Ben Chambers’ chunk of the American dream is off Old Gress Island Road near Midway.
“The rest of the world always hears about the American dream. (They say) Let’s go to America … and make a fortune. For me it’s happened, it’s actually happened,” the British national said last week after cutting a ribbon to mark the opening of an expanded Euromech, Inc. “I came here with nothing. I had the idea and the community, the customers and the support people I’ve got have made it possible. And look where we are now.”
His Euromech garage specializes in European cars, but Chambers will work on others. He’s got signs up, but the shop is more than a quarter mile off Highway 84 and customers can’t see the facility from the road because Chambers doesn’t encourage “drive-by clients.”
He says there are hundreds of European not just foreign cars in the area and he’s attracting reference work from what are generally considered high-end auto dealers throughout the region.
“Nobody around here wants to work on Jaguars, Porsches or Land Rovers. They don’t know how … Many dealers — BMW, Porsche and Jaguar in Hilton Head — are sending me work because we can do what they cannot do. We can tear an engine down and fix it instead of just changing it out,” Chambers said.
The shop owner said he’s been successful because he’s more than a mechanic. Chambers earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Oxford University when he was an airman with the Royal Air Force. After that, he worked for military contractors in Hong Kong and Germany. He moved to Liberty County in 2005 when the Eagle Group offered him a job on Fort Stewart, but that job lasted only nine months.
Chambers transferred the remains of a business he started in London in 1992 to the states and opened Euromech at his home in Lake George. He moved the operation a year and a half ago to a shop that Midway resident Ronny White used to run at White’s house. The two met previously when Chambers worked on White’s Rolls Royce.
Since then, Chambers said, business has been booming. He estimates he’s doing $500,000 in business each year. He convinced White to help construct the three-bay building with an office and storage space. It’s not the glass-and-granite structure many people associate with BMW shops, but it fits the stained-jeans style of Chambers and his four employees.
And he’s proud of it. “This is a brand new, purpose-built facility for the repair of European automobiles,” he said.
He’s also hopeful for the future, saying he will add employees if he finds qualified people. And he expects to stay in Liberty County.
“I love it here,” Chambers said. “The weather is perfect. I hate snow. We’re near water. There’s work. And the land is lovely.”