Limo Maker Got His Start With Pair of Southland Body Shops

Ed Grech, 36, owned a pair of Southern California auto body shops in the early 1980s and bought a limousine as a promotional tool, offering it to his biggest customers and potential customers: insurance executives and auto fleet operators.

He sold it in 1982 when he got an offer that was too good to turn down, he said. But he couldn’t find a replacement.

With the Summer Olympics scheduled for Los Angeles in 1984, limos were in high demand, he recalls: “Everybody was buying them because they we all going to make a million dollars running limo services for the Olympics.

“So one day on my way out to lunch, I looked at this brand-new Lincoln I’d recently bought and joked to my foreman that we ought to cut it in half, stretch it and build our own limo.”

When Grech returned an hour later, he said, “I saw two of my guys wheeling apart the two halves of the Lincoln.” That’s how his limo business was born.

Grech built his first few stretch limos at his body shop in Los Angeles but decided in 1983 to set up a separate facility.

He chose Anaheim because he lived there and because there was a vacant and affordable building in an industrial park at the junction of the Riverside and Orange freeways, halfway between his Los Angeles and Ontario body shops, both of which he subsequently sold.

Krystal ended its first year with 14 employees, 24 vehicle sales and annual revenue of $1.1 million--an average of $45,800 per vehicle.

In 1994, the company’s 212 employees built and sold 600 limos and 120 hearses, said Jeff Wolff, chief financial officer. Annual revenue was $40.3 million, or an average of almost $56,000 per vehicle.