Wreck-it Randy

MOSLOSKI FIXES CARS BY DAY, CRASHES THEM ON WEEKEND

Given Mapleton’s status as a bedroom community for so many folks that travel back and forth to Mankato, the need for a quality auto mechanic is vital in this day and age. While the corporate business model is to make most cities clones of each other with franchises, in Mapleton, local garages are still chugging along. One of these locally owned small businesses is Moz’s Midtown Auto. As the name suggests, the garage is located in the heart of Mapleton, a block north of downtown. In 2019, Randy Mosloski purchased Midtown Auto from Dean Green and Dennis Wilds after having worked for them as a mechanic for several years, and like any car engine, Mosloski fine tuned and adjusted his business to keep it running for the foreseeable future.

Prior to becoming a business owner, Mosloski cut his teeth working with his father. “My dad was an over the road trucker, and he had a couple trucks at home, so I spent time in the shop. You know, soon as I can hold a wrench.” By the time he was a teenager, he was already finding ways to make money with his automotive skills. His classroom involved “actually learning a lot of used cars, fixing them up and turning around and selling them. I'm an entrepreneur. Okay, that goes all the way through high school. I’d find a cheap car, and give it a tune up, clean up, and turn around and make a buck or two.” As an adult, he continued to improve his mechanical skills but he also learned important lessons working in various tire shops, including with Rex McBeth in Mankato. Time is a great teacher, which Mosloski can attest. “You need a lot of hands on to figure a lot of different things out–to know what wrenches, especially all the torques and Allens and all the different stuff there. But it's evolved quite greatly compared to the hands on mechanical to a lot of electrical nowadays, so you got to have a very strong electrical background along with the mechanical to understand it.”

 Working at Midtown Auto prior to owning it provided him with an even deeper understanding of mechanics. He credits Green and Wilds for taking his knowledge to another level. “I always say a lot of it would have been Dean and Denny here would have been a lot, a lot of the stuff that I had, newer stuff that I hadn't been around. Because I grew up around carburetors in that era, so the newer stuff you had to learn it hands on.” Despite all the mentoring on the mechanical side, running a business was something he had to quickly figure out on his own. 

A Family Business

“Well, originally I thought we were slow enough to where I could try to manage it myself, and quickly found out, within a week, that that was not possible. So that was a big eye opener.” Mosloski quickly hired more help and also recruited his son Taylor to join the team. For Taylor, a 2011 graduate of Maple River High School, he’d spent his childhood watching his father participate in demolition derbies, so he had a firm understanding of what he was getting into. “So hanging out with dad, working on race cars, obviously, got me started, to give me a basic knowledge.” Taylor also credits his father as being one of his great teachers.  “Dad taught me by just rolling up my sleeves.” He also learned the necessary skill of problem solving through jobs with various other businesses. Having a father as a boss didn’t really bother him. “It's kind of the same thing. Been that way my whole life.” Yet the relationship between Randy and Taylor evolved in recent years with the business. With Randy doing more and more managerial duties, Taylor began to specialize his skills. Randy recognized the most dramatic way mechanics had changed in his career. “So electronics, heavy, heavy electronics and software stuff. And that's where Taylor's a little more savvy with the software, where he's been picking up a lot of it.” Taylor also agrees that staying ahead of the technology is a constant consideration as a mechanic. “Some of it has been checking videos. We do have a program here, I called Identifix that helps, because with every single make and model, everything's different, and never one code is a different code for over here, and then, and then different wiring schematics and knowing all the systems that talk to each other. So there's a program that kind of pulls all that up and then gives you a kind of a rough, you know idea how to go but mostly, just absorbing information that dad's taught me over the years. It wasn't an overnight process. I'm still learning things every single day, especially with mechanics and how electrical things are getting nowadays.” And the vehicle that gives Taylor the greatest headache? “Any Audi's, just Audi in general, Volkswagen can get up there, but Audi just seems to be a particular sore spot.”

To keep up with demand, Taylor was one of several mechanics hired since 2019, and to keep up with it all, Randy also brought in his wife Tami to help with the accounting. Just like Taylor and Randy, Tami also had to quickly figure out her role in learning all the systems and expectations of a small business. “I'm the secretary. I do Randy's books. If they need something, I run and get it.  I'm usually here for about an hour to two hours.” The business went from 0 to 60 quickly, requiring her to do the books and payroll for four mechanics. It also meant two of her co-workers were also family members. “I don't have a problem working with Randy. We just got back from our vacation. Well, one of his supply guys is the one who sent us on this vacation, and there was a husband and wife there, and she's like, ‘You do his books?’ And I go, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘me and my wife cannot work together.’ And I'm like, ‘I don't have problem with it.’” While her office sign reads: Wife, Mom, Boss, she laughingly insists, “but I am not the boss. People come and think, ‘you're the boss.’ No, I am not the boss.”

And what does “the boss” think about working with family members? “Depends on the day,” he jokes. “Yeah, I guess with Tami working here, she's only here three hours a day or so in the morning.She drives school bus in the morning first, and then comes in here and keeps up with the books, but she only needs a couple hours to do that, okay? And then she's off about her day for the most part there. As with, any father son, you're gonna bang heads a lot but we work through it pretty easily.”

Wreck it, Randy

In his new role of business owner rather than full time mechanic, Mosloski now spends about 80% of his day up front rather than in the garage “just trying to keep up with ordering parts and making estimates and dealing with customers.” While he’s still capable of lending a hand, he finds it “more frustrating when I get into a job and then I get pulled away to answer the phone.”  Getting out all those frustrations, however, is something that should be quite familiar for him. Instead of kicking up his feet on the recliner, Mosloski continued another family tradition: demolition derby. 

“Well, I helped my dad when he had stuff, yep. So I helped build cars at a young age because I couldn't drive then. But then when I was 15, I finally drove my first and then that just kind of snowballed from there.” For Randy, the sport has certainly evolved through the years from doing single stuff locally to now traveling all over the nation. With the popularity of the sport also came complexity, which requires considerable teamwork.  “Actually, I got some local guys on my Kansas team, and that would be Jeremiah Adams, Travis Schultz, and Lino Cummins.” Many of the shows that Team Mosloski attends are televised and shown on pay-per-view, turning him into a known name outside of Mapleton. “We have to basically take our whole shop down to Kansas. We're in the middle of a parking lot. Motors, we've done transmissions, and you need a lot of manpower to do that, so you're kind of all in a group.”

While fixing cars one day and wrecking cars the next is akin to a doctor joining a weekend fight club, for Mosloski, it takes the art of problem solving to a whole other level. “You don't know what you’ll break, but then you hope you can fix it, or you brought the right stuff with you to be able to make-shift-it back together. You don't know what you're gonna break, and you have to find out what you broke. You got to figure it out and then get the means to put it back together and get back out there for another round.”

While most people would turn the steering wheel to avoid a wreck, Mosloski has a reason for why he enjoys his sport. “The adrenaline rush.  You just turn into a junkie. The adrenaline rush is a lot of it. It's kind of like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. Then also the recognition that you see. With the other shows that I go to, there's a lot of national recognition.”

Challenges for the Future

Mosloski credits a lot of the early connections he made working in the area with getting the business off to a good start. “I had a lot of different connections in Mankato, and a lot of people, even now, are coming out of Mankato for the cheaper, cheaper rates and quality service.”  He also recognizes that reputation matters in both demolition derby as well as in a small town. “In a small town, you don't have the foot traffic coming through the door, so you do have to take a little extra care on how you handle the customers, because one bad review will go halfway through the town really fast. So that is probably the biggest. And, you know, most small communities, they like to talk ‘Coffee Shop Talk.’  So it's challenging that way, but it kind of runs in a circle to it. It might hurt you for a week or two, and then come back next month. It's hard to get the service that we provide anywhere in Kato or whatever. You know, for a lot of people coming out of there say that”

Tami also credits the support of the community. “This is the start of our seventh year here. I want to thank everybody in this town for being as supportive as they have all been, because without them, we would not have stayed open. If it wasn't for the town and the surrounding towns. Local support is big.”

From making small investments like new carpet to larger investments like a new hoist to handle bigger vehicles, Moz’s Midtown Auto  is ready for whatever comes through the door, whether Chrysler, GM, Mitsubishi, or even an Audi.  For the time being, Randy will stay ahead of the game through a digital training course or simply by smashing Humpty Dumpty in order to learn how to put him back together again. “I'm gonna stick with it, and eventually, I suppose Taylor will probably take over here. But, we've still got a few years to go.”

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