A muffler that lasts longer sounds like unqualified good news. For a business built on replacing mufflers, it also presents an awkward question: what happens when your product stops wearing out? Danny Rivera had an answer when he ran Meineke. The repair chain had to change along with the cars. Stainless steel could improve the exhaust pipe while making the old business model rather less comfortable.
That small industrial irony is a useful introduction to Rivera, now president and chief executive officer of Driven Brands. His career has moved between computers, customer service and the unglamorous necessities of keeping vehicles working. The recurring problem is adaptation. Cars become more complicated. Customers become less patient. A familiar name over the garage door still has to earn the next visit.
Rivera arrived at the parent company through information technology. He eventually took responsibility for the whole enterprise. Along the way, he tried to make the experience of car care more understandable, more convenient and more consistent. An oil change offers very little room for theatre. That is part of its appeal.
Two degrees, neither a straight line
At Florida International University, Rivera earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, graduating cum laude, and a law degree. Before Driven Brands, his employers included General Electric, Motorola, Burger King and AutoNation. At AutoNation, his responsibilities spanned application development, business intelligence, infrastructure and security. It was a broad view of the machinery behind a consumer business.
Engineering and law make an interesting pair of preparations for franchising. One asks how a system behaves. The other demands attention to rules and obligations. Rivera’s subsequent jobs put both kinds of question close to the customer: how should a shop work, what should an owner expect, and how does a large organization make its promises intelligible?
He joined Driven Brands as chief information officer in 2012. In 2014, he became president of Meineke. The move put a technology executive in charge of a service brand, with all the human complications that a software diagram tends to leave out. A dashboard may identify a problem. Someone still has to explain it across a counter.
The garage door and the phone screen
By 2015, Rivera was talking about an on-demand approach to car care. The customer should be able to arrange service without surrendering a Saturday to the repair shop. He described pickup, repair and return as a possible direction for the business. It was an ambition, with a proposed timetable, rather than evidence that every Meineke had already become a delivery service.
His emphasis was revealing. Automotive expertise was only part of the offer. Convenience mattered because the customer had somewhere else to be. In that framing, the successful repair shop would remove an interruption from daily life. The less a driver had to organize around a brake job, the more attractive the service could become.
The idea also required cooperation between an app and an actual building full of tools. Scheduling, inspection, authorization and payment would have to fit together. A pleasing phone screen would accomplish little if the vehicle arrived late or the customer could not understand the estimate. Rivera was describing an operating problem with a digital front door.
“The nature of technology is that it lets you standardize things.”
Danny Rivera, 2016
In 2016, he discussed digital inspections that could help explain recommended work. A technician’s findings could be supported with information a customer could examine, rather than a mysterious list delivered over the telephone. The early rollout moved from three shops to ten, with a further expansion planned. The details matter: this was a process being tested in working locations.
Standardization can sound bloodless until you are the person wondering whether a repair is necessary. Clear explanations give the customer something concrete to consider. For a franchise network, they also offer a way to make the experience less dependent on which location happens to answer the phone. The promise is ordinary enough to be valuable: know what is being proposed before agreeing to it.
A small device, a large question
Meineke’s connected-car experiment made that interest in information physical. Announced in November 2016, Revvy plugged into a vehicle’s diagnostic port. Built on Vinli’s platform with T-Mobile connectivity, it offered diagnostic monitoring alongside driving information and in-car Wi-Fi. The product connected an older, familiar business to a newer stream of data.
The attraction was easy to understand. A warning light is an economical communicator, sometimes excessively so. It tells the driver to worry and leaves much of the explanation for later. Connecting vehicle information to a service provider offered another possible route between the first signal and a useful response.
The commercial question was harder. By May 2017, the experiment was being rolled out slowly in Charlotte, Las Vegas and Seattle. Rivera acknowledged that the company was still learning which benefits mattered to buyers and how to explain them. Early sales were modest. Having a product available and having a customer who understands its value are separate accomplishments.
There is something appealing about that admission. Technology announcements tend to arrive wearing their graduation gowns. Here was an executive discussing the homework: features, communication and customer education. Revvy belongs in Rivera’s story as an experiment with a documented learning period. Its announcement alone cannot settle the question of what drivers ultimately wanted.
Give the owner a playbook
Meineke’s franchise structure supplied another side of the problem. Rivera described owners who had committed their own money and effort to their locations. Corporate support included a guide called The Meineke Way, covering the customer experience from the welcome to the follow-up. Individual ownership and a common method had to coexist.
That arrangement asks something of headquarters. An owner has reasons to care intensely about a local business, but also reasons to question a proposed change. A system has to be useful enough to adopt. In Rivera’s account, consistency came through practical processes that could travel from one shop to another while leaving the owner responsible for the work.
Opportunity inside the organization could be practical, too. Jeff Todd later recalled Rivera giving him responsibility for a substantial Meineke initiative when he was a 26-year-old junior employee. The work involved helping retiring owners sell their businesses and connecting locations with operators interested in running multiple units.
Todd described building a department around the resale effort and receiving considerable coaching. It is a specific example of sponsorship: an assignment with commercial consequences, given to someone whose rank did not yet suggest he would lead it. The opportunity came with work attached, which is usually how the useful ones arrive.
A family history behind the scorecard
Rivera has connected his approach to opportunity with his family’s departure from Cuba. His grandfather lost a shipping and logistics business before bringing the family to the United States. His father arrived as a child, was separated from his sister in foster care, and was later reunited with his family. Rivera was born and raised in the United States.
He describes leadership in terms of fair chances and clear expectations. People should understand the rules and how their performance will be judged. That is a modest-sounding principle with demanding consequences for a manager: explain the assignment, make success legible and allow people room to attempt it.
The brief gets bigger
In 2020, Rivera became group president of the Maintenance segment and president of Take 5 Oil Change. By the announcement of his next promotion in January 2023, Take 5 had grown to more than 800 locations. Jonathan Fitzpatrick, then Driven Brands’ chief executive, credited Rivera’s leadership in that expansion.
The newly created chief operating officer role took effect on February 20, 2023. Its remit included integrating operations across the company’s offerings. Fitzpatrick pointed to a customer data system serving more than 29 million unique customers. The questions of information, coordination and repeatable service had acquired a much larger address book.
In February 2025, the board announced that Rivera would succeed Fitzpatrick as president and chief executive, effective May 9. He would also join the board. The appointment followed a multiyear succession process. After progressing through technology, brand leadership and group operations, Rivera was taking responsibility for the company’s overall direction.
Growth also means deciding what to sell
The chief executive’s job has included subtraction. In January 2026, Driven Brands completed the sale of IMO, its international car wash business, to Franchise Equity Partners for approximately €411 million. Proceeds were primarily intended to reduce debt. Rivera framed the sale around concentrating on Take 5 and cash generation from the franchise brands.
By the second quarter of 2026, Take 5 reported 1,421 locations and its twenty-fourth consecutive quarter of positive same-store sales growth. Driven Brands also reported $11.8 million in costs related to financial restatements within its adjusted earnings measure. Expansion and administrative repair occupied the same set of results. Running the portfolio involved both.
September brought a revised capital-allocation plan: a long-term net leverage target of two to three times adjusted EBITDA and authorization to repurchase up to $100 million of shares. The company expected to reach three times leverage at the end of the third quarter. That was an expectation, and the authorization permitted purchases without requiring them.
Those distinctions suit a career concerned with explaining what a system actually does. A target, a permission and a completed result have different meanings. For Rivera, the scale of the assignment has changed considerably since Meineke. The practical test remains recognizable: can the people inside the business understand the plan, and can the people outside it trust the execution?