A radiator and a salon chair make an unlikely pair of career landmarks. One belongs under a hood; the other generally improves what is above the shoulders. Mike Rippey has built businesses around both. The connection becomes clearer when you look past the merchandise to the person responsible for opening the local business each morning.
Rippey is the co-founder and former CEO of 1-800 Radiator & A/C. He later became a Sola Salons franchisee in California’s East Bay. That change of seats gives his career an interesting shape. He has helped design a franchise system and subsequently chosen to work inside someone else’s. The familiar question of what a franchisor provides becomes rather more immediate when you are the one depending on it.
The history student in the parts business
At Notre Dame, Rippey found business courses dull and preferred history. He changed his major and graduated. There is something pleasing about this beginning: a future chief executive allowing himself to be interested in a subject without first demanding its contribution to the quarterly results.
His radiator career began with the purchase of an existing distributor. The distinction matters. The business had a life before the franchise network associated with his name. Rippey had bought the company from its founder, Mike Holcomb.
In Fairfield in 2005, the local ownership Rippey’s business encouraged took a specific form. Diane McKay, previously a business systems analyst and project manager, bought a corporately owned warehouse after working in field services. Her route into ownership ran through direct experience with customers. The new franchisee had tried the work before buying the business. She was the second woman to buy a franchise from the distributor, and the Fairfield operation had previously been company owned. Her background also complicates any easy picture of who belongs in an automotive warehouse. Experience in systems and customers could matter alongside familiarity with the product.
It is a useful early scene in this story. A national network can look abstract from a distance. At the warehouse door, someone has to know the customers, answer their questions and make the arrangement work.
A telephone with a second job
By 2004, Rippey’s operation had a central call center handling about 7,000 calls a day with 80 people. Information from those conversations fed a computer system used to examine customer preferences and demand. Sales calls left behind something besides orders.
“My goal was to grow it,” Rippey said. The machinery of that growth included a shared way to take calls and learn from them. A scattered set of customer requests could become information the wider business could use.
Think of the difference between answering a question once and noticing that it keeps arriving. The first helps one customer. The second gives a business something to investigate. Rippey’s call center brought those activities into the same working day.
There is no need to give this arrangement a grander name. Its attraction lies in the practical connection between the work people were already doing and the decisions the company needed to make. The customer conversation had a second job. The distribution promise was equally concrete. The company’s 34 warehouse locations supported overnight delivery; Rippey said air shipping could cover customers beyond the reach of overnight ground service. There is a pleasing lack of mystery in that promise. Whatever the computer could reveal, a customer still needed the part to get there.
Room for the people who knew the software
Franchising became an expansion route in 2004. Company revenue rose from $60 million that year to $116 million in 2007. Rippey credited employees with building the technology infrastructure that supported the change.
He could also be mischievous about the founder’s workload. His stated preference for doing less makes an amusing companion to the expansion figures. The serious question underneath is how much responsibility a growing company can move beyond its founder.
Rippey’s own account emphasized younger employees who understood the technology. His particular hiring preferences belonged to that moment, but the operational question travels well: who understands the tools the business now needs, and will they be allowed to use that understanding?
By 2010, some managers had come through entry-level call-center jobs. Workplace customs were deliberately informal, with first names used across seniority levels and no preferred parking spaces. Those are modest details, but modest details tend to recur every morning. A reserved space makes its point even when the owner is away.
The appeal of this part of Rippey’s career is its attention to the working arrangement. A franchise model needs more than a persuasive invitation to become an owner. It needs people and systems capable of making the invitation useful after the agreement is signed.
Buying the knowledge with the business
The move into air conditioning added another dimension. In January 2008, 1-800-Radiator announced the acquisition of JMAC Radiator and Air, a business with 18 locations and $13 million in sales. The assets included databases and software, while nearly 90 percent of JMAC’s staff were to be retained.
That combination deserves a pause. The acquisition brought locations, but also the people and information needed to sell a different set of parts. Software engineers, sales staff and technical employees belonged in the account of what made the deal useful. A map of warehouses tells only part of a distribution story.
In May, the company announced air-conditioning components that customers could buy individually or together in a kit. Rippey framed the additional products as a growth opportunity for franchisees within their existing territories. The local owner could have more to offer without first acquiring another patch of the map.
Bundling parts also addresses an ordinary customer concern: getting the components for the job together. In a business built around replacement parts, the sophistication of the system eventually meets a plain question about whether the right things arrive.
Expansion continued with Automotive Cooling Products in October 2008. Its seven locations served Midwest markets. Most of its roughly 80 employees were expected to join 1-800-Radiator. It was the company’s fifth acquisition that year and tenth since December 2006. Over the preceding year, acquisitions had added $46 million in sales. Those figures describe a business changing through purchases as well as franchise openings. They also help explain why the work of integrating people, product knowledge and locations belonged alongside the pursuit of another transaction.
By February 2009, the business was advertising 11 remaining start-up franchise opportunities against an existing network of 244 locations. Its stated plan was a maximum of 255. Rippey’s argument for the market rested on motorists keeping cars longer and continuing to need replacement parts. It was a practical sales pitch for a decidedly practical product.
The network changes hands
On June 8, 2015, Driven Brands announced an agreement to acquire 1-800-Radiator & A/C. At that point, the business had more than 200 franchisee-owned locations in the United States and Canada. Mike and Joe Rippey were to stay as advisors.
The leadership transition also placed Gabe Mendoza, previously chief operating officer and chief financial officer, in the president’s role for the division. A business built through local owners and shared infrastructure was entering another organization, with familiar people continuing into the next arrangement.
Rippey’s connections extended to the work of preparing the company for a transaction. Advisor David Traversi worked with him for years on strategy, executive coaching and team development. That is a less photogenic part of a sale, though considerably more useful than a ceremonial pen.
Later, a company celebration for incoming president Kyle Marshall brought Rippey back for a visit. Marshall had spent 18 years with the business. The photograph catches a continuing relationship after the formal change in ownership: a former chief executive appearing for someone else’s new title.
A different kind of local owner
The salon chapter brings the story back to the local operator. In September 2025, Rippey described six East Bay Sola Salons locations, including a newly opened site at Ygnacio Plaza in Walnut Creek. He had chosen Sola partly for the operational tools available to franchise owners.
His own team included a full-time social media professional providing individual help to beauty professionals. His stated priority was improving support for existing operators before opening more locations. A bigger footprint could wait while the existing businesses received attention.
“Foot traffic matters.”
Mike Rippey, September 2025
The short remark suits a career full of practical arrangements. A useful location, a useful system, a useful person to ask: these are things an owner can put to work. Rippey’s route from radiator franchisor to salon franchisee offers a way to consider growth from the shop floor. Before asking where another location belongs, ask what helps the person already running one.
Seen from that angle, the change of industry is less surprising. The work has a new setting, while the relationship between a shared system and an individual owner remains available for inspection. A franchisee can judge a service in the course of using it. That makes the former franchisor’s new seat an interesting place to finish this chapter: close enough to the daily work to discover which promises are useful on an ordinary Tuesday.