At 6 p.m. on a Saturday, Victory Toyota closed the doors of its dealership. By Monday morning, the sales floor, offices, parts inventory and essential tools had reappeared ten miles away. New lifts stood ready. Air, oil and water ran where they should. The cars could be serviced, and the business reopened after a 36-hour move. This is the sort of trick AME Automotive sells: not magic, exactly, but the disappearance of excuses.
The Michigan company works in the half of the auto business nobody puts in a television commercial. Behind the polished showroom sit the service bays, alignment machines, compressed-air lines, fluid reels, exhaust extractors, toolboxes and parts racks. If the showroom is theater, fixed operations is the kitchen. One is photographed. The other has to work at 7:30 on Monday morning.
Founded in 2001 by David Easterbrook, originally as AME Vertical, the company designs those spaces, specifies the equipment, buys it, installs it and, when needed, moves the old operation into the new building. AME says it has completed more than 8,000 service bays nationwide. Its customers include dealer groups, manufacturers, architects and general contractors. Penske Automotive Group, Tesla and Collection Automotive Group appear among its named relationships; project pages document work for Toyota, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The first thing to fail is coordination
A dealership project can look simple on a floor plan and still become a small administrative riot. The lift vendor needs power and slab details. Fluid distribution has to meet the workbenches in the right bays. Parts shelving must match inventory, ceiling height and walking patterns. Freight equipment belongs in the architect's drawings early, not after a doorway is poured six inches too narrow. Then installers, movers and the general contractor must share a schedule while the dealer keeps earning service revenue.
That handoff is where projects crack first. Each specialist can deliver its piece and the whole room can still fail. AME's answer is deliberately blunt: reduce the number of hands the customer must manage. This is also why its work begins with the operation rather than a vendor catalog. A beautiful lift in the wrong bay remains an expensive obstacle. A shelf that adds steps to every parts pick quietly taxes the shop all day. At Porsche Beachwood, General Manager George McClarey said the relocation would normally have required five subcontractors. AME handled the design, equipment, parts-room installation, car and freight lifts, detail bays, photo booth and even the office move.
“Typically, we would have used five different sub-contractors, but AME handled everything.”George McClarey / General Manager, Porsche Beachwood
The 62,000-square-foot Porsche facility went from 13 lifts to 19 bays and, according to the dealership, missed no service days. That result explains what changed the buying calculation. A dealer may begin by comparing equipment prices. Once downtime, sequencing and finger-pointing enter the spreadsheet, one accountable contract starts looking less like convenience and more like insurance.
What AME actually sells
The catalog is broad because the job is broad. AME plans workshops and parts departments in CAD. It supplies vehicle lifts, alignment systems, compressed air, oil and water distribution, exhaust extraction, benches, cabinets, high-density drawers, shelving, mezzanines and vertical conveyors. It provides project management and professional installation. For relocations, it inventories what moves, stages the sequence and connects the new room before the old one becomes a parking lot of unlabeled boxes.
The most revealing products are the odd ones. Tesla once had a problem with the ordinary technician toolbox: an electric vehicle requires specialized company-supplied tooling. AME designed mobile cabinets with computer storage, custom wiring and a large worktable, then kept the visual treatment consistent with Tesla's clean design. The object was furniture. The useful thing was a service workflow that could roll between bays.
For Penske, AME and a partner created a vertical “car dispenser” that displays four Smart cars while leaving all sides visible. Hidden drive chains inside the support structure lift the platforms. The company says one operator can load all four cars in 12 minutes. At Indianapolis Motor Speedway, AME faced a different vertical request: raise the winning car and driver 12 feet into Victory Circle. A custom 10-by-20-foot lift moved from hand sketches to its first test in under eight weeks.
The price is custom; the risk is legible
AME is a project business, not a subscription. Revenue comes from consulting and design, equipment procurement, installation, relocation and project management. A few workbenches and cabinets appear through third-party dealer-equipment catalogs with unit prices, but a working service department is custom-quoted. The relevant comparison is not one AME proposal against one lift. It is AME against the combined cost, schedule and management burden of several vendors.
That chart is a model, not AME reporting: five specialist relationships become one prime relationship. It captures the commercial pitch better than a product list does. The company occupies the overlap between automotive-equipment distributor, facility consultant, material-handling integrator and installation contractor. Regional specialists can beat it on a narrow trade. A general contractor can manage the building. Equipment manufacturers can offer deeper product expertise. AME's difference is the bundle and the dealership-specific experience connecting it.
The experience is unusually practical. Easterbrook spent 23 years in executive marketing and human-resources roles at Kmart before founding AME. Talaga previously ran a material-handling installation company. Vice President Tim Hill spent his career around dealerships and fixed-operations planning; AME says he has taken more than 300 facility projects from concept to completion and worked with OEMs on flagship stores, training centers, vehicle-processing sites and parts-distribution facilities. This is not architectural theory delivered by people who leave before the crates arrive. The sales claim rests on knowing where design intent usually collides with installation reality.
There is no public transaction price for Tico Capital Partners' March 2026 acquisition. The supplied company record estimates annual revenue at about $4.2 million, but AME has not published that figure. What Tico said it was buying is easier to verify: a founder-built operator with a family-oriented culture, a customer-service reputation and room to expand nationally. Bryan Talaga, who joined AME in 2005 and now leads the automotive business, said the deal adds resources and strategic support while preserving the culture.
What an operator can steal
AME's playbook travels better than its vehicle lifts. It applies to any fragmented project where downtime is expensive and no individual supplier owns the finished outcome.
Where the model breaks
Turnkey is not automatically better. It is a weak fit for a customer buying one commodity lift, running a capable in-house facilities team, using established local trades or choosing only on unit price. The model earns its keep when design decisions interact, operating downtime is costly, the move has a hard date and the buyer values one party owning the interfaces.
A bigger shop for the back-room company
AME has already stretched the method beyond dealerships. The broader AME Companies organization applies facility design and material-handling work to industrial and government customers, with systems such as conveyors, modular offices, mezzanines and storage equipment. Easterbrook's Navy service helped establish the business as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, and government products are available through GSA Advantage. The company has also maintained offices in Michigan and Canton, Georgia, giving the Southeast more than a sales pin on a map.
The automotive opportunity remains the cleanest version of the story. Cars are getting more complicated, but the business case does not depend on guessing which drivetrain wins. Dealers and repair shops still need safe bays, productive technicians, stored parts and facilities that open when promised. Chuck's Auto Repair in Canton offered the local-scale example: a busy nine-bay shop was delaying work because it lacked capacity. AME worked with the owner, architect and contractor on a connected expansion planned to create a combined 20-bay center, along with training, lockers, offices and an employee lounge.
“We know cars, but we're not experts in designing and building repair facilities,” Chuck's COO Mason Cox said. That sentence is the whole market. The customer knows its operation. AME knows how to turn that operation into concrete, utilities, storage and equipment without making the customer earn a second degree in subcontractor diplomacy.
After 24 years, Tico's acquisition changes the balance sheet and growth ambition, not the basic promise. AME still has to arrive at a messy site, learn how the work really moves and put its name on the opening date. The shiny showroom can have the attention. The back room has the deadline.