Hands Off Success On

Travis Jolly is not your typical car repair business owner.

By his own admission, he has a broad understanding of fixing cars, without being qualified to undertake the work himself.

Born and raised in Coonalpyn on the Dukes Highway between Adelaide and Melbourne, Travis is not a mechanic but a civil engineer.

He owns Northern Projects, a civil construction and project management company in the Top End and hires out heavy machinery through another venture, Darwin City Hire.

Travis worked on a few major government road projects in South Australia for 16 years before moving to Darwin in 2019.

It is where his business sense and entrepreneurial streak came to the fore and flourished.

And it’s what convinced him to buy Darwin Auto Mobile Care in February 2023.

“I thought, why not diversify?” Travis said.

And he is keen to explore the idea of expanding his car workshop business across Darwin.

“We specialise in doing it right the first time,” he said.

“We don’t do a backyard jobs. We use high quality filters and oils and all the right parts.

“If we were going to buy another mechanical workshop, it would be one that suited what we do without cutting corners.”

Hands off style

Unlike many owner-operators, Travis takes a ‘hands off’ approach with his investments.

“Every business I buy, I try to make myself not needed within the business within 12 months.

“I spend a couple of hundred grand on it, do up all the bits and pieces to make it usable and as happy a workplace as I can and then disappear onto the next thing.

“I just put things in place so I can step aside.”

He is already preparing to install his workplace manager and senior mechanic, Josh Bone, to run Darwin Auto Mobile Care when he steps sideways.

Josh has 12 years’ experience in the game and leads a team of four mechanics at the workshop’s Woolner base, just outside Darwin’s CBD.

Two of them are personally sponsored by Travis, 1 from Taiwan and one from Papua New Guinea to work in his business under the DAMA (Designated Area Migration) agreement designed to meet skills shortages.

As the name suggests, the business offers a popular mobile service for vehicles that can’t reach the workshop.

It is equipped with state-of-theart car air-conditioner repair tools, including the ability to reprogram different modules – a significant portion of workshop business in Darwin.

The company has also installed an EV charging station in readiness to offer EV repairs as Travis’s mechanics undertake the MTA’s EV training course.