A Movie Review of “A Moving Movie About Moving”.

Actually, that movie was emotionally moving for me.  I am so grateful for the giving of time and care and concern by our friends and family on moving day.  And I am moved because for the first time since this little business was born, it now resides outside our home.  Which for some may sound crazy: “wait, you get to work from home!”, but for us our home has not lately been a haven because our work was always around us, 24/7, and that created a mixed-bag of emotions around our lives.

In 2004, we started Autosport Labs with an IC chip and a PC board, at a time most people would not consider starting a business: we were welcoming our first child in only two months!  And Brent had a very full-time day job, and I was still working full-time too.  Sure, why not start selling Brent’s little ignition controller parts online?  How hard could this be?  How hard indeed…

By the second year, Autosport Labs occupied most of a 400+ sq ft bonus room.  By the third year, we were welcoming another little baby to our lives, and Autosport Labs now took up most of the garage.  By the fourth, we realized if we were going to expand our product line, we’d have to expand our production capabilities.  To do that, we needed more room..  Separation of Church & State had nothing on how I felt about separation of work and home by this time.

We found a great space, at a great price, close to home, and the landlord loves us.  As you can see in this video especially, we had a lot of work to do in order to get moved in. We had a few hurdles: a couple of races, a back injury (mine), a broken toe (Brent’s), kids, jobs, schedules, fulfilling orders for our faithful customers, etc.  But a moving day just wasn’t going to magically happen.  What we’ve found with these race car builds is there’s something nifty about setting a deadline: If you set one, you make it happen.  So we set one: June 12th.  Rain or shine.

And the sun did shine. And we made it happen.  And we can now say Autosport Labs is a company, not a home business.  And be really really proud of that. The cast of characters who helped make this happen:

-Scott “Leadfoot” Miller: Forklift virtuoso, who seemed to look at everything we had with a “Let’s fork it” attitude.  I would love to see him autocross a forklift.  I mean it, I’d pay money for that show.  If not for Scott, we would not have a space ready to move into.  He was instrumental in getting those crazy shelves knocked down and our new clean-room/storage loft built.  I don’t know how we’d have done it without him!

-Laura & John Kimball: Laura is a Cross-Fitting glamazon who showed us she doesn’t just lift at the gym.  John is very detail-oriented and took the lead in disassembling the four-post lift and labeled it in such a way that Brent and I put it back together the next day in no time.  John also put in hours knocking out the shelving and an afternoon of moving stuff out of storage into the Lab a few months ago.

-Vadim Lobanov: Vadim has the enviable (or unenviable?) task of working with Brent at the day-job.  His energy and enthusiasm on moving day was contagious and awesome!

-Giancarlo Lenzi & Chris Lenzi: We put a call out to our race friends, and these two with big smiles and lots of help were very welcome to our moving team.  And they took our empty boxes on Sunday evening!

-James Erwick & Angie Chase: James is my big little brother and adds so much fun and funny shenanigans to a busy day.  He’s pretty dang strong too. Angie is his girlfriend (and was our videographer) and proves James isn’t the only one with muscles while bringing her own sunshine to our already sunny day.

-Livia & Ava: I know Brent & I tend to take these little girls for granted.  They are generally the best behaved kids we’ve ever seen, especially considering we put them through late-nights of working in the garage (and now at the Lab) and pretty much being constantly busy with our business.  They tell us they mostly understand, but I am here to say publicly that we ask them to understand too much, and moving this company out of our house was for them as much as it was for us.  They grow up fast, kids and businesses.  They can grow up together, but not at the price of one for the other. We’re changing that. 🙂

-And Brent: What do I say about this guy that hasn’t already been said?  I’m just so damn proud of him and what we’ve built together. And what we’re going to keep building.  Expect even more awesomeness from Autosport Labs.  We’re cooking up some good experiments right now!