By Steve Huffman
Salisbury Post
Jim Laney said that not too many years ago, when he was in the hospital battling lung cancer, his daughter called.
She’d taken her car to have it inspected, she said, and the mechanic told her it needed $200 in repairs before he could slap a new inspection sticker on it.
The trouble, Laney said, was that he knew his daughter’s car and knew it didn’t need any repairs. It was a ruse, he felt, by repair shop workers looking to make money.
So Laney, a businessman by trade, got to thinking: “How long would it take to do a good and legal inspection in a shop that did nothing else, assuring car owners that their inspections were completely aboveboard?”
The resulting creation was Safety Check Inspections. The latest in the three-store chain opened recently in Salisbury in The Pop Shoppe complex on East Innes Street, just past Interstate 85 and Faith Road.
At Safety Check, employees do inspections and almost nothing else. The reasoning behind the venture, Laney said, is to get cars in and out as quickly as possible, the business making its money off volume, not repair work.
If a car fails its inspection, Safety Check employees can perform minor repairs ó replace bulbs, fuses and the like.
For more serious work, the car’s owner is advised as to what’s needed and given 30 days to have the vehicle repaired. When it’s returned, the owner pays only for the sticker, the cost of the inspection paid during that initial visit.
“We create money on the volume of inspections instead of trying to make money off the extras,” Laney said. “We don’t even want our shop to be tied up on repairs.”
He opened his first Safety Check shop in Charlotte in 2000 and another in Gastonia in 2004. “They’re doing well, but it takes a while to build up your business,” Laney said.
He said several people have reminded him that garages that perform safety inspections are everywhere, and wondered aloud why he opted to open a business so close to numerous garages.
To that argument, Laney has a simple reply:
“Why is it that Home Depot always opens across the street from Lowe’s?” he asked. “The last time I checked there was a church on almost every corner.”
Safety Check is opened from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. Charles Sheffield is manager of the Salisbury location while Sheffield’s son, Dale, is general manager of all three Safety Check locations.
The price of an inspection is $30 for cars 1996 and newer, and $9.10 for those older than 1996. Once a car reaches 35 years of age, a safety inspection is no longer required.
Laney said that once the Salisbury business gets rolling, it’ll need to do 12 inspections a day to break even. He said his other shops do as many as 40 or 50 inspections a day, a single inspection taking about 10 minutes.
But Laney also noted that the cost of opening a shop is high and said it’ll be at least a year before the Salisbury business makes a profit.
“It’s not something you make money off right off the bat,” he said.
Laney stressed that while shop workers hustle to get as many cars as they can in and out the door, employees are sticklers for making sure that vehicles legitimately pass their inspections.
“We don’t want an unsafe car going out of our garage,” Laney said.
The Salisbury Safety Check operates out of a 2,200-square-foot building that’s shared with Premiere Automotive Enhancement, a business that specializes in automotive window tinting.
Laney, 58, is an interesting sort, a guy who dresses like a businessman but wears his hair in a ponytail.
In addition to his Safety Check operations, he also owns Laney Brothers Construction Co. in Charlotte, a business that specializes in commercial upfits. Laney also owns a four-county franchise of Iwanna, a classified advertising newspaper.
Laney and his wife live in Huntersville. He visits his Safety Check shop in Salisbury at least twice a week.
Laney said he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999 and was told by doctors at the time that the disease would kill him. But he had a lung removed in the spring of 2000 and has been cancer-free ever since.
“The doctors told me they got it all,” Laney said. “I tell you, man, I’ve been through a lot.”
He said he smoked for 30 years but kicked the habit five years before being diagnosed with cancer.
Laney said his bout with the disease changed his outlook concerning just about everything.
“You can’t get enough of life after you almost die,” he said. “I love old stuff. I love my friends. I love interesting people. You even look at leaves differently after you’ve had a brush with death.”
Jack Taylor of Charlotte is a friend of Laney’s, the two having known one another for decades.
“Lord, Jim is a smart guy,” Taylor said. “He’s a thinker. He’s next to a perfectionist in my book.”
Contact Steve Huffman at 704-797-4222 or shuffman@salisburypost.com.