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Cliff Philen was repairing transmissions in Kent before Mitch Stout was born. Now, 45 years later, both men work in the same six-bay garage — Philen as the master drivetrain specialist, Mitch as the general manager who came home after two years rebuilding Rolls-Royces in Florida.
Fuerst Automotive of Kent, at 1005 W. Main St., features a state-of-the-art, six-bay facility and specializes in routine maintenance, tire care, diagnostics, transmission and engine repairs on almost any vehicle up to 14,000 pounds and 34 feet long. That includes RVs, duallies, Isuzu NPR cabover trucks and food trucks.
After nearly 40 years in business, owners Bob and Sheri Stout, along with their children, Mitch Stout, Amber Stout-Nebozuk, Kayla Stout, are still delivering automotive services in Northeast Ohio at their Kent and Broadview Heights locations.
“The people are phenomenal, the ownership is phenomenal, we have no drama, everybody comes to work with the same goals in mind, we have a good time and we put out a fantastic product,” Philen said. “I didn’t know what it was going to be like, but it’s been incredible.”
The company strives to be community focused. In the past year, Fuerst has expanded a program that began in their Broadview Heights shop: giving away cars. They’re now working with Freedom House, a shelter for veterans in Kent, to donate vehicles, and they’ve already provided two so far.
“I’ve always told my kids, first is community,” Bob Stout said.
The secret weapon
While other shops may offer similar services, they don’t have Cliff Philen. A Certified Master Drivetrain and Transmission Specialist, Philen has been working out of the facility on West Main Street since 1981, back when it was AWTI Transmission.
When Bob Stout and Family purchased AWTI Transmission in 2024 and renamed the business Fuerst Automotive of Kent, Philen decided to join the Fuerst team to continue providing his precision drivetrain expertise to the loyal customer base that he had made throughout the years.
Philen's credentials and history reflect his mastery of drivetrain and transmission repair. In his youth he worked on tractors at his uncle's farm, an experience that led him to enroll in the vocational automotive repair program through his high school. After graduating high school he landed a job at Ron Marhofer Chevrolet, but he soon realized that his ambitions exceeded the boundaries of a dealership, so he applied for an open position at AWTI Transmission and was hired by AWTI’s owner and master transmission technician Brian Forest.
Forest took Philen under his wing and taught him the art of transmission, transfer case and differential repair. Philen said Forest is a brilliant mechanic who emphasizes the role that physics plays in drivetrain repair. It wasn’t long before the two became TransGo research and development team members and for the next 20 years they collaborated with the TransGo team to create transmission solutions, all while continuing to perform drivetrain repair at AWTI Transmission.
TransGo is a California-based leader in automatic transmission valve body solutions. The company is renowned for engineering high-performance shift kits and reprogramming kits with a focus on tuneless hydraulic calibrations that fix common driveability complaints without requiring aftermarket software. For instance, TransGo shift kits improve shift firmness, reduce delay and address common internal wear issues.
“We were part of building that company because we did a lot of research and development for them. It was a lot of fun. We got to meet the [TransGo] guys that came out here from California, they spent some time with us. It was priceless information that’s very hard to get nowadays,” Philen said. “When they were designing a product, they would send us all kinds of things and we would test things, we would record data, and we would send things back to them. We were doing modifications and changes on units that people weren’t even thinking of yet.”
Philen is now solely dedicated to providing Fuerst Automotive with his drivetrain know-how. These days he’s training a young drivetrain apprentice named Adam Jewett, who Philen hopes will take his position when he retires. Jewett has already been working as a mechanic at Fuerst Automotive for five years.
Keeping it in the family
Mitch Stout, 31, is the general manager of both Fuerst Automotive locations, as well as a diagnostics technician and an automotive technician with a history repairing high-end luxury and exotic cars.
From an early age, he’d been trained by his dad to repair vehicles. While he was attending the vocational automotive program at his high school, he worked part-time at his family's business, Fuerst Automotive in Broadview Heights, starting in 2012. At that time, the Broadview Heights location was the only location of Fuerst Automotive.
After high school he continued to work at Fuerst Automotive in Broadview Heights until 2022, when he was offered a job at a Rolls-Royce dealership in Florida. He couldn’t pass it up.
“My dad and mom told me, ‘We don’t want to hold you back from an opportunity like this, and we don’t want to be the reason why you regret never having taken the opportunity,’ So I did,” Mitch Stout said. “I worked in Florida working on Rolls-Royces and McLaren's, Aston Martin, Bentley, all the high-end exotics and high-end luxury vehicles for two-and-a-half years.”
All the while, his dad was back in Ohio planning to expand Fuerst Automotive. Around 2024, Bob told Mitch the plan.
“I kind of missed home, then my dad calls up and he’s like, ‘Hey, we’re probably going to be buying a second shop. Want to come home?’” Mitch Stout said. “Yeah, I miss you guys, of course I’ll come home. So, here I am back at it since 2024, and we have a second location in Kent. I plan to be here the rest of my lifetime and hopefully my kids one day."
The founder
Bob Stout has been the force that drives Fuerst Automotive ever since he and his wife bought the business in 1987, but it wasn’t without a lifelong passion for auto repair and lots of elbow grease that has made their auto care center thrive and spawn a second location.
His passion for automotive repair started in his youth, which led him to attend his high school’s automotive technician vocational program in the 1970s, where he participated in early job placement and was hired at Conrad’s Tire.
“When I started with Conrad’s Goodyear I was 16 years old. I started as a tire changer, oil tech,” Bob Stout said. “I started to get my certifications and started working on vehicles. When I turned 18 and graduated from high school they promoted me to a service manager, so I was actually running a six-bay shop at the age of 18.”
By the time he graduated from high school he was certified by the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence to do brake, suspension and engine repair, although later in life he became a certified master technician.
In 1983 he married Sheri Stout. With his experience from running a six-bay shop at Conrad’s Tire, he figured he could run his own business, so he set up shop in his in-law’s basement in Parma and founded Interstate Towing, a one-truck towing company. He continued to manage Conrad’s six-bay shop, even towing for them, but he wanted to expand his towing business.
Bob and Sheri Stout were young and gumptious, and the tow truck business was growing, so Bob Stout hung up his job at Conrad’s and purchased Fuerst Garage from Ed Fuerst in 1987, a small three-bay garage in Broadview Heights. They bought three more tow trucks and ran Interstate Towing out of Fuerst’s garage for several years, but insurance on the business and the tow truck equipment was expensive, and they found that finding reliable tow truck employees was difficult, so Bob Stout shifted the business to auto repair and changed the name of the garage to Fuerst Automotive.
They had been renting the three-bay garage from Fuerst, but the auto repair business was going well for the Stout’s and they were outgrowing the small space, so they bought the garage across the street.
“It was called Auto Accents,” Bob Stout said. “That's when cell phones were coming about, and you couldn’t go into a phone store, you had to go into a facility and they actually had to install them in your car. So that’s what they were doing and they had the big boom-box radios — you know, that era, back in the late ‘80s early ‘90s.”
That location of Fuerst Automotive is at 8116 Broadview Road. No longer installing car phones, Fuerst is a full-service auto repair shop that has won four national awards for training and service through AC Delco, and has a BBB A+ rating.
Kent expansion
Bob and Sheri Stout moved to Stow in the early 2000s. Bob Stout was impressed with AWTI Transmission and its six-bay garage and bought it shortly after.
Now, Bob Stout has brought all of his children into the business and plans to hand it off to them when he retires.
His eldest daughter, Amber Nebozuk, has two master’s degrees and was a research librarian at University Hospitals main campus in Cleveland. Now she’s the office manager at the Broadview Heights location and handles Fuerst Automotive’s finances, bills and bookkeeping.
Kayla Stout has a bachelor’s in hospitality management and a minor in marketing from Kent State and was previously a guest services manager for the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Now she’s the office manager at Fuerst Automotive of Kent.
Kayla said Fuerst Automotive has a policy that emphasizes open communication with the customer.
“We pride ourselves on transparency and honesty, which is why we do digital vehicle inspections,” Kayla said. “We have tablets that take videos and photos, and our techs write notes with them when doing inspections, and they are coded green, yellow and red. Green means good, yellow means it’s something to pay attention to for the future and red means it’s a safety concern and we need to look at this now. Those will get emailed or texted to our customers, so they have full transparency, so if we tell them they need new brakes, we are actually measuring the brakes and putting that measurement in a picture alongside their brakes so they can see it. We’ll circle areas of concern, we’ll put arrows, we’ll put notes.”
Fuerst Automotive’s mission is to supply honest old-school service to its customer, as well as to engage with the community and give back, and for the Stout family business, that often means giving away a car to someone who needs one.
Wheels To Prosper
The Broadview Heights Fuerst Automotive location has a track record of giving away a vehicle in a charity program Bob Stout calls Wheels To Prosper.
“We would get a vehicle that somebody didn’t want to fix, purchase it for an inexpensive price, then we go through it and make it roadworthy, safe, reliable transportation,” he said. “I was on the advisory council for Cuyahoga County Career Center, so I would get the vehicle and we would actually take it down to the career center and let the kids do the work on the vehicle, and then it’d go over to the body shop at the career center and they’d do the body work.”
To find a home for the Wheels To Prosper vehicle, the Stouts post to social media and place ads in the newspaper to find nominees: people who put others before themselves and are too proud to say they need help.
After a nominee for the car is chosen, they put on a large party for them and present them with the car.
“They would come in and they wouldn’t even know why they were there,” Bob Stout said. “We would have the mayor there, we would have a lot of people show up. And then we’d present the car to them. A lot of tears, man. We would have the kids that actually worked on the cars at the career center come in, so they know what their vocation can do to help people.”
The Stouts are upholding that tradition of donating a car at the Kent location and are working with The Freedom House in Kent to find a worthy veteran that needs transportation. They started the program last year and recently donated another car to a veteran again this year.
“When you’re doing service in your community, you’ve got to give back,” Bob Stout said. “So we do a lot with the community, hence, we do a lot with the veterans.”