If you track the growth of Transtar Holding Company over the last two years, you’ll see a strategic focus on expanding into complete auto care, where it has made two major acquisitions with plans for more in 2024. It started when the traditional transmission driveline company acquired C&M Auto Parts, a Pronto Network member based in New Jersey, in Q1 of 2023 and continued with welcoming Arch Auto Parts, with 21 locations throughout New York City and surrounding areas, into the fold in December. To align these businesses under the mission of simplifying complex vehicle repair to keep the world moving, the company created NexaMotion Group (NMG), a portfolio of businesses that provides world-class customer service, cutting-edge technology solutions and the distribution of OE and aftermarket automotive products.

To explain the recent organizational changes and benefits Arch Auto will bring to NexaMotion Group, we sat down with Neil Sethi, president and CEO of Transtar Holding Company, and Chris Bodh, Arch Auto owner and CEO who will now serve as group president of general repair businesses. Sethi and Bodh explain the vision for the newly created NexaMotion Group and how it’s looking to offer resources to transform vehicle repair for auto repair shops.

AMN: Transtar acquired Arch Auto Parts late last year. How does this acquisition align with Transtar’s goals?

Sethi: Transtar has been around for 49 years, and we’ve been able to hold the number one market position in transmission and driveline solutions. But back in 2021, we remissioned the business to simplify complex vehicle repair to keep the world moving. Part of that process is broadening our horizons on what we thought we could be for our customers, and we set out on a mission to diversify our products.

First, we went to air conditioning products. Then, with our acquisition of C&M Auto Parts, we were able to begin carrying a full line of complete auto care parts. The Arch acquisition is another major step forward in that same strategy of diversifying into general repair parts for our existing transmission shop customers and general repair installers. Arch is the largest general repair acquisition we’ve done in our history, and we’re excited to partner with Chris and his team.

AMN: A deal like this takes two parties. Chris, what attracted you to partner with Transtar?

Bodh: The main attraction when we were going through the process was the Transtar Holding Company culture. We felt that their values aligned with ours, and the partnership would bring opportunities to our team members and customers.

We have a good feel for our customers, with a strong commitment to excellent customer service, and Transtar Holding Company shares this same passion. We felt that Transtar was the best fit and can position Arch to rapidly accelerate the growth of its products, services and locations to continue servicing our customers.

AMN: As a part of joining the Transtar Holding Company team, you have a new position within the NexaMotion Group (NMG), Chris. Can you explain your new role and what benefits you see in becoming part of Transtar Holding Company and NMG?

Bodh: Yes, I’ll be joining the executive leadership team as group president of general repair businesses. I’ll report directly to Neil, and my responsibilities will include creating a strategic plan for general repair and focusing on the growth of the general repair business as well as the expansion of our products, service and locations.
I think one of the unique things that Transtar brings to Arch is its extensive transmission and driveline product expertise to our general repair customers. We can go to our customers and have a total turn-key product offering that’s unmatched in the industry.

Sethi: The thing that was interesting for us is Chris and Arch’s view of customer service, how they treat their people and how they treat their vendors. They’re very long-term-partnership oriented. They’re very values-driven, and that’s the way we are at Transtar Holding Company and in the NexaMotion Group. Frankly, that was a big part of why we thought this partnership would work.

The other exciting part is we really think we’re bringing a product competency together that is unique, with Transtar being transmission and driveline-oriented for several decades, and Chris along with C&M and others that have decades of experience in the general repair parts categories. We think the combination of those competencies offers an unmatched product offering to all repair shops.

These days, repair shops are looking for every type of repair they can get involved in. According to our data, even though we have sold to transmission specialty shops, about 30% to 40% of the jobs that they’re seeing are complete auto care in nature already. So, as we are partnering with businesses like Arch and C&M, we’re learning from one another, and we feel that they can help us expand those products and solutions into our existing customers. Vice versa is true as well.

Whether its transmission, undercar, suspension, brakes, driveline and virtually every other auto repair category, we are creating something great for our customers that Transtar certainly didn’t have just a few years ago.

AMN: Chris and Neil, tell us more about what business entities will be under the NexaMotion Group. What is your vision for growing this part of the business?

Sethi: Before we established NexaMotion Group as an entity, we had several businesses within Transtar Holding Company. What we ended up doing was creating two platforms of businesses: One is the CoverFlexx Group, which is a manufacturer and blender of coatings and primers purposed for the collision industry. We’re the largest independent aftermarket manufacturer of those solutions in North America. The other is NexaMotion Group, which was created to drive our mission of simplifying complex vehicle repair to keep the world moving.

Today, we have four major entities within the NexaMotion Group: Transtar Industries, which is our legacy transmission and driveline business; Transend, our e-commerce platform, which is a B2B tool focused on shops and installers; C&M Auto Parts, which was acquired in the first quarter of last year; and now Arch Auto Parts. While these businesses have their own organizational structures and accountabilities, where we unite is under that common mission.

For Chris’s customers at Arch, they will now have access to Transtar’s products and solutions for transmission along with easy online ordering with Transend. Similarly, Transtar is massively benefiting from Arch’s multi-decade relationships with suppliers, so that we can roll out great product lines that Chris and team have been managing for multiple decades for Transtar’s legacy customers. But we won’t stop there.

We have a head of business development, Kevin Rozsa, who is continuing to seek out new partnerships with distributors who are looking to join an organization like ours that’s mission-driven and across North America and beyond—we sell products into 70 countries globally. We want to partner with distributors that can benefit from our resources and want to come into an organization and add value to expand their growth strategies. That’s what NexaMotion Group is all about.

Bodh: The goal is to leverage everything that we have in our arsenal—that includes the transmission end of it with Transtar, Transend, the general repair side—and use every tool that we have to service our customers at the highest level.

AMN: Neil, with recent distribution acquisitions and the creation of the NexaMotion Group, Transtar has experienced a ton of growth over the last two years. With that, what opportunities and challenges has Transtar experienced as it brings new business and change into the fold?

Sethi: Now, we have 100 locations in the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada, so that’s a great milestone for us. Our goal from a forward-looking perspective is to not only add or bring in new business owners, and partner with them like we did with Arch and C&M, but we’re also launching new locations as we speak. We opened four alone last year, and we’re going to open several more this year. So, to address the opportunity for us, it’s really to bring our customers across North America an even more expansive line of products. And not just products but solutions.

We are staying true to our mission of simplifying complex vehicle repair, whether that is through technologies like Transend, or other solutions that help address the pain points of shop owners today. A good example of how we do this is the RAP (remote assisted programming) kit that helps shops remotely reflash critical components of the vehicle, so they don’t have to do it on their own or tow vehicles to dealerships. We’re orienting around what our customers need and getting products and solutions available for them. With C&M and Arch, we’re taking the expertise that these folks have and bring it across North America. That’s really where the opportunity lies.

The challenges are those that anyone has when they’re facing rapid growth. A lot of it is making sure we are bringing in great people. We strive to find folks that want to join our journey. We’re hiring them, putting them into roles to allow them to be successful and enabling them with the right tools. Another challenge is just making sure that we’re all on the same page and getting aligned.

With the addition of Arch, we have over 1,300 team members, so we have an expanding employee base. We need to make sure that we’re communicating the shared ideas of how we’re going to market.

AMN: What does NexaMotion Group look for in a distribution partner to add to its team?

Bodh: What we’re looking for are partners in markets that we do not currently service who have a strong understanding of the customers in their market, are driven and have the same philosophy as us for taking care of the customer and partnering with suppliers.

Through these partnerships, we’ll want to invest in their growth plans and add technologies that we can leverage under one umbrella. This will allow us to offer all the tools that NMG has available so they can go out and better service their customer.

Sethi: What Chris said reminds me of a philosophy that we have, which is we do business locally. We’re dealing with small business owners, and we’re not here to create a big bureaucratic organization. That’s not what NexaMotion Group is about.

Our goal is to make sure that, if we bring in a business that has a lot of legacy and strength around it there’s no reason to change it. Could there be some harmonization of that strategy later? Yes, but our goal right now is to make sure that we are bringing our industry-leading solutions to market in a way that best fits with the local markets that we serve.
We have significant scale, presence and a lot of resources. We want to make sure, though, that those are leveraged more behind the scenes. We need our partners to focus on those critical, local relationships between our sales organization, our branch and the customer base. Those relationships are what we’re all about and we want to make sure we’re maximizing that.

AMN: What can we expect from Transtar in terms of new products and distribution expansion in 2024? Can you share any news about acquisitions in the pipeline?

Sethi: We definitely have several in the pipeline. For confidentiality reasons, there’s nothing that we’re ready today to announce, but we expect to continue to bring more partners into the fold for 2024. Additionally, the organic expansion we have is very significant, and it’s not just in one local region or local market—it’s on a North American scope. I think moving forward with both methodologies—through acquisition and organic expansion—we have plans to add a significant number of locations under NexaMotion Group this year.

Bodh: We have an aggressive growth plan ahead of us. It’s going to be fun; it’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be hard work, but we’re excited and we’re ready for the challenge.