How a Milwaukee-Based Auto Recycler Stopped Scrapping for Time and Started Scaling with AI

I’m what you’d consider a first-generation auto recycler. I actually come from a family of recyclers, and my husband has owned a tire recycling company for over 40 years. But automotive recycling? That all started around 2012 with an old, abandoned 125,000-square-foot building somebody had dumped thousands of dollars worth of tires in. We gave a quote to clean it up and then put an offer in on it. That's the building I'm in right now.

We get this building, and my husband looks at me and goes, "We should turn this into an indoor auto parts store." I had no automotive recycling experience, but I researched the license, hired my team, and got my inventory system together. Now, I'm one of the only woman-owned, Black-owned auto recyclers in the nation doing what I do. I call it the concierge service of auto parts: Everything is already off the cars, on the shelf like a retail store.

The way I’m wired, I’m willing to jump in and figure things out to make sure everything is going the way it needs to. When I saw what AI could do for my business, implementing it in my everyday operations was a no-brainer. For instance, I’m so busy managing the day-to-day that it’s been hard for me to document what any of my processes look like for my employees. I started using Gemini for help to get everything out of my head.

I’ve also uploaded all my SOPs into NotebookLM and created a human resources hub that everyone can access. Now my employees can go in there and ask questions like, "Do we ship to this state?" and get it answered.

I constantly encourage my team to use Google AI through weekly training sessions because it allows them to be so much more efficient in assisting our customers. Recently I overheard a team member using Gemini to ask for help to make sure he was getting the right battery for a customer's car. If we can’t quickly identify what they need, that's a lost sale, so this is actually saving us a lot of money. The impact has been huge.

That massive time savings is now reinvested in areas I never had time for like e-commerce and marketing. With help from Gemini, I am able to optimize content for our 3,000 eBay listings, and I apply that same approach to our online reputation. When a customer leaves a Google review, I use Gemini to help me draft a response. I'm short on time, so this allows me to communicate with customers. This ability to scale and amplify my story has had incredible payoffs. This past year, I actually won $41,000 in grants from media and entrepreneurship organizations using Google AI to help me research, write and organize my applications.

It’s been so powerful I'm now consulting and teaching other small business owners how to use these tools to run their businesses more efficiently. It’s an amazing feeling, especially since just last year, I was so overwhelmed and felt like I was never going to be able to grow the business the way I needed to. That’s all changed. Now, instead of being stopped by challenges, I see opportunities to find solutions I never would have thought of.