Jim Florek: How Monster Customs Went From a Two-Car Garage to Building Police Cars

Jim Florek co-owns Monster Customs, the Atlanta shop that spent more than a decade building stereos, lifted trucks, and one-off show vehicles for clients that included Ludacris and Shaquille O’Neal. A few years ago it stopped taking retail work altogether. Today Monster Customs upfits police and emergency vehicles out of 50,000 square feet in Smyrna, 20 to 30 of them a week.

Throttlecast host Grant Brewer met Jim around 2013 at a car meet at Perimeter Mall, before Grant became a McLaren brand manager. On this episode Jim explains how a car audio kid from Buffalo built the business, why he and his partner shut down the side that made them known, and why he finally bought the car he envied in high school.

Car audio in Buffalo

Jim didn’t grow up with money. His dad loved music and worked on cars in the driveway, and in the 1980s the two of them installed Jim’s first stereo system together. Audio got him hooked, and audio led to horsepower and muscle cars.

Around 1992 he started at Custom Radio in Buffalo, then moved to another local shop. He spent a few years in management at Circuit City, helping open stores in the Buffalo area, then went back to smaller shops, including a friend’s in Niagara Falls. He moved to Atlanta in 1997. What kept him in the trade was the look on a client’s face the first time they heard their car. “You’re like, I created that.”

Monster Customs started in a two-car garage

Jim and his partner Terry opened Monster Customs around October 2010, not long after the 2008 crash. They had a following and figured it would either go very well or it wouldn’t. Word of mouth carried them, and they grew fast.

The first shop was a two-car garage at the back of a storage facility in Kennesaw, with a small office and a bathroom. One early job was a party bus for friends who owned Opera Nightclub. It had TVs in the windows, a full wrap, and marine speakers on the outside playing the club’s commercial on a loop. It doubled as an ad for the shop.

They also took work other shops didn’t want or couldn’t finish: engine swaps, bolt-on superchargers, custom interiors. Clients came to them after other shops had fallen short. Then people like Ludacris and Shaquille O’Neal started calling out of the blue, having gotten Jim’s number from someone else. That’s when he knew it was working.

Most business partnerships don’t last, and Jim knows it. He and Terry have been at it for well over 16 years. Each handles the parts of the business the other doesn’t care to do.

The night they signed for 11,000 square feet

The move to an 11,000-square-foot building was the defining moment. After the grand-opening party, around 8 p.m., Jim and Terry stood in the empty bay with the lights on. “It literally brought me to tears,” he says. The place felt huge, and it meant they would have to work harder than ever.

Builds from those years include a tailgating truck for a Georgia football fan, with a motorized cap, flat screens that rose out of the bed, a pull-out bar, a home-theater audio rack, and cameras so the crowd could see themselves on screen and do karaoke. It has run flawlessly for six or seven years. For NFL player Bruce Irvin they built a lifted truck on 42-inch tires. The hardest jobs were restomods. Fitting a modern powertrain into an old car made the plumbing, mechanicals, and wiring “a real nightmare.”

Why Monster Customs quit retail for police cars

A couple of years ago a friend called. His neighbor, a Georgia State Patrol trooper, said the SWAT team had five or six Durangos sitting with lights and equipment nobody could install on time or install right. Monster knew the equipment and finished the vehicles in about three weeks, with every connection soldered.

The troopers were surprised by how clean the wiring was and asked why Monster wasn’t doing this full time. Word spread to other agencies. Within a month or two the work had grown so fast that Jim and Terry sat down and shut retail off.

Their custom background is the reason it worked. The same obsession with clean wiring now goes into police and fire vehicles, and Jim says it has made Monster Customs one of the top upfitters in the Southeast. How the operation runs:

• Volume: 20 to 30 vehicles a week from the Smyrna building.
• Warranty: lifetime, which Jim says they can offer because they solder every connection and use custom-made harnesses.
• Quality control: three checks. One on arrival to log any factory defects, one mid-build, and a final check of every light and warning before the vehicle is detailed and delivered.
• Programming: loading the lighting programs can take two to three hours per vehicle, and every agency specs its vehicles differently.
• Easiest to work on: the Dodge Durango and Chevy Tahoe.
• Next: amber and white lighting for tow trucks and construction vehicles, and possibly shops in other states.

The stakes explain the standard. “If we’re going to put police officers out on the street in a vehicle that we had our hands on, it better be safe,” he says.

Build the brand from inside

Asked what he wishes he’d known in 2010, Jim doesn’t point to social media. There’s too much noise there. “Build your brand from within with your people and then let the customers do the talking.”

The hardest early problem was finding installers who would treat a client’s vehicle like their own family’s. His advice now is to invest in your people, reward them, and grow them, because they build the brand as much as the owners do. On the side, he buys and sells cars and Rolex watches.

The Ferrari that got away and the IROC-Z he finally bought

Jim calls himself a horsepower guy. He’s owned Corvettes, CTS-Vs, exotics, and a custom Harley with a big stereo. The one that got away was a Ferrari 458 Italia he found in a wholesalers’ group on Facebook. Other buyers passed because it had 28,000 miles. He had a Ferrari contact check the VIN, learned it had just been serviced, and bought it at a very good price. Six months later a doctor made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He still regrets taking it.

Next up is a new Corvette ZR1 in orange, after two earlier C8s in blue and black. He puts it at about 1,050 horsepower stock and expects tuners to find a lot more.

What he drove to the studio was the opposite: a 1987 Camaro IROC-Z with tuned port injection, the 5.0 rather than the 5.7, and 26,000 original miles. His friends had them in high school and he couldn’t afford one. It isn’t fast, but about 30 people gave him a thumbs-up on the drive over. Terry found a new-in-box Alpine equalizer from the era, and the car is getting an old-school Alpine head unit and Focal speakers to go full retro.

Rapid fire

• Best car he’s ever driven: the 458.
• Upgrade most owners sleep on: window tint.
• Dream build, unlimited budget: a 1970 Chevelle convertible on a Roadster Shop chassis, where “modern technology meets old school.”
• Biggest misconception about custom shops: that they’re only out to take your money. The right shop builds the car the way you want it.
• Dream three-car garage: a Porsche GT3 RS, another 458, and the ZR1.

What he wants people to say about him and Terry is short: “Jim’s solid. If you do business with him or Terry, you’re always going to get what you pay for.”

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Jim Florek is above and on YouTube, including his plans for the IROC-Z and the ZR1.

Throttlecast is recorded in Peachtree Corners at The Ride Lounge, a car club in Atlanta with room for every kind of car, from new supercars to 1980s survivors. Members keep their cars in climate-controlled bays and meet each other at drives, dinners, and tapings like this one. See what’s coming up on the events calendar.