Whether You’ve Shopped It or Not, This Store is Part of Your Life

At 19, Jim Smith decided not to relocate to Georgia with his family. He was happy here in North Texas, even if his budget was a little tight sometimes. When his father suggested picking up a job as a NAPA delivery driver, the referral looked like a straightforward way to make ends meet. He started working at the Grapevine store in 1988.

Today, he serves as its General Manager. And then some.

What Jim didn’t know at the time – what many of his customers probably don’t know, even now – was that his employer handled more than consumer auto parts. The little blue box store on Northwest Highway is actually a key piece in a much bigger puzzle, independently owned since its construction and purchased by Mike and Sheryl Baus in 1996. The couple, and a company that derives its name from theirs, still own the store and another in Lewisville. But that’s only the beginning of the Mi-Sher Auto Supply story.

From Mercy Hire to Dependable Supplier

Smith has a lot of memories from his early days with the company, from his first supply run to a thick head of hair he only jokingly misses in retrospect. He took the delivery job thinking it would be a good way to spend a short season of his life; being a car enthusiast with a habit of taking things apart to see how they work. But he’s under no illusions about his qualifications in the late 1990s, when a serendipitous connection to Mike Baus – who spent 24 years as a District Manager all over the country with Genuine Parts Company (GPC), which owns Napa, - helped him get started. 

“I tell people that either Dad called in a favor, Mike felt sorry for me, or both,” Smith said. “But he hired me as a delivery driver, and here I am, twenty-eight years later, pretty much running the automotive side of our business.”

Jim's father, also a former longtime GPC employee who knew Mr. Baus from one of his stints in Dallas, may have helped open the door for him here in Grapevine, but Jim has technically never worked for the brand's parent company. Like many franchises, the Grapevine store aims to pair NAPA’s brand visibility with a few distinctive traits that come directly from the owners. Unlike the average franchise operator, however, Mi-Sher does more than execute the parent company playbook.

“The idea is for a consumer to walk in the store and, in general, not know that we aren’t a corporate store. There should be some consistency. But where we want to do better and be noticeably different is with our service level. Our people,” Smith said. “[But Mi Sher] is more than just a couple of NAPA stores. It goes way deeper than that.”

Expanding Through Integrated Business Solutions

Pretty much every company talks about putting people first or having excellent customer service, but relationship-based support is the foundation of Mi-Sher’s business model. They hire for it, train around it, and build toward it. For a concrete example, one needs to look no farther than their unique partnership with Envoy Air, a subsidiary of American Airlines that operates their regional American Eagle fleet of planes, that depends on Mi-Sher to keep its ground support fleet running smoothly.

“I have 12 employees over there, and it’s a 24/7/365 operation. We have about $850,000 worth of inventory in it, just for American Eagle. They are the customer. My first day as a delivery driver, one of my deliveries was to the little shop off West Airfield Drive, delivering parts to the little five-mechanic operation over there. A couple of those guys are still with the company today,” Smith said. “They spent all those years trying to run their parts needs on their own, without a point-of-sale system or an inventory management system, and they went to Corporate two or three times to say ‘we can’t handle this on our own...’ Finally, in 2017, the talks started getting real and American allowed them to do it.”

If you’ve ever flown American Eagle, your plane was probably loaded, air-conditioned, or in some way equipped by a vehicle that Mi-Sher helps to maintain. They have an Integrated Business Solution on DFW airport property; a kind of on-site store that handles inventory and purchasing for every ground support vehicle in the Envoy fleet. That’s a routine practice in the logistics industry, because most providers are so focused on their main duties as to need help keeping equipment in order. And, because of Mi-Sher’s dedication to active partnerships, they’ve run IBS setups everywhere from the airfield to the oil patch. 

Large companies lean on Integrated Business Solutions to streamline their operations because, usually, a third-party expert is more efficient than a new branch within a non-expert company. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy work.

“I’m the one who left the Grapevine store in October 2018 to get that thing off the ground, and I thought I knew a lot about their needs,” Smith said, referring to the IBS with Envoy. “When I got over there, I realized I was really only servicing about 20% of their needs. What it takes to make something the size of DFW Airport work – because it’s always on, it’s never off – it's amazing. And we’re just talking about ground support! This isn’t plane parts or anything like that; just the funny pieces of equipment you see scurrying around on the tarmac.”

Why Personal Connections and Support Matter

The scale of operations at DFW International Airport is more than a picture of Mi-Sher’s growth, of course. It’s also a stand-in for the value of ongoing communication in our globalized economy. Information and goods can travel around the world faster than ever before, creating high rates of efficiency and speed for nearly every industry. Especially in the world of logistics and supply chain management, those are good traits. But they come at a cost that, according to Smith, can be overlooked.

“Everything moves so much faster these days, and there’s so much unnecessary noise,” he said. “Try and block some of that out. Put some blinders on, take a deep breath, and think about what’s really important to you. If we don’t do more of that? It’s not good for society – for humans – to stop making connections.”

“While I appreciate the positives [of online sales], it removes the opportunity for us to connect and talk to people. Any time I set someone up with an online ordering portal, I tell them ‘I’m only offering this to you because it’s available. Don’t ever let this take the place of picking up the phone and calling us…’ our business has been built on connections and relationships. The fewer opportunities we have to make those opportunities and relationships; the worse off business will be. The way it used to be was that people bought from people. If you’re just at the other end of an internet connection, you don’t know me or my employees or our story. I want people to know who they’re buying from.”

Efficiency is important, but it’s not everything. Accuracy, innovation, and efficacy have to be part of any good economic calculus. Otherwise, short-term fixes can become long-term problems and supposedly frictionless systems will burn themselves out. For Jim and the team at Mi-Sher, making a connection is essential specifically because it enables deeper conversations. Those are the real key to solving problems instead of just making sales. 

 “You have to have people who understand the business, the supply chain, and the importance of relationships. The importance of people. You’ve got to have the desire to learn the customer’s business. To learn what they’re struggling with, and how you can help them fix it. That’s how our business has grown and evolved: we’re partners. We’re more than a supplier. We want to be the solution, and we hope that people will continue to give us the opportunity to do that.”

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