Living The Red Life - Turning a Childhood Dream into a Thriving Auto Body Business

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Shannon Christian, founder and president of Shannon’s Auto Body Collision Repair Shop, turned a childhood passion for cars into a thriving business recognized for its integrity, safety, and precision. From painting Matchbox cars as a kid to mastering meticulous crafts like lawn care and dining service, Shannon developed an eye for detail that now defines his approach to automotive and marine repairs. Shannon shares how his shop stays at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry by using OEM parts, proper procedures, and highly trained technicians. He reflects on the entrepreneurial challenges of growing a reputable repair business while emphasizing the importance of customer service, safety, and community trust. Through his insights, listeners gain valuable lessons on what it takes to run a high-standard auto repair shop, as well as thought-provoking ideas about sustaining growth in an increasingly complex industry.Key Takeaways:Passion for Quality: Shannon Christian underscores the importance of integrity in car repairs, emphasizing that doing it right is essential, even when no one's watching.Importance of Customer Trust: Building trust with detailed explanations and delivering quality service is central to maintaining a loyal customer base.Modern Auto Repair Complexities: Cars now have more parts and technology, requiring advanced skills and precise approaches; Shannon emphasizes the significance of OEM parts and proper certification.Learning and Adaptability: Shannon's story showcases the importance of constant learning and adapting, both about oneself and the evolving industry standards.Sustainable Business Growth: Shannon illustrates how adhering to high standards and embracing customer-focused values can lead to enduring success and multi-generational customer loyalty.Connect with Shannon Christian:WebsiteInstagramFacebookConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

As we've progressed through the journey of fixing cars over the years, the cars have advanced so much that there's a lot more to it. I take that very personal, where we're making sure that if that car is in an accident, we repair everything incorrectly so that we're preparing for the future accident. If they ever get an accident again, are they safe? There's so much hidden parts on the car that years ago there used to be five parts on a bumper. Now there's over 60 parts on some cars with the different bumpers and brackets, sensors on the front end of it, cameras on the car, so there's a lot more to it. What are some things I should look out for

that are warning signs? I think this thing is just the... My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the Red Life, ditch the Blue Pill, take the Red Pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. This is a special edition of Insight Success. I'm Ray Gutierrez. I'm we are on the verge of filming a very special episode with Shannon Christian, which is the founder, president, Mr. Awesome, of Shannon's. What is Shannon's?

Shannon. We have an auto body collision repair shop and recently added marine and RV repairs for that as well. Right on. We have a mechanical shop. We sell stow plows. Not that you use that in Miami, but we never know. We sell in service snowplows. right on from Minnesota cool well it's funny you mentioned snow plows in Miami there's a lot of

productions a lot of commercials being shot at Miami you never know on that 11th hour I need a snowplower down at the golf course because we've got a commercial shoot for Adidas I've been there so never say never my friend how does one get into fixing collisions I was in second grade seven years old and I would paint matchbox cars right on I always had a thing for cars a young age I wanted to be an artist I enjoyed making things look good washing cars cleaning stuff and I remember getting a paint touch-up set

and had batch box cars and I had paint them and bring them to school and I remember other kids would say wow that looks pretty cool that's nice because you know you play demolition derby with them and smash them up and chip paint and I remember bringing them to school and other kids would see how nice they look

and ask if I could paint them. So I'm like, sure, I'd paint their matchbox cars. I became, I would paint these matchbox cars for 25 cents each. Why 25 cents? Well, that's what it costs at a video game. We had an arcade game. Capit, sure.

Yep. And it was 25 cents to play Miss Pac-Man or Asteroids or that. And it was like, you could either play a game or you could have your matchbox. Yeah, you did Nintendo Amoebos before Nintendo's were amoebo. Okay, if anyone catches that reference. That's actually very cool. You gamified it.

You actually made a physical product then created a game around it, which is amazing. Yeah. Were you any good at it back then? Did you have any skills, or did you create your own skills? I took the time to make sure that I didn't get paint on the windshields or the tires. And after I started doing it for a while, other kids thought they could do it. And then they started doing it.

And I remember one of my friends thought he would be able to do it. He would only charge 10 cents a car. But he would get paint on the windshields and paint on the tires. And the quality just wasn't there. so they would always resort back to having the quality. And that was kind of the thing where the quality meant, you know, at seven years old, what is quality? It's pain.

But isn't it bizarre how you were already thinking that way? But you're seven. Don't you think that's a little weird, but in a good way? I have a grandad of seven. I'm trying to imagine her doing something like this. That's amazing. It's different, I guess. Do you feel like, I don't want to jump ahead and talk about legacy,

but do you feel kind of like your stardust, your obsession is transposed into your granddaughter, maybe. Yes. Would you see she's into automobiles as well, or do you see her crafting something else? She's very artistic and very talented where I could see her doing that. Very cool. When it comes to art and painting, what fascinates you the most to see the before and after or the fact that this is a piece of mechanical engineering that is being painted by you?

What really gets you going? I think you start with the, initial product and identifying what's wrong with it, and then how do you make it better? How do you make it good? Right on. So you try an error. You paint it, and you paint over a chip, but then you see the chip underneath the vet, and it's like, well, that didn't work.

So now you've got to scrape all the paint off and redo it. Sure. And make sure that the groundwork is done before you just paint it. And a lot of that is just a prep work in it, and it carries on to today where it's a lot of is trial and error. You do it, and it's not good enough, as I would say. We're done. where you can always do better.

Same thing with drawing. It's like you start drawing, and as a kid, it's like you're drawn outside the lines. And I would always get a hard time when I had daughters growing up and I critique their drawing. And no, you're coloring outside the lines.

You need to outline it and then color it in. And I would get a hard time. Well, quit being so hard on it. I'm like, no, I'm trying to teach them. You've got to quality means something. Yeah, it's funny because after a while, you got to put on the visor

let them start swinging their lightsaber or you take off the wires and kind of show them how to do it. Like, it really depends on the method of, are you Sith or Jedi? Sorry, I went on a Star Wars tangent. But I'm sure you can appreciate it. When was your first big gig? Someone paid you to fix their car and you go, wow, I made money off of this. I think I was in high school at the time. Okay. I was 15 when I bought my first car. Wow. I had a full-time job at 14. Of course you did. And worked a lot hours, 15. I had enough

money saved. I bought my first car. I paid somebody else to repaint it and do that, but I had this interest. And they did the painting, but I did a lot of the interior work and a lot of the assembly stuff. And a lot of taking things apart, figuring out how things work, putting it back together. And then in high school, after doing that, I had that where I wanted to do that. And other people, I remember in shop class, a friend brought a vehicle in, he hit a deer with his car, and he brought it in. And I'm looking at the front end of it. I'm like, It's all metal. We can straighten that.

Wow. So we took the grill out and just straighten it, you know, just take a hammer and massage the dents back out, put it back together. And that was like the first thing that, like, wow, this really worked. Wow. How long did that gig take you? Like, did you immediately know what you needed to do or were you kind of just learning as you went? Learning as we were doing it.

A lot of it didn't know how things come apart. And, you know, at that time frame, things were riveted together. Some things were bolted, but this was all riveted together. and I remember drilling the rivets out, straightening everything, and then riveting them back together, and it's like, this is right, this looks good. Right on.

Where do you think this passion and drive comes from? Like, is it just the sense of speed, the sense of painting, the sense of repair? Where does this, do you think this comes from? My first job that I had was actually lawn care, mowing lawn. I had a neighbor that I went to their house and mowed their lawn.

I believe it was $2 an hour I got paid. used their lawnmower, their gas, and I mowed the lawn, and I remember getting done with it, and them looking at it and said, okay, if you look down these lines, they're not straight. And I'm like, yeah, I went around the tree, and I just followed the tree. And then that was when they taught me that make things look good, so not just done, but the appearance was really important. Absolutely. So making the line straight, when we're done, it was, okay, when you're done mowing lawn,

you've got to wash the lawnmower, clean it, take it apart, pressure wash, get everything cleaned up every other time I had to take the blades off and sharpen the blades and get it ready for the next time. So a lot of that prepped me for doing things right and cleaning up when you're done. I had worked at a resort at the age of 14, right? That was my first full-time job where I was working 40 hours a week at a ski resort. It was a four-season golf course ski resort. And I worked in the dining room, busing tables, setting tables. And the importance of setting the table and everything had to be exact. Oh, yeah.

Every placement had to be so far from the bottom edge. An napkin folded this way, the forks, the knives, the spoon, or glass, the sugar packets, the salt and pepper, everything had to be, everything had a precision placement. Oh, absolutely. And that kind of transferred into working on cars afterwards. Everything is precise. And you take something apart, you put it back together the right way. How much of that precision is the mental.

health versus the professionalism and running a tight ship. Oh, it's, there might be a little ADHD. Yeah, just a little bit, yeah, because you and I have that, that similarity. I'm running the four studios and one and two are my pride and joy. My thing is you walk in and your eye line is like, you see the lines, everything's clean. There is no mess. Folks immediately go, I'm going to go into a production studio. They're thinking wires, you know, someone mouth breathing in the back.

Too many bodies that are not doing anything. I'm like, no, no, no, no, that's not how we operate here. No, not an insight successor. Sir. So everything is run very much like a tattoo shop or a salon where it's a system in place. So as creators of our own universe, I take a lot of pride of that. I'm sure you can agree. So now it's Shannon's. First of all, I got to ask, what's it like walking around this planet with a name like that? Shannon. It just comes that to, I guess. You very much are Shannon, sir. Yeah. Yeah, what's that like for you?

I feel proud. Yeah. I feel good because they know when we fix a vehicle, they know. know that my precision and expertise and the attentive to details is spot on. And I expect that in everybody in the whole shop, whether it's sweeping the floors, cleaning up afterwards, paperwork's got to be in order, files when things are closed out. Everything has a place and process to be followed. Yeah, to me, it's very much mental health where I will lose sleep if that one thing wasn't turned off because then I know how energy works. where it says it's going to be a cascading effect.

If that's that nipped in the butt, everything's in synergy and everything just flows. So to me, it's just like everything must be, you know, aligned. Speaking of alignment, let's talk about your episode there. We're about to film. We're going to put you in the hot seat. I call it the dentist chair because we've got this giant microphone over here.

It looks like a drill. What are we going to learn about you? That's a good question. I'm still learning about me. Amazing answer. That's a great answer. What are you learning about yourself constantly? I expect a lot of out of people.

So I hold people to a higher. standard. Me too, sir. And when people don't live up to my standard, I take offense to it. Yeah, it hurts me. And I expect a lot out of people. Oh, yeah. You know, Steve Jobs is very similar.

People make fun of my Apple tattoo. They're like, oh, I'm like, no, this is very much a Steve Jobs statue. Steve Jobs, orphan, his father, obviously adopted him, a carpenter. And he taught Steve Jobs. Like, I'm not worried about the microphone. I'm more worried about when I'm making a cabinet. I want to make sure that the back panel of that cabinet is precise. It doesn't. It's not about the front of house. It's all very much about the back of house.

Steve Jobs is so obsessed with this. He wanted his factories to be painted, cleaned, like the hard shop factories where everything's dusty. He wanted those factories to be nice and clean and polish. He had this philosophy that you and I share. You mentioned that you're still learning about yourself, but we've got 22 minutes to learn about you. Can you give us a preview of your episode? What can we learn? I like to do things with the purpose. Purpose. What does that mean? Like a lot of folks, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of folks that are running companies don't understand their why yet, they don't understand their purpose. Can you educate folks that are still figuring that out? Do what's right. Even when no one's looking, just have

integrity. My passion was cars and bring it on to not just the cars, but now it's the people that that own the cars and to make sure that when we repair something, yeah, the car is great, but how about the person that you're fixing it for? Do they feel good? Are they confident in what you're doing? Do they feel comfortable with what you're doing? So it's not just fixing the car. You're taking care of that customer and making sure that they're back to hole. Can you share a story of a customer experience that was transformative? I have several stories. It's trying to figure out that right one.

But I would say right now we are in the 1% of the shops that are doing what's right because everything is based on dollars. And customer pay jobs, I would say 30% of our work is customer pay. zero issues with customer pay. They know, I know what they expect, they know what they're expecting, we deliver on what they're looking for. Where we run into is collision repair

when somebody else's paying the bill, the insurance company's paying, they're always looking at the dollar amount. 20, 30 years ago, it was who could do the job, and you did the job and you did it right, and you got paid for it. Now we're being told that we don't pay for that, nobody else charges for that,

nobody else is doing that, you're over repairing cars. Wow. You don't need to do that. I can have my car repaired down the street for 70 cents on the dollar. And great. If they will do that, are they doing the correct repairs? Are they doing everything that they should be doing?

There's, as we've progressed through the journey of fixing cars over the years, the cars have advanced so much that there's a lot more to it. So much more to the repairs. And with us growing and educating, we are following repair manufacturers. There's a lot of things that is updated and need to be done for safety of the occupants. And I take that very personal where we're making sure that if that car is in an accident, we repair everything incorrectly so that we're preparing for the future accident. If they ever get an accident again, are they safe?

So that's the biggest concern. It's awesome that you've got that microscope on such a small niche. What kind of person does it take to run a business like this? I can't just wake up one day and be like, well, I'm going to start repairing cars. And sure, there's a way of doing it, but there's a special way of the way you do it. What's still special about Shannon's way of doing it? Just the passion of doing things right. Having that customer mind, if you're putting your family in that car, is it safe?

Wow. And not only safe, does it look good? Does it right? Do you feel like that energy's... How is the warranty? How is it going to hold up? Right on? Do you feel like that energy that you put into is transposed into your work and you see it in your

customers? To my work or customers or employees. I have great employees that they really live up to what I am looking for. So just for folks to educate them a bit, what makes the evil version of what you do? Like, if I walk into a competitor and they're awful at what they do, what does that mean? That would mean that what is the cheapest? Yeah. You don't need to use an OEM part.

OEM would be an original manufacturer. You can put an aftermarket fender on it. You can put an aftermarket headlight in it. Aftermarket parts do not work in the collision world. it's it's not safe it's proven that they're not as it could cause more problems and it solves right so parts number one and then the repair process you have the right tools to do the repairs are the technicians that working on it are they qualified to do the repairs are they doing the test welding are they making sure that everything is back to the way it was you know the biggest thing is

the safety inspections and and the all the components that go into the the advanced driver assist systems that are on the cars now, I want to make sure that that's all operating properly when the repairs are done. What's your common customer? Do you have the enthusiasts that have car collections and then you have your standard, you know, mom and dad? Most of the stuff right now is the standard everyday mom and pop. We have a lot of second, third generation customers, fourth generation customers coming in. That's huge. Which is great. And they've been bringing their cars to me for 30 years and they're like, I won't go anywhere else. You're the only shop we trust to do the repairs.

So how do you hand down this power? Like, how do you teach what you've taught yourself and hand it over to the legacy? How do you keep going? Keep doing what's right. Staying up for the customer. Customer deserves to be taken care of. Right on.

And a lot of times they're not. They're undervalued. They're told that you don't need to do certain things. They try to steer people to someone that'll take the shortcuts and do it cheaper and not do all the repairs. And just for a quick buck to get it in and out where it takes us longer to fix the cars

because we are looking up procedures. We are following everything that needs to be done. We are doing test welds. We are trial fitting. We are measuring. There's a lot of things that go into the process that not every shop is doing. Sure.

I hate to ask, if you could just take them open and look at this camera and just kind of give us, give our folks some fun facts, I don't have fun facts, but some tall tales of like what to look for in a bad negative experience with someone that is

looking for your services and they can't find you. Like, what are some things I should luck out for that are warning signs? Find a shop that you trust, build a relationship with them, check the reviews, ask them about a warranty, ask them if they're taking care of all the safety inspections. Go a little deeper. We have entrepreneurs here. Is it like eye contact, if they go right for the sale in the first 15 seconds of a conversation, that's a red flag.

If their shop isn't set up, that's right. Like, give me the entrepreneurial. Are they explaining the repair process? Sure. Are they giving you options? Are they just giving you, this was the only way to repair the car, or do they give you options? They might tell you, this is the recommended repairs. We can get by doing something a little less, but here's the consequences for doing a lesser repair.

So the biggest thing is just the honest, open transparency. Are they giving you an estimate up front? If they're giving you a parking lot estimate, they're missing 30% of the damage. Are they bringing the vehicle in? Are they disassembling it? Are they looking at procedures to find everything? we call it blueprints. Are they bringing the car in

and blueprinting the repair? Car comes in, first thing we do is we wash the car. We have to identify all the damage. Then we'll do safety inspection. We check all the seatbelts and safety things. Every manufacturer's got a different checklist to follow. So we're following that.

We're checking the wheel alignment up front. Then we pull up repair procedures, do a vehicle scan. So there's things that before we write the estimate on it that need to be done to know what, what needs to be done in that car. You know, it makes you feel good to know that. Thank you.

I appreciate the time in education, Shannon. It's come so far. It's advanced so far. At least your shop has. I'm still in the belief that you just pull up and ding, ding, and there's some guy with a sweat thing is going to hustle me and tell me, well, your car, and like,

you've brought some confidence to me that you've got it all taken care of, my friend. There's so much hidden parts on the car that until you disassemble that bumper, years ago there used to be five parts on a bumper. Now there was over 60. parts on some cars with the different bumpers and brackets sensors on the front end of a cameras on the car. So there's a lot more to it. I got to ask, maybe this is a side quest. What happens

when a cyber truck wheels in and everything is this fresh and new and there is no SOPs for this this beast of a truck? What happens then? That you just knock on Elon door and go, yo, I need PDFs here. I got nothing. Like, who do I call? What's your experience been? You want to find out who's qualified to work on on that car to start with. Not every one is qualified to work on every car out there. You might have some shops that they haven't invested in any technology or upgrades for years. You want someone that is up to date, like annually updates with procedures and making sure certifications. We have several OEM certifications. We are continuously adding to that. Are they Icar gold class certified or, you know, what kind of

certification they have? What kind of paint are they using? Do they have a warranty? Do they have a written warranty and you just chew this up like breakfast you like data data amazing good for you my friend what you do is very very impactful and that's not quite a pun it kind of is um i got to cut a short brother i'm looking forward to your doing your interview um i hope you enjoyed your time doing uh the red life podcast i've learned a lot i'm sure our viewers have learned a lot uh shannon i look forward to our interview we're wrapping up yet another amazing episode of living the red life uh for inside success i am ray gutierrez You know,