Everything ShopPros does today began at a table, with owners helping owners figure out how to run a better shop. We just made it something every shop can use.
In 2004, a shop owner named Rex Sarson pulled together a small group of shops to meet once a month and figure out how to run better businesses. There were four of them at the start. They tracked their sales and expenses by hand, compared notes, and built plans for each other, month after month.
The conversations grew past software and past any one shop. The group started writing down what actually worked: the routines, the SOPs, the playbooks that turn a shop from busy into profitable. What began as four owners at a table became a real system for growing a shop.
“I’ve been a shop owner for 40 years, not all of those successful. In fact, some say that I’m the overnight success story. That took 30 years, and a lot of help from ShopPros.”
It worked well enough that in 2014 the group formed ShopPros to offer the same thing to other shops: the planning, the coaching, and the routines they’d spent a decade sharpening. ShopPros grew to nearly 100 member shops across Canada and the US, owners coaching owners, all working from the same hard-won playbook.
For years that playbook lived in coaching sessions and a planning tool built alongside it. It did its job. But shops change, software changes, and the founders knew the system deserved to be rebuilt for how shops run today. So that’s what we did.
When we rebuilt ShopPros, we didn’t train it on generic business data. We trained it on our own: the SOPs, the coaching material, and the decades of real shop experience from Rex, Rick, and the owners who built this. Thirty-plus years of running shops, through plenty of failure before success, is now inside the platform.
Rex Sarson and Rick Cloutier own and operate repair shops to this day, and they’re the owners carrying ShopPros forward. Not former operators. Not executives who read about the trade. Owners who have lived every number on your scorecard, and built the tool they wish they’d had.
Rex says it plainly about his own shop: it runs over 90% of capacity, turns a healthy operating profit, and does it whether or not he’s there. That’s not a promise we make for your shop. It’s proof of what a systems-driven shop can become, from someone who built one.
That’s why ShopPros gives advice that fits how a shop actually runs. It isn’t guessing from a textbook. It’s the accumulated judgment of owners who’ve stood in the bay and figured it out the hard way, working for you every morning.
