The first version of Justin Strickland’s future fit on a scrap of paper in a bar. He had experience changing oil, a friend willing to entertain business ideas and the useful impatience of someone who had already learned that waiting politely was not a strategy. So he began writing. There was no founder retreat, no polished deck and no heroic soundtrack. There was a service bay he understood and a customer errand almost everyone disliked.
That modest beginning suits the business he eventually built. An oil change is not mysterious. Its inconvenience is. Drivers make an appointment, hand over their keys, settle into a plastic chair and watch a muted television while a necessary task develops imperial ambitions. Strickland Brothers 10 Minute Oil Change removed the ceremony. Pull in. Stay in the car. Watch the work. Leave.
By July 2026, the Winston-Salem company reported more than 285 locations across 27 states. It performs more than 1.7 million oil changes a year. The scale is large; the proposition remains almost comically narrow. The customer is buying maintenance, but the cherished takeaway is time returned.
The expensive little word “yes”
Strickland did not arrive through the management-trainee door. He attended Guilford College and Davidson-Davie Community College, lettering in varsity basketball at both, but left college. Newly married, with a young son to support, he took a minimum-wage job as a lube technician. When he was denied even the opportunity to apply for an assistant manager position, the lesson was blunt: advancement was not going to arrive merely because he wanted it.
In 2010, he worked under Mark Agan, a manager whose shop culture stayed with him. Two years later they bought a gas station in Welcome, North Carolina. They did whatever kept the place alive while Strickland chased the more focused idea of a drive-thru quick-lube business. More than 30 lenders and investors declined to fund it.
Then his grandfather, C.W. Strickland, known as PawPaw, took out a home-equity loan. He handed Justin a check for $35,000 and a risk too personal to squander. PawPaw had been a tobacco sharecropper. He knew collateral in the least abstract way possible: the family home was on the line.
I took a piece of paper from the bar and started writing it out.Justin Strickland
In October 2012, Strickland and Agan opened Taterbugs Drive Thru Oil Change in Greensboro, naming it after Strickland’s son Tate. Early customer counts were thin enough to make Strickland suspect a very expensive mistake. The counts improved. They sold the gas station, concentrated on quick lube and eventually sold Taterbugs so they could attempt a national brand.
One shop becomes a system
A family tree with service bays
The first Strickland Brothers shop opened in Thomasville in December 2016. Its name joined Tate with his younger brother, Beckett. The family signature did not stop at the sign. A “PawPaw’s Bench” sits outside every shop, honoring the grandfather who had liked to drink coffee on a bench at the original location. Many companies preserve their beginnings in a framed photograph near reception. Strickland made his origin story somewhere customers can sit.
The second location did not arrive until May 2018, in King, North Carolina. That pause matters. The eventual speed was prepared slowly. The team created an internal “Road to Thirty” plan: reach 30 communities within 36 months. The company ended 2019 with 13 locations and 2020 with 24. It passed 60 in 2021 and 150 in 2022.
Franchising began at a particularly odd moment. The first agreement was signed on April 7, 2020, as businesses everywhere were discovering the limits of their contingency plans. Within about eight months, the company had awarded more than 100 units. Its drive-thru arrangement happened to fit an era newly alert to proximity and waiting rooms, but the groundwork had been laid the year before.
The first purpose-built prototype opened on University Parkway in Winston-Salem in October 2020. By then, the company had learned from several existing facilities and acquisitions. Agan shaped the service layout for efficiency; the design team simplified colors and signs so the building could explain itself at driving speed. In the two months before that opening, Strickland Brothers had acquired eight stores in five states. The prototype was less a monument than a template, a way to make accumulated lessons portable.
The ten-minute choreography
The technician who read the numbers
Strickland’s education continued in the quiet minutes between cars. He began with elementary books about managing money: how to budget, how to save. Then came accounting and finance, followed by real estate. He would study whatever applied, use it and move to the next area. The habit lasted for years.
You can hear the technician in his later management language. First understand which questions each department needs to ask, he argued, then identify the key performance indicators that answer them. Keep those numbers close enough to review. The method is mechanical in the best sense: diagnose, measure, adjust. Inspiration may open the first shop; a dashboard has to help with shop 125.
We look for people who embrace change. And we look for people who can implement change.Justin Strickland
His attention to people also carried an old memory. He had loved the positive culture Agan created when Agan was his manager. Later, when Strickland was the CEO, he wanted managers, office leaders and franchise owners to reproduce it. Area managers joined store tours and validation calls with potential franchisees. Employee development was not a sentimental appendix to expansion; it became part of how expansion was sold and checked.
He personally scripted the courses for Strickland Brothers University, the company’s employee e-learning program. This is the less photogenic work of scale: turning tacit knowledge into material another person can use on a Tuesday morning several states away.
It also helps explain why Strickland speaks about culture in verbs. Employees are asked to embrace change and implement it. Managers do not merely represent the company; they show prospective owners how the operation behaves. A value that cannot survive contact with a busy bay is decoration. His version had to work while cars queued, inventory moved and a new hire learned which cap belonged where.
Reported location growth
The game comes back around
Before oil changes, there was basketball. Strickland was a guard who stayed late, skipped proms and summer vacations, and built his game on repetition rather than flash. The professional dream did not survive college, but its habits migrated neatly into operations: prepare, practice, notice small failures, run the play again.
Years later, Wake Forest basketball gave the old pursuit a new use. Justin and his wife, Jessica, began bringing guests to courtside games, particularly people who might never otherwise have that experience. Through Strickland Legacy Group, the family supported a current-use scholarship and created the Justin Strickland Pro Humanitate Scholarship for students whose ambitions outrun their resources.
The giving echoes the company’s earlier community work. In 2020, Strickland personally pledged $250,000 to match a corporate commitment for an anti-bullying endowment. The effort backed practical programs including “Buddy Benches” intended to encourage inclusion at lower-income schools. Once again, the idea became furniture.
Strickland talks about entrepreneurship as stewardship of capital, people and opportunity. The claim is grander than an oil change, but it is attached to recognizable acts: a scholarship, a training course, a manager invited into a bigger conversation, a bench bearing the nickname of the person who risked his house.
What ten minutes requires
The current chapter is financed on a different scale. In January 2026, Strickland Brothers closed $360 million in committed financing from Golub Capital and Audax Strategic Capital to support acquisitions and national expansion. In July, the company said nearly 80 corporate locations were expected to be acquired or opened during the year. New senior leaders in marketing, finance and strategy had joined during the prior 12 months.
Large numbers can tempt a founder into store-count theater. Strickland’s public emphasis was more sober: team, infrastructure and operational excellence capable of sustaining the pace. “We’re building for the long term,” he said. The sentence could belong to any executive. In his case, it sits beside a decade-long record of making a very short service promise repeatable.
There is a pleasant contradiction here. Ten minutes for the customer demands years from the operator. Each quick visit rests on site selection, equipment, training, inventory, software, courtesy checks, capital allocation and a crew that knows which question to ask when something goes wrong. Convenience is complexity made invisible.
Strickland began by holding signs outside an early shop to persuade drivers to pull in. He still does it occasionally. The gesture looks almost quaint against a network spanning 27 states, but it reveals the durable unit of the business. Before the financing, the franchise agreements and the acquisition pipeline, one person had to earn one car. Then the clock started.