The Absolute Right Time To Go, but the Business Goes On

Jim Guinn walked through the front door of Absolute Auto at 6:45 every weekday morning. His longtime mechanics — Craig McKean and Joseph “Jay” Geier — would already be under a hood. Just as Guinn put down his briefcase and put on his glasses, the phones start ringing.

Customers ask when their cars will be done. Vendors call about parts. Repair schedules shift. Someone wants to know why a warning light is on. Someone else wants to know if they really need new brakes.

For nearly 20 years — and a lifetime before that in machine shops, auto parts, and repair bays — Guinn has lived that routine.

But somewhere along the way, that routine started to feel more like repetition.

“I used to hear people talk about burnout and I didn’t really understand what that meant,” he said. “Now I do.”

Guinn recently sold Absolute Auto and handed over the keys June 1, ending a two-decade run at one of the KP’s most recognizable businesses. For him, selling the shop wasn’t really about money or even age. It was about listening to a feeling, he said, that became impossible to ignore.

Long before that blue awning meant anything to drivers on the Key Peninsula Highway — signaling the first business heading into Key Center, and the last one heading out — Guinn remembers making the same drive himself, wondering if buying a repair shop in the middle of nowhere even made sense.

Born and raised in Seattle, Guinn grew up in the automotive industry. His father spent his life in the business, and Guinn followed the same path, eventually operating a machine shop with him before buying him out and later selling it.

When Guinn and his family moved to the Key Peninsula seeking a quieter place to raise their daughter, he knew he wanted to own another shop. The one that eventually became his wasn’t even for sale.

“I remember driving out here the first time thinking, ‘How can there be an auto shop out here? I don’t get it,’ ” Guinn said.

A broker made cold calls and connected him with the business. Guinn bought it in November 2006 and soon launched a contest to rename the shop. The winner — Absolute Auto — wasn’t chosen by accident. Back then, before Google searches and Yelp reviews, being listed early in the Yellow Pages mattered.

Guinn admits that over the years, he developed an uneasy relationship with parts of the automotive industry.

“My biggest thing was that I don’t like the automotive industry,” Guinn said. “It’s crooked. It’s full of deceit.”

His goal from the beginning was simple: run the shop the way he was raised.

“My dad always told me the world can take a lot of things away from you, but the one thing it can’t take is your integrity,” Guinn said. “You have to give that away.”

That became the operating philosophy of everything that followed.

Instead of upselling customers, Guinn said he built trust one person at a time. A customer might come in asking for a tune-up and leave surprised after being told they didn’t need one. He said customers often arrive with long lists of suggested repairs from larger shops and dealerships. Some repairs could wait, and some didn’t need to happen at all.

“If it isn’t broken, we don’t fix it,” he said.

Guinn wanted to be the person a customer thought of when telling a friend: “I’ve got a guy.”

That culture extended well beyond the service counter in ways most customers never knew about.

At the end of some months, Guinn would think back on customers he knew were facing hardships and would quietly ask them to bring their vehicles back in. Then he’d fix them for free. He didn’t even tell his staff.

“I never did it because I wanted somebody to say, ‘Good job,’ ” he said. “I just wanted to help.”

Over time, Guinn said, customers found their own ways to say thank you.

“This area is like an old country town,” he said. “Everybody taking care of everybody.”

His approach to running the shop has its own quiet logic in other ways, too. Guinn’s oversized paper appointment calendar and handwritten work orders seem out of place in a digital world, but he prefers pencils and paper over a screen between him and his customers.

The shop’s unconventional hours — opening at 6 a.m. and closing at 2:30 p.m. — started after Guinn grew tired of watching his employees work in sweltering summer temperatures inside the metal building. Closing early gave them extra daylight hours at home. In winter, they’d still have some daylight when they finished.

The business had been for sale for about a year before Guinn found the right buyer, and he turned down others to get there.

“I took less money from the right person than I would have taken from the wrong person,” he said.

For someone who spent years building a reputation one customer at a time, protecting what came next mattered. The Absolute Auto name will stay. So will McKean and Geier, a continuity Guinn said mattered as he searched for the right buyer. That buyer turned out to be fellow KP resident Garrison Rose, owner of Wild Rose Motorworks and a Mercedes-Benz Master Certified technician with more than 15 years of experience. Guinn said whatever else stays or changes is now up to Rose. Guinn knows he has no control over that and has come to terms with it.

“I’m just tired. I used to love cars, and now I can’t look at one anymore,” Guinn said. “Am I happy to go? No. Am I sad to go? No. But I’m ready to go.”