Automotive Service Technology, 2002
Austin Lutz was not your classic gearhead. “I didn’t know I wanted to work on cars at all,” he would later say, looking back on his teenage years. “I didn’t grow up tearing cars apart or anything like that.” Even when he landed his first job at the age of fifteen at an Amoco gas station in Hopkins, he worked in the front of the store as a cashier rather than in the garage, where grease tended to get under fingernails. Then, one day a manager asked if he wanted to become an oil changer. Lutz asked if the job paid better than what he was earning at the cash register. The manager told him it paid a dollar an hour more. “I said, ‘All right!’” Lutz recalled. “‘Sign me up!’”
Thus started Austin Lutz’s career in the field of what he called “turning wrenches.”
Lutz’s garage work at the Amoco station allowed him to gain valuable car repair skills, but he knew he would need more training if he was going to make progress on what looked to be a viable career path. While still a student at Hopkins High School, he took several automotive courses at Hennepin Technical College. Then, after a brief postsecondary enrollment at Penn State University (“I did not like it at all”), he returned home and asked the owner of another Hopkins auto shop for career advice. “What he told me,” Lutz later recalled, “was if I was serious about automotive, I had to go to Dunwoody.”
Lutz enrolled in Dunwoody’s Automotive Service Technology program in 2000, attending classes during the day while working night shifts at a Goodyear station in Champlin. But when he graduated two years later, he still wasn’t completely sure he wanted to spend the rest of his life turning wrenches. “I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it,” he later said of the work. “I just knew I didn’t want to be in the back of the shop, full-time, forever.” He continued on as a student, taking general education courses at Normandale Community College, and earning a four-year degree in agricultural and food business management at the University of Minnesota. But after working for less than a year in the agricultural sector, he realized it wasn’t the right fit for him.
In 2007, Lutz started teaching classes as an adjunct automotive instructor at Dunwoody. For nearly a decade, he helped students much like he had been train to make careers for themselves as automotive technicians. But eventually, he started thinking about opening his own shop. “I had a full toolbox at my house, and I was fixing cars on the side,” he said. “I enjoyed it. So, I decided to start looking for an auto shop to buy or a space to lease.” In 2015, he took over the lease of a longtime mechanic in Minnetonka, not far from his old Hopkins stomping grounds. He called his new shop BAM! Automotive.
Unlike many first-time auto shop owners, Lutz decided not to specialize. BAM! would service almost any make and model, just as long as it wasn’t too new or too old. “I felt there wasn’t really a good general automotive company out there,” he explained. “So, I thought fixing everything would be my niche.” His first few years in business featured “a whole lot of learning and a whole lot of doing it wrong,” but, with the help of a business coach, he eventually found his footing. By 2022, BAM! was doing so well that he felt confident enough to open a second location in St. Louis Park.
It had taken Lutz about fifteen years from the day he first started turning wrenches to the day he opened BAM!, but by the time he finally did, he felt he was ready. And he gave Dunwoody a lot of credit for that. “Someone needs to drive home the basic concepts of how to think through problems,” he said. “And that’s something that Dunwoody does fantastically well.”