We hope you had a wonderful holiday season!
This month, our Director of Member & Vendor Relations, Amanda Morrison, spoke with Dave Silkovskyy from A Plus Auto in Nicholasville, Kentucky about the thriving business he is building with his family.
“We’re three brothers – there were four of us when we started – three brothers and one brother-in-law. We all started in 2017 after our parents moved us to the United States in 2005. We lived for 12 years in northern Michigan and worked on salvaged cars from the day we came to the states. I don’t think anybody from my family ever drove a clean title car!” Dave recalls.
“It was all salvage all the time: saving money, rebuilding cars, and shopping in a salvage yard. Every time you come in and see all this mess and you’re like, “man, come on, why does it have to be like this? Why are all those cars sitting outside, being destroyed by weather, by rain, by sun? Why can’t they cover them at least?” So, we started in Michigan, all three of us separately. It was more like a hobby than a business. Then at the end of 2016, I was trucking then, I had an offer to move to Kentucky to drive for an amazing trucking company here. Our older brother Oleg, he got us together and said “here in Michigan, we’re not getting anywhere. We got to move!”
Amanda asked about their specific business model. Unlike many salvage yards, A Plus only takes a certain range of vehicles, which changes based on the make/model. “We only work with new vehicles, at this point, we work only with 2019 and up. There are a few, like Mercedes, that we would go (back) to 2017. But if we’re talking Korean cars, American cars, it’s `21 and up, nothing older than `21. If we’re talking about German cars, we would go like to 2017. Basically, we’re staying with the new cars, and when we get a car to our lot, we don’t have those cars sitting in the yard for years. We just part them out completely, to the empty shell!”
Dave makes use of social media to showcase just how many parts they can get out of their purchased vehicles.
“I was just making one video for Instagram like how many were the most parts a car can have?” he said. “We have one 750 series BMW that we pulled 520 parts out of it! Holy moly! That was the biggest one. The smallest one was like 80 parts, but it was a burned RAM 4500.” They part out vehicles as completely as possible, and store everything indoors in their warehouse, after inspecting for damage, testing completely and finally, cleaning the individual parts.
“One day, Oleg, I mean, he’s the oldest brother, so he’s in control of everything. He basically said, “It’s time for you to become famous.” I was like, what are you talking about? He was like, “Get on social media and put yourself out there and put the business out there and make sure everybody knows about us.” That’s easy to say, I’m shy!” Dave recalls. And then he said, “‘Well, I don’t care! Here’s a link for you.”
“There was a Ukrainian guy, and he’s basically giving a class on how to start on social media: what to do, how to post, this and that. A small how-to class. So, I went through that, I watched it, and so did my brother-in-law who did it too at the same time and I was like, I think I can do it, you know?”
Dave’s first few videos reached about 200 views. Now, their online presence continues to grow with videos are reaching 9,000 views or more! On top of their highly watched videos, the main business page now has over 32k followers, with Dave’s own page over 9k on his own.
Despite their climbing numbers on social media and wide reach, Dave still finds the climate of doing business WITH other yards fascinating. “You know in Ukraine, when you start your business you’re trying to hide from everybody so nobody sees how you do, how you operate and when I started posting those videos with special prices all the Ukrainians I know were like ‘What the heck are you doing? Why would you show people? Why would you tell people!?’”
Dave continued, “I told them, so that they know, so that they copy me.” “What do you mean? Why would you want somebody to copy you?” I said, “because if everybody’s gonna do like we do, everybody would want to buy parts from us and get pre-owned auto parts.”
“I spoke with Larry from Fenix at ARA, and he said, ‘Once you guys are set up to broker our parts, I’ll fly to you, I’ll teach your guys how to do it!’” and we were like, what, really? You’d do that?’ He said ‘Yeah! That’s why we’re here. We want to broker your parts, so we’re gonna teach you, and then you can teach the OTHER yards once they grow and are ready to move.’”
To hear more from Amanda, and Dave from A Plus Auto, tune in to the URG On the Go Podcast!
