Lynn Wood Service Center: Where Family Values Meet the Digital Age
If you ask Kameron “Kam” Butcher what he does for a living, he won’t give you a title. He’ll tell you a story. About a family business in northern Utah that’s been fixing cars for four generations. About two shops, 24 employees, and a father-in-law who trusted him enough to hand over the keys and never asked for them back. About the kind of place where customers drop off homemade salsa and cookies at the front desk, and where the general manager still personally responds to every (rare) negative Google review.
Kam is the General Manager of Lynn Wood Service Center, a family-owned auto repair shop with locations in Clinton and Layton, Utah. He started as an assistant manager and, about ten years in, got the call: his father-in-law was leaving the country for a two-year service mission and needed someone to run both locations. When he returned, he looked at what Kam had built and told him simply to keep doing what he was doing. Kam has been at the helm ever since.
“This is my gig,” he said. “I’ll be here until the day I die.”
A Long Overdue Digital Upgrade
For most of Lynn Wood’s history, the website was an afterthought, the kind of thing you had because you were supposed to, not because it was doing anything for you. Their original site dated back to the Yellow Pages era: expensive, generic, and offering no real functionality. A friend eventually took over hosting duties for next to nothing, but the result was still, in Kam’s words, “pretty hokey.”
Kam will be the first to tell you that marketing isn’t his strength. He’s tried newspaper ads, TV spots, radio, streaming ads through Comcast, and yes, even a bench at a local golf course. “You name it and I’ve done it all,” he said. When the golf course called back this year looking to renew, Kam declined. “I’ve been on your guys’ bench for years and I just don’t think it’s really doing anything.”
The truth was, the marketing landscape had shifted beneath his feet, and Kam knew it. “The future’s 100% online,” he said. “Anybody under the age of 40, they’re all on their cell phones, they’re all looking up everything on the internet.” He just didn’t know how to get there.
A Digital Partner Worth Bragging About
That partner arrived through the dealer affiliate group Lynn Wood belongs to. They introduced Kam to Net Driven, and for the first time, he saw what his online presence could be.
“They said, ‘Hey, we’ve teamed up with this company called Net Driven. Take a look at this website that they built.’ And I looked at them like… that’s awesome. And then they came in, they built mine.”
“The functionality is unreal. I love everything about it — the ease of use, all the different things like online tire catalogs, online service quoting, financing options. I think it’s honestly one of the best websites I’ve ever dealt with. I’m a huge fan.”
-Kam Butcher, General Manager
Kam doesn’t just like the website; he campaigns for it. “I brag it up to everybody,” he said. “Every time we have a Tire One meeting, I’m like, ‘Man, my website’s awesome.’ And I get compliments on it too.”
Beyond the design, tools like Net Driven’s online repair quoting have changed how he runs his day. When a customer requests a service quote online, even at midnight, the system generates a response and sends Kam a copy. “That’s another thing that I really, really like,” he said, “because then I’m in the know.” He uses those overnight quotes to prep his team before the customer even walks through the door.
But what Kam talks about most passionately isn’t the technology — it’s the people behind it. “I’m getting reports. I’m getting people calling me and saying, ‘Hey Kam, this is what’s going on. This is what we think you should do.’” For a guy managing two shops and 24 employees, that kind of proactive communication is everything. His Net Driven account rep, Wendy Stockdale, has been a standout spotting issues on the site that Kam never would have caught and making changes fast. “She noticed things that needed to be tweaked; things I didn’t even think about,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier.”
“I’m just really happy that the affiliate program came into place so that I could get introduced to you guys. It’s been a great, great partnership without a doubt.”
-kam butcher, general manager
Built on Trust, Looking Ahead
You don’t have to take Kam’s word for how Lynn Wood treats its customers. During our interview, we got to see it firsthand. A technician knocked on Kam’s office door mid-conversation. A bearing they’d installed had failed during a test drive, and the team had already installed a replacement. But Kam wasn’t ready to hand the car back yet.
“I want to put at least 100 miles before we give it back,” he told the tech, and advised that after 500 miles, the customer should return for a follow-up to ensure everything was broken in correctly. “We’ve got to make sure everything’s good,” he assured.
It was unscripted and unrehearsed, and it said everything about how this shop operates. Kam trains his team to approach every customer like family. “If we treat everybody like they’re our mom, dad, brother, or sister,” he said, “you’ll never go wrong.”
That same philosophy extends to how he thinks about the road ahead. Northern Utah is booming with new apartment complexes going up across Syracuse, Clearfield, and Layton, and Kam sees nothing but opportunity. “Ultimately, why do we do marketing? It’s to get our name out there. It’s to build a brand.”
With Net Driven, he’s now expanding into Google advertising and growing Lynn Wood’s presence across Facebook and Instagram. When asked what he values most in a digital marketing partner, Kam didn’t hesitate: “Honesty and integrity. I want honest info, honest input. What can I be doing better?”
We ended on a note about advice for other dealers. “Don’t waste your time looking,” Kam said. “This is it. This is fantastic. If I can help another business make a decision that I wish somebody would have pushed on to me sooner, 100% call me. I’d be happy to advocate.” He paused, then added:
“Every experience I’ve had with Net Driven has been a positive.”
