This place could be a gold mine

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On the Rise

Sarkis Motors has a reputation for performing quality service on high-end and vintage cars.

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By Shana O’Malley-Smith ‘THIS PLACE COULD BE A GOLD MINE’

A CALIFORNIA BODY SHOP STARTS A RETAIL TIRE DIVISION

What would you do if someone walked into your business and told you that you were missing out on a huge potential to make more money? Would you kindly show him the door or would you hear him out?

A similar scenario played out at Sarkis Motors in early 2017 when third-generation owner Sarkis Ohanian met Joe Flores.

“When Joe came in I thought, ‘Oh great, another person who is trying to sell me equipment and supplies,’” Ohanian says. “I didn’t want to deal with him, but he kept coming in… and he had a great demeanor about him. It just clicked one day when we finally had the chance to talk.”

Flores, a former tire store owner who has decades of experience in the automotive and tire industries, met Ohanian by chance after he was involved in a car accident and needed some repairs done to his vehicle. Flores says he saw instant potential adding tire sales to the 10-bay auto body and service shop in Huntington Beach, Calif.

“When I came in for the first time I thought the layout was phenomenal. The location is about a block and a half north of the 405 Freeway, which is heavily traveled, and I just thought with a little bit of help, this place could be a gold mine.”

FROM BODY SHOP TO… Garage Sarkis Inc., which does business as Sarkis Motors, set up shop in Huntington Beach back in the ’70s when the majority of the area was still farmland.

“It started as a body shop,” Ohanian says. “Grandpa Sarkis was a painter by trade and that was his pride. He knew how to do body work and he did body work, but he focused on painting. So we were a body shop initially.”

As family members joined in the business, they added service and repair work.

“Grandpa Sarkis and my dad handled the business side of things, and my uncle Gary handled the mechanical side of things. He’s a Mercedes trained and certified technician.”

The Sarkis name grew around town and became known as the go-to place for auto bodywork and Mercedes service, the latter through the company’s S-Class Motors subsidiary. As the area exploded with development and the client base grew, customers wanted to be able to bring all types of vehicles to Sarkis.

“We brought my cousin along and we did an expansion,” Ohanian says. “He is more of a well-rounded mechanic on other cars. He’s never afraid to tackle anything, and now I don’t have to turn away any cars.”

A NEW PROFIT OPPORTUNITY Business was steady, and the 33-year-old Ohanian kept busy with the day-to-day tasks, almost too busy to realize that he was missing out on a huge market — the

To make room for its tire division, Sarkis Motors cleared room for tire storage, and added an underground alignment machine that’s flush with the ground.

Most of SM Tire Center’s inventory is made up of OE brands.

tire market. When it came time to balance and align the tires, he would just farm out the service.

“Balancing and aligning tires was the one thing I didn’t do in-house,” Ohanian said. “And also the one thing I really couldn’t stand, partly because of dealing with four or five different tire shops in the Huntington Beach area. None of them performed the tire services to my satisfaction. No matter how great the manager was, I still had issues with the work their technicians did.

“We would kill hours just taking the car back and forth, only to notice that the steering wheel wasn’t straight and we’d have to take it back again. It was a lot of hours lost and we were paying a lot of money for it.

“It was expensive and it still wasn’t done right, but at the time I had no choice. I was willing to pay a lot to not have to deal with it, but in the end I still had to deal with it.”

Ohanian was near the peak of his frustration when he was introduced to Flores. The two began talking and Ohanian decided he’d be better off doing tires on his own.

“We made the decision mid-year last year and we went to (the SEMA Show) and spoke to the Hunter people,” he says. “We already knew what we wanted.”

Ohanian spent last winter reorganizing the shop to accommodate the new tire equipment and was up and running in January.

“We added an underground alignment machine that we could roll a car onto because it was flush with the ground. That was our main construction, although we had to reshuffle our lift into another location and clean up a previous bay to set that up and have a more uniform look. It opened up space so we could have the nice, new equipment and a tire center.”

The new tire center includes the HawkEye Elite alignment machine, which Ohanian says was easy to get the hang of.

“As someone who had no experience with alignments before I went to my training, I was able to utilize the machine,” he says. “It guides you step-by-step so anyone with a basic knowledge of cars can handle it. The training helped fine-tune it.”

DISRUPTING THE LOCAL TIRE MARKET So how does a body shop with no experience with tires become a competitive player in the local tire market? The answer: Joe Flores.

With his decades of experience as a tire store owner and vast understanding of the local market, Flores agreed to come

Joe Flores, left, manager of SM Tire Center, convinced Sarkis Ohanian, right, to add tire sales and service to Sarkis Motors.

on board with Sarkis Motors and help Ohanian come up with a strategy to attract new customers and introduce current customers to their new service.

“He is someone I have full confidence sending as a representative of us,” Ohanian says. “It’s what I needed to go after other accounts.”

One of the first things Flores recommended was to give the tire side of the business its own brand by creating a separate division of Sarkis Motors called SM Tire Center.

“We created a social media platform and tried to market awareness on the tire side alone, and that’s been really good,” say Flores, who serves as the manager of that division.

With their reputation for quality service on high-end and vintage cars, Ohanian decided to focus his tire sales on high-end vehicles.

“I think we virtually have all the equipment to handle the cars, so that’s what made it easy to go after on the tire side because it was almost a niche market,” Flores says. “He had so many Mercedes coming through, Sarkis felt like he didn’t want to carry all of the different brands of tires. He wanted to focus more on the high end.”

S-Class Motors is located right next to Sarkis Motors.

Sarkis Motors set up shop performing body work in Huntington Beach, Calif., in the 1970s.

“We created a social media platform and tried to market awareness on the tire side alone, and that’s been really good,” says Flores, the tire division manager.

Ryan Evans, left, one of the stars of the TV show “Counting Cars,” shares information with Sarkis Batanian, owner of King’s Tire Wholesale in El Monte, Calif., during the open house.

Since Continental tires are what come stock on Mercedes, Sarkis Motors established itself as a Continental Gold dealer and keeps several Continental and General tire sizes in stock.

“We decided to go 10 years back and covered Continental or General tires in stock. So when someone comes in, we should be able to handle the tire sale that particular day,” Flores says.

“If you own a high-end vehicle, chances are most shops will need to order those tires, where we have them in stock. If someone came in with a Toyota Prius, those might be the tires we need to special order.”

In addition to Continental and General, the www.smtirecenter.com website highlights Yokohama, Goodyear, Dunlop, Hankook, BFGoodrich, Pirelli, Toyo, Michelin, Uniroyal and Bridgestone as the brands offered at the SM Tire Center.

The company keeps just about everything but run-flats in stock.

“Those are a little pricey to keep on hand, but besides that we have everything from the comfort S-Class type of tires to some of sportier coupes and SL’s and the CLK’s and E coupes now,” Ohanian says. “BMWs and Audis are essentially the same so it works for all aspects.” Once they were

Armen Gambaryan, left, is a technician at Sarkis Motors, while Art Aslanyan is a Certified Mercedes Technician at S-Class Motors.

well stocked with tires and well equipped to do tire jobs, they needed to let people know that they were ready for business.

“I turned to the people at Tire Rack because Tire Rack is kind of in their own world in terms of people looking for quality,” Flores says.

“Whether it’s a sensor, a tire, a wheel, the purists tend to go to Tire Rack, but they need some place to install it, and that’s where we can make our money.”

Sarkis Motors became an authorized Tire Rack installation center. “It’s really difficult to make any margin on any of the parts per se,” Flores says. “It’s the installation of those parts, and if you do it the right way the first time, that is the beauty part of Sarkis Motors.”

Flores started making friends with other local body shops and collision centers in the area, and to service them added mobile tire service.

“For example, I had a customer last week who had a mechanical shop. He was working on an old Jag and needed tires, but wasn’t physically capable of driving the vehicle down to our shop. He wanted four tires and he wanted to get them aligned, so what we did was we had our mobile unit deliver the tires, install them at his facility and then we brought it in and did the alignment at our shop. I think adding that piece of the puzzle to the tire side is invaluable.”

ATTRACTING CUSTOMERS There’s no shortage of high-end vehicles in Orange County, but having the right setup is key to attracting the luxury and vintage vehicle owners.

“We have that charm of integrity and quality — I think that’s our strongest suit — but we didn’t have an ‘image,’” Ohanian says. “People didn’t come here for the cleanest floors and the best coffee in town, so now were trying to put a face to our service.”

They did some cleaning and sprucing-up around the shop to make it more comfortable and inviting for customers.

“Presentation is crucial to attract the type of clientele you want,” Ohanian says. “We made a lounge area and a reception area as opposed to just dealing with whoever is at the desk.Now there are places to sit. Parking was a huge issue for us. It was not an inviting place to come into.”

Last month Sarkis Motors held an open house to showcase the work put into the shop and the surrounding area.

Bill Doyle, regional sales manager for Autobody News, left, talks with Bob Ohanian, co-founder of Sarkis Motors and father of Sarkis Ohanian, during the recent open house for the company’s new SM Tire Center.

Representatives from Continental Tire the Americas LLC and Hunter Engineering Co. were on hand as well as customers from local body shops. Ryan Evans, an expert vehicle painter from the popular TV show “Counting Cars,” did NitroHeat painting demonstrations and took photos with customers.

A COMMITMENT TO HIGH-QUALITY The Sarkis Motors brand was built in two ways: by delivering decades of exceptional service and by employees treating their customers’ cars like they treat their own. Ohanian plans to continue that philosophy with the expansion into tire sales and service.

“We want to deliver high-quality service to people who want to maintain their cars properly, and we do that by using original parts, high-quality paint, high-quality equipment,” Ohanian says. “That’s what we do, we don’t know any other way.

“From a business standpoint, it eats into your bottom line. Yes, you could save more money if you use inferior brakes, but I personally like to sleep comfortably at night knowing we did the right thing.”

Sarkis Motors’ expertise of high-end and vintage vehicles makes it a top choice for Orange County car lovers who want a personalized service experience.

“Currently in the shop we have everything from a vintage 1961 190 SL Mercedes to a 2017 Bentley,” Flores says. “And that’s really the type of customers we’re trying

Claire Brecheisen is the office administrator for Sarkis Motors.

to drive in on the tire side. You wouldn’t take your Porsche 911 Carrera to a big box store for tires. They wouldn’t know where to jack it up. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.

“A lot of shops are like that. They don’t want the liability, so we want to embrace that customer.”

Ohanian says the new division of SM Tire is an exciting new chapter in the long history of the family-owned business.

“This is uncharted territory for us. We’ve always kept our head down and done our own thing, but now we can offer tires and tire service both on the retail end of things and in the collision industry. And people need to know what we’re doing.”

Shana O’Malley-Smith is a freelance writer living in northeast Ohio. She specializes in the automotive aftermarket.