The Beginning It was the mid 1950s, Eisenhower was president, car sales reached over 6.5 million, and a loaf of bread cost $0.14. And in a Philadelphia neighborhood Claudia Brigidi and her brother Richard, were hard at work at their father’s auto body shop. It was here that the siblings honed the skills that would someday see them form the successful partnership that exists today. They learned the first thing you ask someone who has been in a car crash is: ‘are you okay, and is everyone in the car OK.’ Rich added, “After that you’re just fixing a car, which is not as important as the people in it.”
And for Claudia, the only girl in the bunch, those life lessons also included pumping gas, changing oil, paying bills and learning how to treat people. “My father would say to me, ‘Don’t ever think you’re the boss, every customer out there is your boss,’ at the time I didn’t think much of it but now I realize how right he was,” she reflects.
