Lamb’s Tire & Automotive, a subsidiary of Lamb Ventures L.P., has opened an eighth location in Austin, Texas, and 15th overall in the metro area.
The 10-bay store — a 7,500-sq.-ft. outlet on South Lamar Boulevard in south Austin — was a former Pit Stop Lube & Tune location, according to Lamb’s President and CEO Jim Ramsey. It had been closed for several years when his company decided to buy the location.
“My operations director and I were down in that area looking at a shop that a guy was wanting to sell, and it didn’t really fit our criteria,” Ramsey said. “We just walked down the street a little bit, and we just happened on it.”
Lamb’s held a grand opening event July 18 for the location.
Lamb’s remodeled the entire building and built a tire storage area equipped to hold about 600 units. The dealership did not disclose its investment in acquiring and remodeling the store.
“We had to pretty much start from scratch,” Ramsey said. “We put all new electrical in the building. We basically took the front showroom structure back down to metal and rebuilt it all.”
The new store is located less than two miles from Lamb’s closest location at 290 West in Austin, but Ramsey said the freeways bordering that store have provided good separation.
“The [new] store started out very, very well — better than we had anticipated it would — and our closest location continues to do well,” he said. “It didn’t really impact it.”
The Austin-based dealership, founded by John Lamb in 1987, has gone through a few ownership changes in the last decade. Lamb retired in 2008, selling his then-17-store business to an employee, Ron Meredith.
According to Ramsey, Meredith soon partnered with Houston, Texas-based Main Street Capital Corp. Under his management, the business closed three locations.
Meredith sold his share of the business to Main Street Capital in 2012, and the investment firm brought on Ramsey — who had several years of experience in the retail automotive industry — as a minority owner.
This article originally appeared on Tire Business.
