Jerry Newcomb, middle-aged and needing a job, was looking for something just to help tide him through to retirement when he decided seven years ago to open an auto-lube shop in Airway Heights.


He and his wife, Jeanne, formed a company called J&J Lube Inc., and he opened the shop in November 1997 in a nondescript building at 13023 W. 14thjust south of busy U.S. 2with modest expectations.


I remember going to bed at night hoping I could get up to 25 cars a day, he says.


Today, about 70 cars a day pass through the J&J Lube service bay. More significant, though, is the companys mostly happenstance entry into government and commercial fleet-maintenance and heavy-equipment lube work, much of it done off-site at clients locations throughout the Northwest.


Due partly to strong demand in that niche market, J&J Lube now employs 18 people, counting full- and part-time workers, up from two originally, and is projecting revenues of more than $1 million this year, up from less than $200,000 in its first full year.


It foresees the potential for additional revenue growth next year, when a second service truck that it bought recently and has been equipping will be ready to travel to job sites. It acquired its first service trucka former Illinois bread truck that it found on eBayabout a year ago, and that rig has become so busy that the company hasnt been able to go after additional business, Newcomb says.


All I wanted to do was make a living. I didnt plan this, he says of J&J Lubes growth. While confessing hes a little overwhelmed by it, he also doesnt want to make too much out of it.


Were just a mom-and-pop. Were nobody special out here, Newcomb says.


Growing up, he served a military stint in the U.S. Navy, then settled in Ephrata, Wash., where his parents lived, and studied accounting at Big Bend Community College in nearby Moses Lake.


It was only after I got into accounting that I realized I hated it, he says. He always had enjoyed mechanical work, though, and was good at it, he says, so he gravitated toward that type of work in the jobs he took after finishing his education.


Newcomb worked for about a year as both a bookkeeper and mechanic at a small General Motors Corp. auto dealership in Almira, south of Coulee Dam. He and his wife then moved to Davenport, where he worked initially as a bookkeeper at another dealership and later as an accountant in the Lincoln County highway department. While in the latter job, he says, We set up some pretty efficient fleet-maintenance programs.


Restless as a government employee, though, Newcomb resigned in 1969 to become a tenant farmer on about 960 acres of wheat and barley land. He operated the farm until 1995, expanding it to 2,700 acres under his tenancy. While there, he says, he built a shop where he did extensive heavy-equipment maintenance work. Deciding finally that it was time to get out of farming, he sold the leasehold improvements and equipment, and screwed around for a couple of years, using some of the proceeds from the sale of the farm operation to enjoy more leisurely pursuits.


Newcomb says he then realized he needed to generate some income, if he was going to meet his financial needs until retirement, and bought the Airway Heights property in early 1997. The building there that J&J renovated had housed a Lightning Lube chain outlet in its early years, he says, but was being used as a Laundromat when he and his wife purchased it.


He chose not to affiliate with a particular oil company, deciding instead to stock all major brands of oil, but he says. I truly knew that if I could provide quality service, I could be successful, because there is no bad oil.


He focused on training all of his employees personally and to entice the best candidates, offered a starting wage that he claims is higher than what managers of one of the largest national auto-lube chains operating here earn.


Shift in focus


Separate from a steadily rising passenger-car volume, Newcomb says the lube shop got strong support early on from customers such as the Airway Heights Fire Department, Spokane County Fire District No. 10, Shamrock Paving Co., and DAA Northwest, the big West Plains-based auto auction. It then began picking up business from Fairchild Air Force Base and from the U.S. General Services Administration, which provides fleet-management services to a range of federal agencies.


At that point, I knew fleet work was going to be the long-term success of the business, because drive-in consumer vehicle lube work eventually would flatten out, Newcomb says. He adds, We have never solicited business. I think there was a built-in need when I arrived on the doorstep.


About a year ago, the company started doing a lot of off-site work, including servicing heavy-construction equipment, such as backhoes, excavators, and cranes, Newcomb says. Its big break, he says, came when it caught the attention of a foreman for Henkels & McCoy Inc., a large Pennsylvania-based engineering, network-development, and construction company with a regional operations center in Portland.


Henkels was working as a contractor on a large Bonneville Power Administration power-line installation project, operating a temporary office in Davenport, Wash., and the foreman would have his pickup trucks oil changed at J&J Lube, Newcomb says. On one such visit, he noticed a construction crane sitting nearby, and asked whether J&J did any fleet-maintenance work.


Out of that conversation, J&J landed a job to service a fleet of Henkels vehicles, including large construction machines, while they were idled at yards in Grand Coulee, Reardan, Davenport, and Creston over the 2003 holiday season. Newcomb says he and two employees worked 39 days straight, including Christmas Day and New Years Day, on that job. Henkels rewarded that effort by hiring J&J Lube to do fleet-maintenance work for it on other BPA jobs in the region, he says.


Since then, J&J Lube has picked up another sizable fleet-maintenance job, this one with Verizon Communications on a fiber-optic line installation project, and has attracted the interest of a large utility company in Portland about possibly handling some of its fleet-maintenance work, also through Henkels, he says.


J&J Lube bills fleet-maintenance customers for time and materials, with travel being the biggest variable cost, Newcomb says.


He says he enjoys that sector of the business because of economies of scale that make it more profitable than a standard lube shop operation and because pleasing one customer is easier than pleasing many.


He says J&J has developed strong expertise on the environmental side of the business and takes pride in leaving no evidence that it has even been at a job site other than the tracks leaving and the fresh oil in the crankcase.


Of the success of J&J Lube to date, Newcomb says, I dont think I could have made it without a good business background. He says having been around heavy equipment all of his life also has helped, but he adds, A lot of it I learned the hard way. I bought the service manual on the way to the job. His companys standard policy now, he says, is to make sure it has service manuals for every big rig it works on.


Fleet-maintenance work has grown to about half of J&J Lubes total revenues, and Newcomb says he expects that percentage to continue to climb. At 59 years old, he says he hopes to step back in about three years and turn the day-to-day management of J&J Lube over to a general manager.


For now, though, hes showing no signs of revving down.