Craig Noel
Business Development Coach – Elite Top Shop 360
I grew up in Sacramento, California, fascinated by anything with an engine. What started as a kid’s curiosity about how cars worked turned into a deep love of street rods and race cars, then into a genuine appreciation for fabrication, the craft of designing, building, and modifying components to make something perform better than it did before. That same curiosity eventually pulled me toward high-performance automatic transmissions, and from there into a career built around drivetrain diagnosis, repair, and performance.
After high school, I earned a degree in Automotive Science from Lane Community College, focusing on drivetrain repair. School sharpened my technical skills, but more than that, it taught me to value precision, real problem-solving, and doing the job right the first time, habits that have stuck with me ever since.
My first job out of college was with Clay’s Transmissions, a small, family-owned shop where I spent five years building a real technical foundation in transmission rebuilding, diagnostics, and customer care. From there, I moved to Eugene, Oregon to be closer to family and joined Ford Motor Company, where I’d spend the next twenty-plus years working nearly every role in the service department: technician, team lead, service advisor. That range gave me a full picture of how a dealership actually runs, technically, operationally, and on the customer side.
Somewhere along the way, I realized fixing cars wasn’t really the whole job for me. I loved helping people understand what was going on with their vehicle so they could make a real decision instead of just nodding along, and I loved mentoring the technicians and advisors coming up around me. I came to believe that great customer service starts with trust, honesty, and education, not a sales pitch. That belief became the foundation of everything I’ve built since, and it’s still the standard we hold ourselves to at Sun Automotive.
One of the proudest moments of my career came when Ford selected me for its Technician Review Panel, just 25 technicians chosen out of more than 7,500 nationwide. Our job was to bring real shop-floor experience straight to Ford’s engineering and leadership teams: what was breaking, what was hard to diagnose, what needed to change in how vehicles were built and serviced. Being trusted with that kind of feedback loop, at that scale, told me my instincts as a technician were worth something far beyond my own shop.
After more than two decades at Ford, I felt the pull back toward independent repair. A local shop owner recruited me, initially to help strengthen his business and eventually to run it as General Manager. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he wasn’t just hiring a GM, he was grooming a future owner. That decision changed the entire direction of my career.
Today I’ve owned Sun Automotive for more than ten years. We’ve grown from three locations to five, serving Eugene, Springfield, and Junction City throughout Lane County, and I’m prouder of the team behind that growth than almost anything else I’ve done in this industry.
The Influence of Pro Service
A big part of that growth traces back to Elite Worldwide’s Pro Service, a peer group of top-performing shop owners from across North America that I’ve been part of for more than fifteen years. Pro Service isn’t a seminar you attend once, it’s an ongoing circle of people running businesses just like mine, comparing real numbers, working through real problems, and holding each other accountable to keep getting better.
Being in that room regularly, shoulder to shoulder with some of the strongest operators in the industry, changed how I thought about my own business. It gave me an honest benchmark for what excellent actually looks like, not guesswork, but real performance data from shops facing the same challenges I was. It’s where I learned to look harder at my own numbers, to stop assuming a problem was unique to me, and to borrow solutions instead of reinventing them from scratch. A good amount of the thinking behind growing Sun Automotive from three locations to five came directly out of conversations I had inside Pro Service.
It also shaped me in a way that mattered just as much: it’s where I first experienced, firsthand, what it feels like to have a coach and a network of peers genuinely invested in your success. That experience is a large part of why I wanted to become a coach myself. I know what it’s like to be stuck on a problem and have someone who’s already solved it hand you the answer, and I want to be that person for the next generation of shop owners the way Pro Service has been that for me.
Recognition & What Matters Most
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to pick up some of the industry’s biggest honors, including Ratchet+Wrench General Manager of the Year and Elite Worldwide’s Top Shop of the Year, awarded to Sun Automotive. I’ve also had the chance to share what I’ve learned on industry podcasts and through hosting my own automotive radio show.
But if I’m honest, none of that is what I’m proudest of. What I care most about is developing people, building a team I genuinely respect, and giving back to an industry that gave me a career I never expected to have. That’s the same reason I’m stepping into coaching now: to help the next wave of shop owners raise the bar the way the people ahead of me did for mine.
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