⁄Tactics⁄ When you started Green Drop in 2009, were you focused on biodiesel vehicles or were you kind of open to everything? You work on all kinds of cars now. When we started, I thought it would be a 70/30 split. I thought it would be 70% repair, 30% vegetable-oil conversions. Now we’re at 99.9% repairs. We only see one or two conversions per year, but we do about 60,000 other invoices that are just regular repair and maintenance. As I started the business, I realized I could hit a bigger cross-section of the market with maintenance and repair with a new model. We meet people where they are; the products we use are a bit more eco-friendly, environmentally better. That’s the way we’ve approached it. With the number of conversions being a lot lower than you thought, is that just because demand is for conversions is lower now, or lower than you anticipated? It’s only 5% of car drivers who drive a diesel car. Maybe only a few percent of them want to spend a lot of money for a conversion to run on vegetable oil. We are the oldest actual businesses doing vegetable-oil conversions in the area. So it’s not so much that the market got smaller as it is that I realized other services are more scalable. A vegetable-oil conversion still requires a high degree of engagement from me and engineering; it’s not like a brake job. We started doing the other services more frequently, as a higher percentage, just because we wanted to grow the company and to get out of the onesie, twosie, where I’m involved with each job. We got to scale and serve more people by focusing more on just regular maintenance repair rather than a specialty of vegetable-oil conversion. How many employees did you have at first? When we started, it was me and one other employee. We slowly grew, and now we have about 40. Farhad Ghafarzade Drives Ahead Ghafarzade started Green Drop Garage to convert diesel engines to run on vegetable oil. Now focused on general car repair, the company just opened its fifth location. INTERVIEW BY CHRISTEN McCURDY In the mid-2000s, Farhad Ghafarzade was studying biology at UC Santa Cruz (and repping the school at sporting events as its mascot, the Banana Slug). He planned at first to go to medical or dental school. But in college, he learned how to convert diesel engines to run on vegetable oil. “I just wanted to go surfing and I couldn’t afford gas,” he tells Oregon Business. So purchased a diesel car, converted it to run on vegetable oil and started fueling it with oil he found behind the school dining hall. After college he moved to Portland, where he worked as a bartender and started converting friends’ cars to run on vegetable oil in an effort to pay down his student loans. Over time, Ghafarzade learned to fix cars and in 2009, opened Green Drop Garage. At first Green Drop was focused on biodiesel conversions, though the first garage — situated in Southeast Portland — also did some basic maintenance and repair. Over time the business model has flipped, with maintenance and repair making up more than 99% of Green Drop’s workload. That decision was necessary in order to scale, says Ghafarzade, and it has paid off: In July Green Drop opened a shop in Vancouver, adding a fifth location to its portfolio. (All four other stores are in Portland.) OB spoke with Ghafarzade about the early days of the business, Green Drop’s hopes for the future — and how he goes about running an environmentally friendly mechanic shop. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 14
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