Oficinas Gerardo Bastos: The Largest Repair Shop in Brazil

The largest repair shop in Brazil started with someone who walked in without a place.

Bernardo joined the Gerardo Bastos group in 1999. His own family's company, three stores, a large-scale tire shop that handled between 3,000 and 4,000 cars a month. He started by managing the smallest branch. When he moved to the headquarters, he found that no one had thought of a position for him. So he started from the bottom: warehouse, delivery counter, sales, the service floor, which back then was only tires, alignment, and balancing.

It was from the service floor that he saw the problem no one treated as a problem. More than three out of every ten cars came in and left without any service performed, not for lack of customers, but because they had a mechanical defect the store did not fix. The customer asked for speed because he still had to stop at the gas station to change the oil. The repair shop did not exist. The revenue drove away along with the car.

Bernardo took a project to the owner at the time, his grandfather: build a repair shop inside the store. The grandfather did not believe in the potential. He authorized it anyway. It was the end of 2002.

The operation began in 2003, and the read was right: services took off. To know what could and what needed to be done to a car, Bernardo went to learn mechanics. He became a mechanic. And understanding the car from the inside, he saw there was still a lot of money on the table. With the wheel off, came the brakes, the first add-on. Then the shock absorbers. Then it never stopped, until it reached what he himself named back then: serving a car from bumper to bumper.

In 2007 the grandfather began building the fourth unit: 10,000 square meters of service area, designed from scratch as a repair shop, no longer as a tire shop. That added another 2,500 cars a month. The group reached 8,000. The old stores went through their first retrofit. They stopped being tire shops and became repair shops.

And then the structure began to break. Logistics, inventory, service, the customer journey, machinery: everything that had been enough stopped supporting the volume. Even after years of improvement, growth had outrun the structure.

Bernardo went back to the drawing board. From zero.

He reviewed every process. He created a unified purchasing unit that delivered the part in an hour and a half, from approval to delivery. He set up an inventory control owned by the area, with its own KPIs now that purchasing was centralized, and a stock manager dedicated solely to resolving breakdowns. He rebuilt the entire service flow and cut the customer journey from 12 touchpoints to 7, bringing down the friction in communication. And he turned the supplier into a partner: he began studying Bosch's equipment before it became a project, so it would be born efficient for the demand only that operation had.

Because the demand was different. An ordinary repair shop in Brazil handles, on the high end, 200 cars a month. That one handled more than 10 times that. What for any store was an occasional problem, for that operation was a daily problem, and the response to those problems became standard. Models created there still run across the country today, without anyone realizing where they came from.

In 2011 came the biggest challenge. A store of 40,000 square meters, 15,000 of built area alone, not counting the second floor and the basement. All of it service. And a new question: how do you fill so much space?

Back to the drawing board.

The answer was to become a complete point: car, truck, tire retreading, distribution. ZF dealership, Bosch Steering dealership, Agrale authorized station, Vipal retreader, all on the same site. Forty cars and 30 trucks served at the same time. And with each brand, one more requirement: a high-performance lab, specialization taken to the limit, until they became the only ZF dealership approved to do all of the brand's transmissions in the Northeast, receiving work from the entire region.

And then the mark that was a dream: 10,000 cars served in a single month.

It was also from this period that the turn came which would give rise to the Bosch Car Center, the Bosch Technical Training Center, and the joint venture with Bosch Brazil and Mundial. But that is another story.

In 2015 the problem changed in nature. The country seized up. Unstable politics, saturated road networks, too many cars for too little street. The cars simply stopped arriving at the stores. Traffic became a barrier.

Once again, the drawing board.

The Concept Stores project was born: bring the store to where the customer was, instead of waiting for him to cross the city. The decision was to leave the main axis and go to the more distant neighborhoods, which forced a change of audience and, with it, everything else. The store rethought to be truly lean: from almost 30 people in a 1,200-square-meter store to fewer than 10 in a 900-square-meter one. A more dynamic, faster layout, the same services. A change of SKUs to keep quality and lower the price, after reading what kind of product fit that specific market.

And the construction: 30 days planned, 24 hours a day, each shift a different type of work so that one would not block the other. They delivered in 27. Soft opening. The first neighborhood store, outside the city core, opened operating at full capacity. Another came. And all the stores went through a retrofit to accommodate the new format.

In 2016 the challenge flipped again: instead of bringing the store close to the customer, go to where he already was. The mall. And not just any mall, the city's luxury mall. But that story, Via Mall, is also another one.

Seventeen years earlier, all of that was a tire shop. And at some point along that road, in a warehouse that did not have a spot for him, Bernardo started over from zero: warehouse, counter, service floor. The operation grew, broke, and went back to the drawing board as many times as it needed. The rest, the 10,000 cars, the dealerships, the models that run across the country, was a consequence.