Young Automotive
Some shops fix cars. Young Automotive says it changes lives by fixing them — and now that belief lives in a playbook the whole team can execute against.
Since 1969, Young Automotive has run out of the same location on a tourist peninsula northeast of Green Bay, Wisconsin — the self-styled "Cape Cod of the Midwest," where the population triples every summer and a season can bring a couple million visitors. Founder Phil Young built the shop on one simple idea: take care of the person with the broken car. His son Fred Young bought the business in 2002, and in the years since has doubled its revenue, doubled its footprint, and grown it to 11 service bays — without losing the thread his dad started.
"The mission statement of Young Automotive is Changing Lives by Fixing Cars. That's really what my belief is."
For Fred, the hard part was never fixing cars. It was making sure a growing team could carry that mission — the culture, the standards, the way a customer is treated from the first phone call to the last handshake — consistently, and without him standing in the middle of every step.
Why Fred brought in Trainual
Fred first saw Trainual visiting a friend's shop. Adam Preusser, and his partner Jason Kath, operate multiple auto repair shops around St. Cloud, Minnesota — 80 to 90 team members across the business, plus a corporate office and a call center.
"I said, 'How do you manage all of this?' And he said, 'Trainual.'"
That got the wheels turning. Two things were nagging at Fred: his employee handbook needed updating — it had printed addendums stapled on — and he wanted one source of truth his team could always rely on.
"I love the idea of having it digital. When there's a change — boom, it's done. The ability to have my team access a live, current document of everything in one place — that's what drove me."
The skeptic's hesitation
Fred is the first to admit he has a weakness for the next big thing.
"My kryptonite is shiny new stuff. I had to ask myself — is this just another new shiny software?"
He also knew his own habit of layering processes on the team until it became a constraint instead of a help — something he's had to consciously pull back on. What ultimately won him over wasn't a feature list. It was watching his people actually reach for it.
"I see Trainual — because the team's embracing it in particular — as a good decision that'll give them the ability to be more efficient."
Getting it built: December 2025
Young Automotive went live with Trainual in December 2025. The fastest wins came from moving what already existed into the platform — but Fred was deliberate about how.
"We opted to set the documents up as editable instead of just uploading the PDF version. If we're only going to have a PDF, it's no different than a printed document."
He also liked that the implementation came with a structure of its own.
"Implementation gave us measurable timelines to have stuff done. And it let me hold my team accountable — they were responsible for the setup and for helping me approve what went in."
That shared ownership solved a very human problem, too. As Fred puts it, "I'm not a great proofreader. I can read something four times, and then four people will spot four things I didn't." Having managers build and review meant better content than he'd have produced alone — including a parental leave policy his manager structured his own way.
"It's structured a little differently than I would have, but it works well. He found it easy, so I'm not going to mess with it."
Adam had set expectations honestly, and Fred agrees they were right:
He told Fred, 'It'll take you a minute to set up. It'll take a year before you feel like you've got everything in place the way you want it.’
The signature move: a key-to-key playbook
If there's one thing that captures how Young Automotive uses Trainual, it's their "key-to-key" playbook — the documented flow of a customer's entire experience, from the moment they call to the moment they get their keys back.
"It describes the flow from the first phone call in until you hand the customer their key back — who's responsible for that key, and what tasks need to be done before it's handed off to the next person. To reduce any sloppy passes."
That phrase — no sloppy passes — is the whole philosophy in miniature. Many of Young's technicians came from shops with little structure and plenty of chaos, and Fred's goal has always been the opposite.
"My vision is to do whatever possible to remove as much chaos and friction in the business."
At Young Automotive, the structure is the culture. And now it's written down where everyone can see it.
The team took to it — fast
Fred braced for resistance. In a shop full of technicians, he says, you've got natural "problem finders" alongside the "solutionists." The pushback never really came.
"I'm going to say it — the team loves Trainual."
The proof is in the platform: Young Automotive already shows 100% training completion across the team. Rolling out Google Workspace around the same time reinforced the shift, and the two tools now play off each other.
What a smooth onboarding looks like
Young has only made one hire since going live — a front-counter assistant named Trent, training toward a service advisor role. But that single onboarding showed Fred exactly what he'd been missing. Without Trainual, it would have meant far more one-on-one time from Trent's manager. Instead, Trent got up to speed in his first few weeks and, more tellingly, felt the culture right away.
"Our new hire specifically called out the welcome video and the mission video — he liked having those. It sets the stage better than having somebody sit down and read the book page by page."
Fred knows the old way intimately because he used to be the old way.
"There was a time I would read the handbook to them, line by line, to reinforce everything. It was well received — but it wasn't a good use of my time. That got old."
There's a second benefit that shows up once a new hire is on their own: the ability to quietly look something up instead of asking again. New employees are absorbing an overwhelming amount in week one — and a self-serve reference means they don't have to choose between getting it right and feeling foolish for asking twice.
Buying back the owner's time
Fred hasn't turned a wrench since around 2004. That's by design.
"I looked at running the business as a business, not as an auto technician."
He describes his role today less as an operator and more as an investor — he's with the team about four hours a week on regular check-ins, and he and his wife Shawna also run a cafe and short-term rentals. The throughline across all of it is the same:
"We try to put the tools in place to buy back our time."
Trainual is one of those tools: a way to make the mission and the method repeatable, so the business doesn't depend on Fred being in the room.
Results so far
Young Automotive is early in its Trainual journey — live since December 2025 — but the foundation is already paying off:
- A live, digital handbook that updates instantly, replacing printed pages and stapled addendums
- 100% training completion across the team
- A documented key-to-key playbook that standardizes the customer experience end to end
- A smoother onboarding for the newest hire, with less one-on-one manager time
- One trusted source of truth the team reaches for
- Mission and culture — the welcome and mission videos — built into day one for every hire
What Fred tells shops on the fence
As a coach for Shop Fix Academy, Fred advises more than 28 other shops — so he gets asked about tools constantly. His answer is refreshingly unsentimental:
"Break down the cost. If you're on the fence with a four-person team, don't do it. If you're on the fence and you have ten or more people, seriously take a look. The benefit only grows as you add people and complexity."
And a warning that applies to any system: it only works if you work it.
"Trainual is like a gym membership. If you pay for Gold's Gym and don't go, you ain't gonna get any stronger."
What's next for Young Automotive
Fred's list is already growing — the sign of a tool that's sticking. Next up: recording Loom videos so repetitive explanations get captured once and reused forever, digitizing the last few paper onboarding steps, and building a rhythm around performance reviews inside Trainual as new operations and performance features roll out.
"Do it once, and it's there for everybody. That's the ultimate goal."
TL;DR
Young Automotive — a second-generation shop built on the mission of "Changing Lives by Fixing Cars" — brought in Trainual in December 2025 to turn a stapled-together paper handbook into one living source of truth. In a matter of months, they've hit 100% team completion, documented a key-to-key playbook that keeps the whole customer experience consistent, and given every new hire the culture and structure on day one. For owner Fred Young, it's one more tool to buy back his time — and to make sure a 1969 legacy keeps running the way his family always intended.
👉 Want to turn your team's know-how into a playbook they'll actually use? See how Trainual works.
