The Bobby Bones Show - Torque Wrenches Are This Girl’s Best Friend

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Demeny Pollitt is an automotive technician and the founder of Girlington Garage, a female-run auto garage in South Burlington, Vermont. In operation since 2009, Pollitt’s business has not only survived, but thrived. Ms. Pollitt talks about taking the leap to entrepreneurship, entering a male dominated industry, and the joys/challenges of business ownership.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what you're saying. Yep, that's me. Clivert Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits,

my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated.

So let's get to it. Listen to the. the Clifford show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.

Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift, who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. But hey, no one's perfect. We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty. that none of us likes. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Demony Pollitt, and I am the owner of Burlington Garage in South Burlington, Vermont. Beautiful. I appreciate you building a fort there for our reporting.

You're welcome. It was kind of fun. I haven't built a sheet for it since I was a kid. Welcome back to On the Job. Today we're speaking with Demony Pollitt, who as you heard, is the owner of a female-run auto repair shop in Vermont. But Girlington Garage is more than just a cute name. Demony's mission is to create a place where women feel comfortable having their cars repaired. They walked in and they didn't feel out of place or like they didn't belong. they immediately felt like, yeah, I can sit down here. And this feels like, I don't want to say this feels like home because, you know, it doesn't feel like home to go to a repair shop. But something equivalent to home, this feels like a comfortable coffee shop maybe.

I don't know. To that end, Gerlington does serve some pretty darn good coffee. And the lobby is the kind of place you wouldn't mind passing time, reading a book or catching up with an old friend. So our waiting room is very clean. It has really comfy chairs. It's full of plants. We also have, I remember when I was a kid,

the funnest thing in the world was when we got a new refrigerator and there was a big box to play in. And so when we got a tire machine, I took that box, I painted it, and I cut out little windows and a door in it. So we have that in our waiting room for kids to play in. We have lots of toys. And in addition to the comfy furniture,

and a cardboard playhouse for kids. The lobby of Girlington also has a large window, which looks out under the garage bays where the mechanics do their work. One of the pillars of my business is transparency and honesty, and I feel like if I can see what's going on, I am more likely to trust that what is happening is right because I'm watching it happen.

So I feel like it just lends a sense of trust for our customers. And that sense of trust that Demney is trying to instill is just one of the many ways she is hoping to revolutionize a slippery, historically male-dominated industry. As she tells it, Demony was far from a natural-born mechanic. In fact, it took a lot of trial and error, sometimes at her own expense.

I think actually I had changed my own oil once, and I found, it was at my parents' house, and I found a gallon of oil in the garage. And so I thought, okay, that's what you put in. So I put a full gallon of oil in, which is not what you're supposed to do. At that time in her life, pre-Girlington, Demony was working in the social services field, tending to the elderly and people with developmental disabilities.

But it seemed that no matter how much she worked, she just couldn't get ahead. I lived in this cabin that you had to walk to out in the woods that didn't have running water. It only had an extension cord like running along the ground for electricity. And it was $200 a month, and I couldn't afford that. So she came up with two potential career paths, which on their surface seemed completely different. but not to her. So the only two things that I thought would be at all interesting were psychology. I thought that would be very interesting, learning about people, figuring out their mysterious mysteries every day, and fixing cars.

Again, figuring out these machines fixing their mysterious mysteries every day. And so I did a little bit of research, and I realized it was going to take six years. to become a psychologist and two years to become a technician. And so that was my decision right there. So Dempne is learning about cars, turning those mysterious mysteries into solvable problems. When one day, while studying front-end assemblies, she suddenly thinks back to an experience she had with her own car, an old Ford Bronco. And as I learned them, I started remembering this time. I had brought my truck in.

Then the technician came out to me and said, hey, come out to your car with me. I want to show you something. So he got me down, we got on our backs, we went underneath the truck, and he grabbed this bar that went from one wheel to another, and he grabbed it, and he moved it back and forth. And he said, see that, that's your tie rod. And that should not move like that. I saw him moving it and I thought, boy, that's definitely moving. So I guess if he says it shouldn't, that's bad. I need to fix that. And back in school, years down the line, I was remembering this.

And I realized that the part he grabbed was not a tie rod, but a sway bar. And a sway bar is not a safety issue. and also it moves like that. The way he grabbed it and moved it, that's what it does. It was fine. Oh, man. Do you think he got swindled? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if he misspoke or if he showed me the wrong thing or what.

Whatever it was, I was misled, whether on purpose or not. And I didn't have any understanding of what was going on. and I realized that that had probably happened to me so many times, more times than I could count. Here's the thing about Demony, though. Instead of thinking back to that moment and getting bitter about it, she gets inspired. And I thought, God, I wish there was, I knew of a woman mechanic. I would drive long distances to bring my car to a woman who was a mechanic. And then I thought, I bet a lot of other women feel this way.

I'm going to open up an all-girl garage and I'm going to make a million dollars. And then from that point on, that was my plan. That was what I was working towards, was figuring out how to open my own business. But the more Demony learns about the industry, the more she realizes, opening up a business is a lot of work, much more than she can do alone. Luckily, she knew just who to call. My mom was looking for something new to do with her life. And so I said, hey, come up to Burlington.

I'm trying to start this business. Why don't you come help me? And so she did. When we come back from the break, the Pollitt ladies roll up the garage doors. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. This is the kind of person you need. Express employment professionals can help.

Because in good times or bad, we understand how critical it is to make. manage your business for today with the right workforce. We offer hiring solutions to fit changing demands. Express knows jobs. Get to know Express. Go to Expresspros.com to find a location near you. We're back talking with Demony Pollitt, who along with her mom, has just opened up her repair shop,

Burlington Garage, in South Burlington, Vermont. And for the first few days, things go exactly as you'd imagine. with only a handful of curious customers trickling in. Like any business, Demony knows it will take time to grow. Unless, of course, you get a lucky break. I was at the shop on the weekend because we had just opened, so I was there 24 hours a day. And I got a call from someone whose car had broken down in another town.

And they didn't have AAA. And so I gave her my AAA. I called AAA and I said, hey, my car broke down. So I had AAA tow her to the shop. I think it was just like a flat tire or something. I just fixed whatever it was. And I sent her on her way. And she happened to be a DJ on the local radio station. It was really the most wonderful stroke of luck. And that was in your first week? Yeah, first or second week. Right in the beginning. It was amazing. And you noticed the uptick in business right away?

Oh, immediately. Immediately, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really incredible. I mean, she would talk us up on her radio show every week. It was so incredible. From then on, business continued to prosper, as more and more customers kept coming in and spreading the word that there was this cool new female-run auto shop.

And while Demony could breathe a little easier with the influx of new customers, she quickly learned that owning an auto shop comes with some built-in challenges. You know, being a technician is a really hard job. It's physically difficult and it's hard on your body. And most technicians don't last much past 52 because of how physically difficult it is. But I would argue that the most difficult job is being the service advisor. That's a person that you talk to when you bring your car and to get fixed. They're sort of the go between the mechanic and the customer.

and it's nearly impossible to take your own emotions out of it. Everyone knows what it's like when their car breaks down and when they have this painfully expensive bill that they have to pay if they're going to get their car back. Everyone knows how that feels. And so being the person who has to explain that to a customer and say, your car is not safe to drive unless you give us $2,000. It's just a brutal job. It's mentally and emotionally exhausting.

And then there are the customers that have sent me messages saying, I don't trust you. I think that you're taking advantage of me. I think you're cheating me. I think, you know, this other shop told me such and such a thing. And while I do understand it, it's the whole reason I started my shop. And it's brutal. It kills me.

me a little bit. I die a little bit every single time. Learning that no matter how good we are and how careful we are and how hard we strive not to take advantage of people, not to cheat people, if you tell them they need to pay you a lot of money, they're not going to trust you anymore. That's just gone. It doesn't matter what you do. No amount of nice coffee and tea is going to fix that. No, of course not. Of course not. And I mean, I'm the same way. I get my house worked on and all of a sudden it needs $1,200 more than they quoted me. I immediately think that they're doing something wrong or that they're cheating me or they're trying to just squeeze more money out of me. That's just how our brains work, I think. There's nothing you can do to stop it. It's just, I think, I think, psychology. But it still hurts. The job also impacted her relationship with her mother, who as a partner was sharing the responsibilities of the business, albeit not always smoothly. Being partners with my mom

owning a business destroyed our relationship 100%. When we were so working together, we would just be in our office and we would just constantly be yelling at each other. Things eventually got so bad between Demony and her mom that they couldn't even be in the shop at the same time. We had changed it so that we were only each working two and a half days a week and we would overlap for an hour on Wednesday and sort of have a conversation and talk about what was going on in the shop and then she would leave and I would take over and I'd be there for the end of the week.

Then eight years into the business, Demony came down with a third. thyroid condition. She struggled to even work the two and a half days a week. And that's when her mother's unconditional love took over. My mom being a really, really good mom said, you need to take some time off. Go away for two years. Come back. We'll see where the business is at if it still exists. I'll take care of it till then. And so I did that. And it did still exist. She did good. So your mom held the fort while you were gone? She did, yeah. My mom, she ran the business all by herself.

She became the service advisor. She did it all by herself while I was gone. Really amazing. And then she immediately retired. Since Demini's mom stepped away from the business, the two have attended therapy sessions to overcome the damage they're working together had on their relationship. really helped us to heal things and get over the damage that was done being business partners.

I couldn't have done it without her, but I also wouldn't choose to do it with her again. And with her health greatly improved, Demony is back in the shop these days. But she admits she's in that challenging phase of ownership, where it's no longer as exciting as it once was for her. I care about the business. I really do, and I love my employees. I love the people that I work with, and I do want Girlington to run forever, but it doesn't make me very happy. And so I'm mostly just there for support for the manager.

Susan McGrath, she's fantastic and running the business like nobody's business. Demony still goes in two days a week, but her goal is for Girlington to grow independent of her, for this thing that she created, to reach a stage where it no longer needs her. So what do you think's next for Demony? I have no idea. I think I still, I'm still in a transition. Getting it to a stable point. Once that is sort of settled, I'll have to think about it.

I haven't thought about it. I don't know what's next. I don't know. Springs coming, so anything outside, that's definitely next. Definitely gardening, definitely walking in the woods. swimming in some cold streams. Yeah, I have no idea what's going to happen work-wise. We'll see.

For on the job, I'm Avery Thompson. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Cliver Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media. Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Cliver Show.

This is a place for raw. unfills of conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to The Clifford Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick & Poll show are geniuses. We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand. Better version of Play Stupid Games win Stupid Prizes.

Yes. Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually thought it was. I got that wrong. But hey, no one's perfect. We're pretty close, though. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.