How I quit my nursing job, started a business

Six years ago, Desiree Hill spent her days diagnosing patients. Now, she diagnoses cars.

As an oncology nurse at Northside Hospital Duluth, in Duluth, Georgia, Hill made around $40,000 per year. “I wasn’t happy in my career at that time. I wasn’t happy in my personal life,” says Hill, 39. “It was three hours of commuting in Atlanta traffic every day. And [as a single mom at the time] I never saw my children. So it really was taking a toll.”

Today, Hill is the owner of Crown’s Corner Mechanic — an auto repair shop in Conyers, Georgia, just a 15-minute drive from her home in Covington. Her company brought in nearly $440,000 in net revenue last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

This year, Crown’s Corner Mechanic has brought in about $70,000 in monthly revenue — roughly double last year’s monthly average — and is profitable, says Hill.

Hill started fixing cars in 2019 with no prior mechanic or entrepreneurship experience, teaching herself through YouTube videos and involving her family. Her 10-year-old daughter recently built a motor, and her son is a mechanic in the U.S. Army.

“We learned together,” says Hill, adding, “I not only have a family at home, I have a family here [with my employees] and I have a family with my customers.”

Hill got a Registered Medical Assistant diploma from Florida Metropolitan University, a now-defunct for-profit school, in 2011, she says. (By the time she graduated, the school was known as Everest University.)

Over roughly a decade of nursing, she worked her way up to a high-demand, high-stress oncology unit at Northside Hospital Duluth. But she was unhappy, she says: long hours and commutes for a unit where patients often succumbed to their illnesses.

In 2019, Hill sought to increase her income by starting a side hustle. She began buying and renovating run-down vehicles to sell for profit, despite not knowing how to change her own car’s oil, she says.

“Everybody needs transportation. That’s never going to stop no matter what. And I knew it was something that I could spend a very small amount on and maybe potentially make a lot of profit,” says Hill. “It was the fastest way to make money.”

Hill watched tutorials on YouTube about how to fix or change certain car parts, or diagnose various vehicle problems. Her first purchase was a truck, for about $1,200. After spending $60 and putting in only an hour of work to fix it, she sold the truck for around $4,000 two days later.

“I bought three more cars the next day,” says Hill. “It was almost like a high. I swear, it was beautiful.”

Hill stayed up until 3 a.m. nightly fixing cars, waking up at 6 a.m. to get back to the hospital. After 15 months of minimal sleep and time with her kids, she quit nursing around January 2020. Over the next year, she bought, fixed and sold 38 cars, which made her around $100,000 she says.

In June 2021, Hill decided to additionally work on other people’s vehicles as a mobile mechanic, traveling to customers to fix their vehicles. She spent a “couple thousand dollars” on her business license, auto tools, website, advertising and billing software, she says.

Hill brought in about $13,000 as a mechanic in six months, she says. She documented her repair jobs on TikTok, which brought a wave of new clients her way. In Spring 2022, she stopped flipping cars and rented a garage at a local repair shop to keep up with demand, and quickly outgrew that space, too.

A four-month RV repair job led to a stroke of luck: The RV owner saw her struggle, and offered her a $10,000 loan — without interest — to pay for her own auto body shop. Hill insisted on paying 10% interest, she says, and the pair drew up a three-year contract.

In September 2023, Hill began renting Crown’s Corner Mechanic’s 9,000-square-foot space, initially receiving two months prorated before paying $6,375 monthly. She brought on a mechanic, a welder and a towing professional, each renting space in her shop, covering about half of the now $6,566 monthly rent. “It was the smartest thing I could have ever done.”

Hill paid back the RV owner’s loan in 18 months, documents show.

Many of Hill’s customers find her through her TikTok account, where she has over 120,000 followers. Others walk into the shop, see a 4-foot-11-inch woman, and do a double take, she says.

“There’s people that walk in here that don’t know [I’m the owner] … and they’re just baffled. Just because of how I look,” says Hill. “And then, when they tell me what the issue is, I take them 20 steps further and break it down for them before they can even get to the next question. I have to wow them with my knowledge. Every time, I have to prove myself. Every time I open my mouth.”

Hill projects that Crown’s Corner Mechanic will bring in $1 million in revenue this year — roughly double last year’s figure, though still less than the national average, according to a 2023 report from auto parts supplier PartsTech. Hill’s shop has eight bays, and the average gross revenue per bay for auto shops in the U.S. is $203,000, the report says.

She hopes to soon switch from renting to owning a space, she says, but she’d need about $4 million to buy her current building — which has her exploring mortgage loan options. Owning would help her put more money back into both the business and her five workers’ pockets, she adds.

In the meantime, she plans to keep growing her clientele through social media — if TikTok disappeared overnight, it’d be “devastating to my business,” she says — and one day get a mechanical engineering degree, preferably through a flexible, online program.

“We don’t stop,” says Hill, adding: “If you don’t know about us yet, you’re going to know about us real soon.”

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