Motor masters: Father-and-son Automotive grads expand family business into Winnipeg
He doesn’t quite have engine oil flowing through his veins, but Hi-Tech Automotive service manager Matthew Silva does have a blood-bond with the business. So much so that he likes to joke that his start date is the same as the one on his birth certificate.
“Everybody asks, ‘How long have you been working in a shop?’ and since I’m 28, I say, ‘Well, 28 years and they kinda look at me funny,” he says.
Matthew’s dad, Mario Silva, has been in the auto repair business since he graduated in 1989 from Red River College’s Apprentice Motor Vehicle Mechanic program (now Automotive Technician) with his Red Seal certification. For the past 24 years, he’s owned and operated Hi-Tech Automotive in Thompson, where Matthew, a 2017 graduate of the same RRC program, spent a lot of quality time as a child playing in the fenced compound out back.
“The compound was almost a little circle and I had a little snowmobile and I would ride for hours and hours. [My dad] never really had to get a babysitter because he’d just bring me to work and I would do my own thing in the back and check on what my Dad and the guys were doing – seeing and learning” Matthew says.
“From such a young age, I saw first-hand my dad’s work ethic and the fact that he is always willing to do what it takes to get it done the right way, no matter what.”
Always a good student, Matthew says his high school teachers encouraged him to go to university rather than take up a trade, but he found that jobs were scarce in his preferred field — designing snowmobiles and other recreational vehicles — and that he would have had to move away from home and family to pursue those interests.
“If I’d have known then what I know now, I would have gone to Red River College immediately,” Matthew says. “The hands-on and the actual applicable knowledge that the instructors had was amazing to me. I found tremendous respect for every single instructor I had there. They’ve definitely been there, done that — you ask them a question, they’ve come across it.” Read More →