Long before automotive became my career, understanding how things work was simply part of how I grew up.

I was raised in Wisconsin, where my father was a mechanic. In the early 1970s, he built a Class 5 off-road race car that would go on to compete in several off-road world championship events throughout the Midwest.

And when I say he built it, I mean built it.

I grew up watching a race car take shape in our workshop—from bending tubing for the roll cage to welding, fabricating, assembling, and understanding how all of those individual pieces had to work together as a complete machine.

As I got older, watching turned into doing.

First it was things like changing belts on mower decks. Then, when I was about 12 or 13, my dad handed me a clutch kit and a repair manual and told me to replace the clutch.

“Don’t bother me unless there’s a bolt you can’t get loose.”

So I did it.

Not long after that came my first car—a Volkswagen Thing. It didn’t have an engine and needed a considerable amount of work before it would ever see the road. For me, that was part of the appeal.

At the same time, bicycles became another outlet for that mechanical curiosity. I worked at a local bicycle shop to help support my BMX racing, eventually attending Schwinn School in Chicago and advanced Trek training. That path eventually took my mechanical career into professional cycling. While my own racing reached the expert/elite level, my work as a technician took me further—I became a NORBA and World Cup professional team technician and a master bicycle mechanic, developing world-class wheel-building skills along the way.

Cars, bicycles, race machines—they all reinforced the same way of thinking.

Mechanical systems make sense to me. I naturally see how an individual component relates to the system around it, and how one system affects another. Whether I’m looking at home HVAC, plumbing, a DSG transmission, or trying to understand the purpose behind some particularly ambitious piece of German engineering, my mind tends to work the same way.

It just clicks.

Interestingly, I never chose to make being a technician my profession.

As much as I enjoy understanding machines, my real passion has always been working with people—building relationships, listening, and making complicated things understandable.

That's where I found my place in the automotive business.

And in many ways, Steiner Automotive Concierge brings those two sides of my life together: the mechanical understanding that began in my father's workshop and more than two decades spent helping people navigate the automotive world.

Understanding the machine has always come naturally to me.
Understanding the person who owns it is what made it a career.