How Marty got started
Marty Shugrue trained for three years under a master tech with 35 years of experience at Karking Repair Shop. When the owner retired and sold the shop to the tire shop next door, Marty moved around from shop to shop looking for a new home.
What he found instead was a pattern. "A profound lack of integrity every where I went," he says. That is what pushed him to start his own company, doing honest work at a fair price. That is also why the word painted on the van and in the bay is simply integrity.
The call he gets most
The job Marty gets called for most is a car that will not start. He puts the average cost for that call between 225 and 550 dollars, depending on what is actually wrong.
Before you even call, there is one thing worth checking yourself. "Loose battery terminals account for 25% of our no start calls," Marty says. Grab the negative terminal with both hands and try to wiggle it back and forth as hard as you can. If it moves even a little, that alone can cause up to 95 percent loss of energy transfer. It costs nothing to check and it might save you a service call.
A repair he's proud of
A 2001 Jeep Cherokee had been sitting in a hotel parking lot for four years. No key, just a fob. To even get the power door locks to energize, Marty had to backfeed the fuse box by jumping to the starter lead wire from underneath the vehicle.
He replaced the battery and cranked it, but there was no compression. So he pulled the plugs and dropped transmission fluid into each cylinder. The Jeep fired right up. It is the kind of job that does not show up on a price list but shows what the work actually looks like some days.
What people skip and what surprises them
Marty says transmission fluid service is the maintenance item most people skip. It is not glamorous and it is easy to put off, but it is one of the jobs he sees neglected most.
On the repair side, he says HVAC work tends to give customers sticker shock, especially on newer vehicles running the 1234yf refrigerant. It is not that the work is unnecessary, it is that the parts and refrigerant cost more than people expect going in.
Where he works and what he likes
Marty covers Webster, League City, Seabrook, Kemah, Nassau Bay, El Lago, San Leon, Dickinson, Friendswood, Pearland, La Porte, Hitchcock, South Houston and Pasadena.
Asked about his favorite car to work on, he did not hesitate. A Toyota FR-S with the boxer engine. Whether it is a sports car or a four year old Jeep with a dead battery, the approach is the same, figure out what is actually wrong and fix it at a fair price.
Interviewed by Mechanicrank · August 31, 2026. Nothing here is sponsored and nothing was rewritten into marketing copy. Read the other features or tell us about your own shop.