Express Oil Change & Tire Engineers Franchisee Opens Fifth Virginia Store
An Express Oil Change & Tire Engineers franchisee in Virginia recently opened his fifth store in Powhatan, Virginia, reports Richmond BizSense.
Located at 1840 Stavemill Crossing Lane, off Anderson Highway in the eastern part of the county, the shop opened earlier this month, and is franchisee Robley Bates’s fifth store.
Bates first learned of the brand in the early 2000s while working as an investment banker in Charlotte, North Carolina, after serving in the Marine Corps for eight years. His firm worked with Express Oil Change’s corporate office, and Bates was impressed with how well the company was doing.
After working as a technician at an Express store in Alabama for a couple of years, Bates went on to open his first store in Midlothian, Virginia, in 2013. Since then, he’s expanded to Mechanicsville, Virginia, in 2016 and Chester, Virginia, in 2019, before opening a second Midlothian store in 2023, located across the street from the first one.
“You could throw a baseball at the other shop,” Bates said. “People thought it was crazy, but it worked out well.”
Though Bates hadn’t considered Powhatan when he first started, that’s changed in recent years as more of his customers have come from Powhatan to his stores in Midlothian.
“Powhatan wasn’t even on the radar. It was farther out than I wanted to go,” Bates said. “(Now) there’s a lot of cars on Route 60, and that’s my business.”
The new store was built on a vacant 1.6-acre site, acquired last year by an LLC tied to Bates for $650,000. Now, it sits between a Bojangles and Dollar Tree near the Powhatan-Chesterfield line, and is close to a Whistle Express Car Wash that opened in 2023. Bates estimated the all-in cost to open the store to be $4.5 million.
