Joe Benza is the owner of Carolina Quick Lube in Garner, North Carolina, and a runner-up for this year’s NOLN Operator of the Year award.
Benza lives and breathes auto service, having grown up working in his father’s quick lube business—and later going on to run it alongside him.
The two sold their business and his father went into retirement—but Benza was far from done. Around a year after that, he jumped back in with his own new brand, ready to use decades of experience to create something entirely his.
Friendly, Fast, Local Service
Since Benza last spoke with NOLN in 2023, he’s only continued to build upon his success, surpassing expectations in car count, sales, and customer feedback, and nearly doubling his number of employees from six to 10.
Much of this didn’t just fall in his lap, however, but was the result of months of community involvement and outreach.
“I pretty much didn't say no to anything in the first year,” tells Benza. “I just said, ‘Let's try everything, let's get our brand out there. Let's get our logo on the back of grocery receipts and put up a couple billboards, and let folks know that we're here.’”
Alongside running Google Ads, having a nice website, and sending ads out in the mail, Carolina Quick Lube sponsored a myriad of organizations in its community such as churches, car washes, and local high schools. It helped increase his brand awareness while also garnering admiration from locals.
With the brand that Benza built came a newly constructed four-bay facility for it to operate out of. When he first set out to open the shop, he already had it in his head to have four bays. He utilizes what he calls a hybrid approach, using the fourth bay for completing jobs like brake repairs, while the others are mainly for quick oil changes.
Having a brand-new building is something Benza cites as attracting customers, but what he’s ultimately prioritized in his business has been the speed of service. That, combined with Carolina Quick Lube’s helpful staff and local roots, has brought them much publicity through word of mouth alone.
“Being friendly, personable; getting it right,” sums up Benza. “Getting folks back on the road, while we have a nice, comfortable waiting area. They don't want to be here for more than 10, 15 minutes,” says Benza.
Like Father, Like Son
Many of his insights into what makes a quick lube business work stem from already having extensive experience in the field. He ran another quick lube business, Fast Lube Plus, alongside his father before the two sold it to FullSpeed Automotive.
There are many words Benza uses to describe the relationship he has with his father: a colleague, friend, and mentor being among them. The two keep in touch daily, and while Benza’s father is enjoying his deserved retirement, he never passes a chance to hear about his son’s continued path in the quick lube industry and to offer him any guidance he can.
“I know Dad is, as I mentioned, enjoying retirement, but there's part of them that I think misses the camaraderie (of) working alongside me,” shares Benza. “I know he enjoys hearing the good news.”
Reflecting Success
Being the sole owner of a shop now, Benza has developed his own unique leadership style. In the past 20 years, he’s seen a change that has led him to take a more balanced approach to his role as a boss. While he makes sure everyone knows they’re there to do a job and enforces structure and accountability, he makes time to understand them and their lives.
This understanding is effective not only in building a loyal team, but in learning how to best develop each staff member’s talents. If there’s anything Benza has learned from being in the oil change field, though, it’s that there can be a lot of changes in staff. The more capable some techs become, it’s common for them to look ahead at pursuing something like a managerial role.
While there are some that will remain comfortable in a certain role, quick lube techs often come and go–but for Benza, it’s something he knew to expect. When one of his staff members visibly improves to the point that they want to advance their career, it brings him a sense of accomplishment because it’s a reflection of his own success.
“If you provide them a good opportunity to be the best they can at what they do, and if they come to you with an opportunity for themselves to move on–whether that's, ‘Hey, I've kind of mastered the oil and lube space, and I want to get into full service,’ or, ‘Hey, I've become a really good technician, I think I could be a manager of my own,’ then you've done a good job and growing and developing,” Benza explains.
Benza knows the quick lube space, and he knows it well. Now, he’s driven to use his experience in the industry to help the staff he oversees also achieve that same success.
He describes the relationship he has with his staff as that of a family, and he credits this to being a present owner. It’s undoubtedly a contrast to bigger, more corporate environments, where employees aren’t typically as familiar with the executives behind the brand they work for.
Running his business from a distance has never been what Benza is interested in. He returned to the field to be in it, not to watch from afar, and the genuine care for what he’s built is something that reverberates throughout the shop’s entire culture.
“You got to touch and feel your business every day and let the folks who work for you know that you're willing to do what they do, and that you appreciate them. You can have a beautiful store and a great location, but if you don't have the right people to execute it alongside you, it can be challenging,” advises Benza. “Be a part of the business on a daily basis–don't try and run it from your vacation home.”
