On a mission to fix Mid-South muscle cars: Auto shop another sign of growth in Whitehaven

Located on a side street just west of Memphis International Airport, the empty industrial building appears past its prime.

But this 43-year-old building in the Whitehaven area off East Raines Road will see fresh life, part of the dream of a Middle Eastern entrepreneur, an ambitious engineer enthralled by the high-power sporty cars made in Detroit before he was born.

Muhsen Najdawi, 41, an engineer and auto mechanic, has bought the 1-acre site at 3301 Winbrook Drive and begun to ramp up Turbo Knights LLC.

The repair shop will handle minor chores such as oil changes while aiming to land on the mobile phone contact list of muscle car lovers across the Mid-South.

Need your 1969 Dodge Super Bee overhauled? Want a modern engine running your 1968 Chevrolet Camaro? Your 1966 Shelby Cobra 427 Super Snake just not breathing right?

Those are among the $5,000-and-up tasks Najdawi is staking out for his shop. Welding and rebuilding foreign luxury makes such as Mercedes-Benz are also on the menu, he said, though “around here they want more American muscle than anything else.’’

Najdawi himself drives a 2006 Jeep, says he admonishes his four children not to buy brand-new cars (too costly), refused the expense of cable television in his Germantown-area home, and has tapped the network of fellow Middle Eastern entrepreneurs to help get his business going with small loans. It’s all about frugality now, saving, getting the shop going.

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Four decades ago, he grew up in Jordan, then worked in Dubai and Germany, earned an engineering degree, found his way to Memphis in 2011. Now, he’s tied his dream to this building in Whitehaven. The city-county EDGE Board, an economic development agency, agreed to provide a $12,000 loan under its Inner City Economic Development Loan program.

“Germany is a beautiful country where you can live comfortably, but if you have a long-term vision and want to be big in something, I think in our great land here we can do more,’’ Najdawi said.

Development in Whitehaven 

Mike Harris, interim executive director of the three-year-old Greater Whitehaven Economic Redevelopment Commission, said Turbo Knights reflects a larger commercial uplift underway in Whitehaven.

“It’s our location in the city and how easy it is to get where we are, here in the backyard of the airport,” Harris said.

The 80,000-population district, located along Interstate 240 south of Downtown, takes its name from a 19th-century farming family. For decades it has been home to a large share of the city’s middle- and working-class Black families along with the Graceland international tourist attraction and Whitehaven High School and its feeder schools, which Harris cites as forces for neighborhood stability.

Despite the stability, Whitehaven’s Southland Mall has emptied, part of the demise of malls nationwide, and most chain retailers have been more attracted to the burgeoning shopping centers just over the state line in Southaven. Lately, though, he’s seen a change.

Houston investors bought the former Medtronic office buildings on Interstate 240 and are renovating the property, intent on leasing out the space for general offices, which promises an inflow of new workers. And entrepreneurs such as Nubian Design Studios hair salon, Suga Mama SnoBalls, Trap Fusion restaurant and BeLeaf, a cigar maker, have opened or are about to open, part of the new influx of Black entrepreneurs into Whitehaven, Harris said.

“That’s the new trend that I can see,” Harris said. “It’s happening now because entrepreneurship is something being celebrated.”

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After the 2008 credit crunch and following recession raked small businesses, Memphis and America watched firms implode. Six percent fewer Black-owned firms were open by 2012 in metropolitan Memphis than a decade earlier. The decline among white-owned firms here was 9%.

Where the U.S. Census survey of small business found growth was in one demographic — Asians, a term which for Census purposes spans the map from China to India and the Middle East. By 2012, the number of Asian- and Hispanic-owned firms in Greater Memphis together had increased in number in a decade by 65%.  White-owned firms in metro Memphis totaled 12,792, compared to 993 Black, 253 Hispanic and 1,295 Asian firms employing one or more workers, the Census reported.

'The key is to work hard'

Najdawi was among those new entrepreneurs. He had followed his mother Rida and other family members to Memphis. Although put off by the crime and violence, he decided against returning to Munich, Germany.

He decided to bear down here, relied on his electronics skills and in 2012 opened ER Wireless, he said, working six days a week for long hours every day to expand into a  chain of 10 stores selling mobile phones and repairing electronics (ER is short for emergency room).

Rather than spend on groceries, cash went into the stores, resulting a few times in small meals. "Some days we didn't have enough food to eat," he said.

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When thieves emptied cases of mobile phones in the ER shop on Getwell one night, he worried insurance would take too long to pay off and provide money for restocking. He saw the network of Muslims and fellow entrepreneurs in Memphis back him. They handed him some of their own unsold cellphones to restock his shelves.

“They broke in. They destroyed me. I didn’t make a call. Friends heard and brought me phones,” Najdawi said. “There are good people around here. It’s the same thing with me. I’m going to help them out when they need help. I think we care more about humanity than money.”

With low property costs in Whitehaven and convenient access to the interstate highway, he tapped the network to help get Turbo Knights going. It opened in a smaller location in Whitehaven a few years ago. Now he expects two to three mechanics will be employed in the bigger shop he bought on Winbrook.

“We know for a fact that if you work hard you can make it in America,” he said. “The key is to work hard.”