![]() ![]() The location is in a beautiful, natural setting with spring fed ponds and mature trees and the restaurant’s interior mirrors the peaceful feeling outside. My girlfriends and I ate at the restaurant several times during our stay. Some of them have become lifelong friends – they’ve been my sounding board when I have issues and I’ve been their sounding board, too.This restaurant is part of the Sunrise Springs Resort and Spa, but is open to the public. “I’ve got customers who come up and give me a hug. We’ve got customers who’ll bring us lunch and sit down and eat lunch with us,” he says. “I’ve got customers who bring us donuts, even though there’s a donut shop right next door to us. The analogy isn’t just hypothetical – Goldberg says he regularly treats his customers to dinner in a local restaurant. This is a small enough town where I see people I know everywhere, and I treat my customers as if I ran into them at a restaurant I could sit and have a meal with them and not feel uncomfortable.” “Most of the time, I donate to the local schools, for their soccer, baseball and football teams. Goldberg believes a better use of his marketing dollars are at the local level. Obviously, I have a website and a Facebook page, but I’m not too comfortable posting on social media.” Keeping his shop’s reputation high requires daily commitment to many factors, but Goldberg says his advertising program is not one of them. So, we’re on track to being back to where we were pre-COVID.” Right now we’re on track to beat last year, and last year we were down probably about 8 or 9 percent. We’re not all the way back – I don’t know if it’s COVID-related or if people are still working from home, so they’re not driving their cars – but we’re not down that much. April 2020 was a pretty bad month, but by July we were back close to where we were before. That quickly morphed back into pretty normal shop operations. “At the beginning, we decided, we’ll do breakdowns and where people can’t get to where they’re going. Goldberg says the past year and a half has been challenging for the shop because of Covid restrictions, but after a brief shutdown at the beginning of the pandemic, Pete’s Auto Care started going to the customers, not waiting for them to come to the shop. And then, sometimes in the summer, we’ll periodically close on a Friday so we can have a three-day weekend.” They get home, they get to enjoy some time before it gets too dark. It’s nice to start the weekend, even if it’s just an hour on Friday,” he says. “We’re booked out usually about a week and a half, so even that little bit of time gives my guys a break. The early close on Friday is good for Goldberg and his team, he says. The shop operates Monday – Thursday from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM and on Friday from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM. “It was empty for years, and I decided to go talk to the landlord and rented it in Feburary of 2003.” The shop that I had worked for in college had closed down,” Goldberg says. Unfortunately, my shop was not in the nicest neighborhood, so we kept getting robbed. “We had one other guy helping and we muddled along for about three or four years, getting busier and busier. One of the things the Goldbergs agreed on back then was the need for a new facility. ![]() I’ve come to find out that he was mostly right all the time.” I’d always bounce ideas off of him and he’d say ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ And I’d take his advice most of the time, but sometimes as a 25 year old, I didn’t. “In addition to helping with customer service, he served as my business consultant. Though his grandfather had a garage, Goldberg’s father did not have shop experience. Goldberg and his father would go to lunch every Tuesday and talk about the shop. “My dad helped out answering the phones for me while I got everything rolling,” Goldberg recalls. ![]() He took a night class to get that final credit while he started building his shop’s reputation. Come to find out, I was one credit short,” Goldberg says. “I thought I had all my credits to graduate, so in July of 1998 I got a loan and opened up a three-bay shop near downtown Albuquerque. The decision to open his shop was simple – the process of doing so, not so much. ![]()
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