop is unique because we specialize in drive-line repair and diagnostics. A lot of shops out there are prone to the typical under car repairs or parts hanging. In today’s age shops have become a custom to replacing things in whole versus “repairing” what is actually necessary. In the case of a “transmission failure”, some places don’t understand the exact workings of a transmission so they will sell a unit to their customer. That isn’t always necessary. In more cases than not, a transmission or vehicle in that matter, can be fixed, repairing a single component that will not cost customers’ an arm and a leg. This type of philosophy runs down through all of our work, all the way to how we look at performing oil changes, brake replacements, etc.