Six years ago, Desiree Hill spent her days diagnosing patients. Now, she diagnoses cars.
As an oncology nurse at Northside Hospital Duluth, in Duluth, Georgia, Hill made around $40,000 per year. “I wasn’t happy in my career at that time. I wasn’t happy in my personal life,” says Hill, 39. “It was three hours of commuting in Atlanta traffic every day. And [as a single mom at the time] I never saw my children. So it really was taking a toll.”
Today, Hill is the owner of Crown’s Corner Mechanic — an auto repair shop in Conyers, Georgia, just a 15-minute drive from her home in Covington. Her company brought in nearly $440,000 in net revenue last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
This year, Crown’s Corner Mechanic has brought in about $70,000 in monthly revenue — roughly double last year’s monthly average — and is profitable, says Hill.
Hill started fixing cars in 2019 with no prior mechanic or entrepreneurship experience, teaching herself through YouTube videos and involving her family. Her 10-year-old daughter recently built a motor, and her son is a mechanic in the U.S. Army.
“We learned together,” says Hill, adding, “I not only have a family at home, I have a family here [with my employees] and I have a family with my customers.”
a 2023 report from auto parts supplier PartsTech. Hill’s shop has eight bays, and the average gross revenue per bay for auto shops in the U.S. is $203,000, the report says.
She hopes to soon switch from renting to owning a space, she says, but she’d need about $4 million to buy her current building — which has her exploring mortgage loan options. Owning would help her put more money back into both the business and her five workers’ pockets, she adds.
In the meantime, she plans to keep growing her clientele through social media — if TikTok disappeared overnight, it’d be “devastating to my business,” she says — and one day get a mechanical engineering degree, preferably through a flexible, online program.
“We don’t stop,” says Hill, adding: “If you don’t know about us yet, you’re going to know about us real soon.”
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