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Longtime West St. Paul automotive shop Cherokee Service has sold to local shop Turbo Tim’s Anything Automotive. With existing locations in Northeast Minneapolis and St. Paul’s Midway, Turbo Tim’s is now branching out to the Forty Acres area of West St. Paul.
Why it matters: The trend of locally owned auto repair shops in West St. Paul continues, but Turbo Tim’s brings a new level of community involved and, well, fun.
A Fun Auto Repair Shop?
Turbo Tim’s co-owners Tim Suggs and Rachel Grewell are bringing the fun:
- Cats: Shop cats is kind of their thing. Between the two locations, they have 11 cats. “If a technician is all stressed out because that bolt is rusted out and not moving, just pet a cat and life can be better,” said Suggs. They’re in the process of making the new shop cat-friendly, but then they will bring shop cats to West St. Paul.
- Car crushing: They’re known for Crush-a-Whirl, a car-crushing companion to the Northeast Minneapolis Art-a-Whirl event. “I just decided to do some of my own performance art,” Suggs said. Here’s some play-by-play of the 2022 event. “People love it,” Grewell said. “The kids, the kids love it.”
- Community: They’re big on community engagement, putting on free puppet shows and automotive repair workshops for women. They’ve even hosted birthday parties. They regularly partner with Articulture and donate a car to be painted, appear in the art car parade, and then come back to the shop to serve as a loaner car for customers.
Why all the crazyness? “One of our five core values is fun,” said Suggs. “So we got to make sure everything’s fun, otherwise you don’t want to do it.”
- Why not: “Tim’s a big thinker, he thinks big, and we have an ‘anything seems possible’ kind of attitude,” said Grewell. “We’re so grateful. We have so much privilege and resource that it’s like why not? Why not have fun and share and participate?”
- Complimentary: The two met while Grewell was in graduate school studying community engagement and Suggs was her mechanic. When they began dating, she started helping out around the shop with marketing and her degree complimented what Tim was doing.
- Energy: “I just knew that there was a lot of energy and motion and excitement going on with the business and that I could include the principles of community engagement in that work in a really practical, tangible way,” Grewell said.
Local connection: One of Suggs’ first jobs was working at a Pep Boys on Robert Street.
Neighborhood feel: Suggs and Grewell are used to the small-town feel of West St. Paul. “We’re used to that type of neighborhood,” Grewell said. “It feels familiar for us.”
- Cherokee Service joins Pace’s Tire and Service Center as another West St. Paul auto shop that sold to a locally owned shop.
- Turbo Tim’s also becomes another new business investing in the Forty Acres neighborhood recently, joining The North 40 Tavern and Other Skies Weird Fiction. Lehner Law Office also reinvested in their building with the help of a city grant.
Now hiring: Turbo Tim’s is hiring, and they love to hire local. “It’s always good to hire local people,” said Suggs. “It makes them want to stay at their job and makes their job even awesomer when they can just walk to work.”
Goodbye to Cherokee Service
John Gouette, the former owner of Cherokee Service, sold the shop so he could retire.
“They seem to have been great for the community,” Grewell said. “It’s so fascinating to be there for a couple days and the number of people that stopped by—it’s just a very close-knit community and a lot of people have been going there for decades.”
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(Photos courtesy of Turbo Tim’s.)
