The Heart of a $1.3 Billion Bet
- Debbie Braden
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
Speed, convenience, and a $1.3B bet amidst global volatility.
Call me partial, but I have a soft spot for the automotive service industry and the technicians that fuel the business. So, when I read that Jiffy Lube was purchased, I leaned in.
You might have missed it with everything else going on in the news, but the deal announced in March closed. After 24 years, Shell sold Jiffy Lube as part of their “non-core” interest divestitures (1) to Monomoy Capital Partners, including Premium Velocity Auto, Jiffy Lube’s second-largest franchisee, operating 360 of their 2,000 locations. (2)
Monomoy’s Senior Operating Executive, Ben Humphreys shared in their press release, “Our ambition is straightforward: enable franchisees to grow and strengthen their businesses; continue delivering the convenient, high-quality service millions of customers rely on; and foster an entrepreneurial culture where employees can contribute to and share in the company’s success.” (3)
I love that sentiment and am rooting for the thousands of employees who call Jiffy Lube their home away from home, especially their 20,000 technicians. They do the hard, dirty work most people won’t. Up before dawn, still there past close, taking care of customers who would like to be anywhere but there. And they take care of each other—quietly, the way people do when nobody’s watching or asking them to.
The stories I heard while working at Caliber Collision, one of the nation’s largest collision repair providers, are too many to count. Some would make you cry if you heard them, but suffice it to say, the stories of how they support each other are not ones you typically hear in corporate work. These men and women are the heart of the company—everything else is scaffolding around them.
While I don’t know the Jiffy Lube technicians, I know this kind of work, and having supported a $2.75 billion private-equity backed company through a merger that doubled its footprint, I know the challenge Monomoy’s transition is facing. Business strategy doesn’t become behavior on its own. It takes deliberate translation and integration—into pay, parts, onboarding, and front-line manager team interactions. And that is hard work.
That work is starting under real pressure. The ceasefire with Iran broke this month. Oil prices, already whipsawing for weeks, jumped again. Underneath the headlines, the price of base oil used in synthetic motor oil has more than tripled since the war began, with shops already absorbing cost increases as high as 60%. (4) Jiffy Lube now buys its lubricants from Shell under a long-term supply agreement. (5) The terms aren’t public, so no one outside the deal knows yet whether that agreement protects the business from this pressure or leaves it exposed to it.
The pressure from rising costs land somewhere. They get absorbed at the top or they get pushed down—into manager communication, into change adoption, into how quickly a technician gets what they need to do the job and serve their customer with excellence. When I was at Caliber, we experienced a similar but different kind of external pressure just after close—the COVID pandemic—but pressure on the same things. The cohesive glue that kept the business moving forward and taking market share was the teamwork. The collective mission to succeed. The trust in leadership and the culture we built together.
It’s in the testing where companies typically find out what’s actually true about themselves on the inside. It’s what is said between two people after a long shift walking to their cars or at the dinner table with family. But it’s there, if you know to listen for it.
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