He paid for the replacement battery out of his own pocket and swapped in a correct unit at no charge. Then he pulled his sales records and identified every unit in the field that had used a regulator from the same batch. Four others were out at different garages. He called each shop personally and asked them to hold those units for inspection. He would come to them, verify the regulator revision against the application, and return the unit before it went back into service. Eugene told him he thought the calls were a risk, that garages who had not seen a problem might start worrying about one they had never experienced. Andre understood the concern and went the other direction anyway. If any of those four units eventually developed a symptom, and a garage owner later realized Andre had known about the batch and said nothing, there would be no recovering from that conversation. None of the four shops pulled their business. One owner said he appreciated the call. Another mentioned that his customer had reported a battery light flickering once, and he had been wondering whether to bring it up. The situation resolved without a second failure, but Andre understood clearly how small the margin was between what had happened and something that would have ended Benson Auto Electric before it had a real name.
He stopped selling for nearly three weeks. Franklin Sykes came to the shed during that time. Franklin was a retired auto electrician who had heard the story through Neil, and he came to look at what Andre was actually doing before deciding what he thought of it. He spent about fifteen minutes watching Andre work and asking quiet, specific questions about the sorting system, about how Andre was confirming compatibility before assembly, about what documentation existed for each finished unit once it left the shed. At the end of those fifteen minutes, Franklin said the thing that stung a little but landed exactly right. What was missing was not better parts or more volume. It was a process that guaranteed the same result every single time, regardless of which components were being assembled or who was doing the work.
Franklin came back the following morning, and the morning after that. Together, they built a documentation structure for every unit that came off the bench. A serial number tied to a record listing each component by source and revision number, test results before and after assembly, confirmed vehicle applications, and the date of completion. Andre extended a six-month warranty to every unit sold going forward. Not as a marketing promise, but as a commitment that forced him to stand completely behind the testing process. If a unit came back within six months, that was information about a gap in the process. He needed to know about it. The documentation Franklin helped him build made that kind of tracing possible in minutes. The quality improvement showed up quickly in how garages talked about what they were receiving. Neil told Andre that his technicians had started commenting on the consistency. Benson units came in labeled correctly, tested to spec, with documentation that matched what was inside the box.
The shed had become too small for what was actually happening inside it, and Andre signed a lease on a vacant garage bay on the east side of town. He moved the most critical equipment, brought Franklin on part-time, sourced additional cores from garages across the region, and purchased a commercial-grade testing bench that he and Franklin bolted to the rear wall of the new space. For the first time, Benson Auto Electric occupied a building that matched the scale of what it was trying to do.
That expansion led directly to Erica Sutton at North Delta Service Network, which operated twelve garages across the region and did the kind of purchasing volume that could change what Benson Auto Electric was capable of becoming. Erica met with Andre, reviewed his documentation, examined the warranty terms and testing records, and told him she was interested. She wanted a trial supply of twenty-five units across common application families, delivered over six weeks. Andre agreed without hesitation and began structuring production around the trial immediately. Then, four weeks into his preparation, Erica called with news that had nothing to do with the quality of his work. The North Delta procurement department had run Benson Auto Electric through their standard vendor-approval process and flagged a problem. The operation did not have enough documented operating history to qualify as a primary vendor under their purchasing policy. The trial was suspended. Vendor approval would need to be revisited in at least six months. Andre had signed the lease on the East End garage based on the expectation of that contract. He had purchased the testing bench and ordered components in anticipation of the volume it would require. The financial exposure was not catastrophic yet, but it was real, and it was accumulating, while the largest near-term revenue source had just gone on hold.
Within two weeks, the news had reached Gordon Phelps, and Gordon Phelps came to the garage with a number. He came on a Wednesday afternoon. He looked at the organized bays, the labeled shelving, the commercial testing bench Franklin and Andre had bolted to the rear wall, and he did not make a joke about any of it. He made an offer instead. Eighteen thousand dollars for the equipment, the remaining inventory, the core-supply relationships Andre had built with garages across the region, the documented testing process, and the right to operate under the Benson Auto Electric name for one year, while Riverton expanded into reconditioning. Eighteen thousand. Andre had started this with eighty.