087: Cody Loveland of LoveFab and Affinity Aero shares how he went from Honda’s to NSX’s to tube-frame carbon-bodied race cars.

Explicit content warning

12/19/16 • 55 min

Cody Loveland worked on bicycles during his early teens but realized cars were way cooler when he turned 16. It didn’t take him long before he was piecing together turbo kits for his EK Civic and quickly had a group of people asking for him to make parts for their cars. His step-dad loaned him the money for a tig welder and Cody never looked back. While he was working as a package sorter for UPS, he started LoveFab, Inc in 2002 and worked both jobs for several months. But he quit his job and decided to not go back to college to focus his efforts on LoveFab. He was working out of a home shop from 2006-2012 and transitioned to working on NSX’s.

He eventually began renting a 7000 square foot commercial space and quickly realized how difficult it is to run a large-scale operation. He encountered some miscommunication with a customer that ended up costing him tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, he had a daughter and realized that he needed to downsize his operation. While he didn’t close LoveFab, he scaled it back and returned to a home/shop style space where he continues to fabricate turbo kits and work on cars.

His latest passion project is called the EnV8 and is a tube-chassis, LS-powered race car that he hopes to produce and sell in the future. He is still modifying the design and testing his work, but he is excited to unleash the full potential!

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086: Franco Ganino of Alliant Insurance talks about their Garage Keepers insurance plan called Installers Edge

Franco Ganino has been working at Aliant Insurance for 23 years. Being a car guy, Franco was excited when given the opportunity to work with Bob Corwin to work with SEMA and provide insurance. At the time, Bob was risk advisor for the NHRA and they become instant friends. They worked together to create an insurance product specifically for the SEMA members. They created “The Specialty Equipment Insurance Alliance” (SEIAinsuance.com) with the initial goal of proving manufacturers with product liability insurance. After 10 years, they started to add plans for garage keeper’s insurance. What they came up with would be known as “Installers’ Edge.”

He has spent years collecting, restoring, and racing cars so he understands what shops do when the install aftermarket parts and tune them for higher horsepower. This helps him cater insurance plans for his clients and ensure that they are fully covered. With Aliant being an insurance broker, they are connected to every insurance company out there and work with providers to insure the shops.

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088: Frank Rehak tells how he transformed his family auto shop to Driveshaft Shop over several decades.

Frank Rehak grew up working at the family’s shop and initially thought he was going to find a career as a motorcycle mechanic. He got a few jobs working on motorcycles and realized it wasn’t as great as he hoped. So he went back to work with his dad. He started at the bottom cleaning the machines and sweeping the floors. Frank worked his way up and eventually had quite a lot of responsibility at the shop. He had a few ideas about doing exchanges with customers and boxing up product to sell them anywhere and slowly began implementing these ideas.

He started to transition the shop to doing more CV axle rebuilds. But then the market was flooded with new replacement parts from China and he had to reevaluate his business model. So, he began offering upgraded drive shafts. Now, things have become very serious! They own a 50,000-square foot facility in North Carolina and employee 29 people.