“Nope,” you think, “totally safe.” Safe from layoffs. Safe from health problems. Safe and sound, happy and healthy. Until you’re not.
For Alan Braun, that moment came on Wednesday, May 22, 2019, when a tornado ripped through Jefferson City, Mo., and obliterated Donnie Braun & Sons Auto Repair. Due west of St. Louis and a stone’s throw south of the Missouri River, Jefferson City was caught unawares just before midnight by an EF3 tornado, with estimated winds howling from 136–165 miles per hour.
“There was no precedent,” Braun says, who co-owns the shop with his brother, Gary.
Braun says the twister destroyed over 75 percent of what he’d worked for all his life, and photos from the local news reveal a building and surrounding structures reduced to matchsticks. For some owners, that kind of event would shutter the doors permanently or dictate some layoffs as the business rebuilds from frame to rooftop.
“Our guys can fix anything,” Braun says. “We hung all our own lights, ran all our own electrical and revamped the entire HVAC system. We didn’t hire anyone to do it. At the same time, we were paying our technicians a weekly salary.”
Braun pauses, then laughs, thinking about how the tornado turned his life and his team’s livelihoods upside down.
“Why not pay them, instead of just sitting at home, waiting for something to happen?”
Working with his insurance agent, he secured the covered funds he needed to begin immediate construction and told his people to get to work.
From Bust to Business.
Braun and his brother grew up under the wing (and in the bays) of their father, Donnie, who opened the shop in the ’60s with his wife, Dee Lynne. Not even their father, though, had seen anything like that night. Cleanup began almost immediately, and Braun was touched by the community outpouring to support his family and his shop.
“Some of our older customers sent cards, while others actually showed up!” he says. “We had to turn them down in sweltering weather. People from our bank and friends of friends came out to help; restaurants brought food; it was more than I ever thought possible.”
Just 10 weeks after the tornado swept through the shop, Donnie Braun & Sons Auto Repair was open for business once more—at least, a version of the shop. Braun is currently changing the footprint of the shop, using the reset as an opportunity for a new layout. The old shop had 14 bays; the current revamp has nine, with long-term plans to add more.
Braun hopes the new layout will improve workflow, increase car count and ARO, and increase efficiency throughout. For now, space has become the No. 1 issue for his team.
“We need our tool room back,” he says. “We have toolboxes, not just a toolbox. We’re jumping between repairs, pushing cars in and out as we wait for parts. It’s inefficient.”
Despite the wreckage and 10-week closure, however, Donnie Braun & Sons Auto Repair enjoyed one of its best years, tornado be damned.
“My Jasper rep told me we outsold the year before even though we were closed for three months straight!” he says. “Sometimes you have to laugh at what life gives you.”
Ensure to Insure What You Need Most.
Looking ahead, Braun hasn’t added additional tornado coverage to his insurance policy nor intends to do so; a tornado is considered an act of God and thereby covered. He’s thankful he protected his tools and gear. Still, it’s given him perspective and clarity on how to take care of the people under his roof (provided it’s on the building).
“Look at your insurance company and make sure they’re doing what you need them to do; there’s no way to know how good your company is until you go through something and you need them,” he says.
Braun describes how another shop in town didn’t have tool coverage, while another had disaster coverage to a specific limit which ran out before they were able to reopen. Braun considers himself lucky—on May 1, a mere three weeks before the tornado, his insurance rep walked through the door and insisted they review the policy.
“He saved my bacon,” Braun says, “he really saved my bacon. He stopped me in the middle of my workday and said, ‘Look, we really need to look at this.’ So we did.”
And though Braun didn’t anticipate a tornado would destroy his shop, he updated the policy to cover his tools and much of the accumulated technology that had amassed over the past three decades. It turned out to be a business-saving decision.
“You can be over-insured, but I was totally under-insured until May 1,” he says. “Over 30 years in business, we accumulated computers and extra technology everywhere and none of it was accounted for in our old policy.”
Through it all, the mission of Donnie Braun & Sons Auto Repair—honest, quality work—saw them through adversity. When friends, family and community organizations came together to rebuild—not just the shop, but for greater Jefferson City—Braun knew he was contributing to something larger than himself.
“We’re not just repairing vehicles—we’re helping people live their lives,” he says.
“It’s a good feeling.”