Can you imagine opening a new car dealership? How about in California? Now, imagine it’s mostly for diesel trucks? Sound hard? For Bushra Salman, it sounded like a challenge.
Bushra is originally from the LA area, but after living in Texas for seven years, she and her husband realized that there was something to this whole diesel truck thing. “We never really paid much attention to them living in LA,” she says with a laugh. “They’re just so big and noisy and stuff. But living in Texas is a whole different ball game. People out there love them like they love their kids. It’s a big part of the lifestyle. If you don’t have a big truck, it’s like, ‘Who are you?’”
Loving That Diesel Life
Bushra has a background in real estate management, as well as a few start-ups and small businesses, but her husband had dealt with car dealerships and they both came to see what a good business the diesel truck industry was. “These diesel trucks are so durable and they last for so long. It’s nothing like any other kind of used car. We’ve seen some go up to 1,000,000 miles, if you take care of them. I just fell in love with what they brought to people. Everyone that had a diesel truck was always busy on the weekend, camping and fishing and doing all this exciting stuff with their families. Coming from LA, it was a different culture for us. We just fell in love with them as trucks.”
She always wanted to move back to California, and when the opportunity presented itself to come to Orange County and start a car dealership, she took it. There was just one little snag. “I was thinking diesel trucks, but my partner was thinking a regular car dealership,” she says. “At that time, this was eight years ago in 2010, they didn’t know yet that this was even a thing. We didn’t see eye to eye, so within a month and a half, I bought him out and just started my own vision.” That vision became OC Autos.
Top Of The Heap
Bushra founded OC Autos in 2010 and while it started out as, in her words, a mom-and-pop- type shop, it quickly became much, much more than that. OC Autos is not only the premier diesel truck dealership in southern California, but for much of the western US as well. A lot of that is due to her insistence on providing the highest possible quality in the vehicles they offer, but she also points to a very simple reason: integrity. “If I tell a customer that they’re going to get a certain thing, that’s what they’re going to get,” Bushra says. “People know we have a ‘moral’ warranty, I guess you can call it.”
Getting to this point hasn’t been without its risks, though. She says, “It was kind of a gamble, especially for someone like me. It was hard being taken seriously the first few years because I’m a woman. A lot of times people would walk in thinking I’m the secretary, or ‘Where’s your daddy?’ A lot of that kind of vibe. Now it’s different. I took a huge gamble to go from a mom-and-pop to this, because there was no in-between. I’m glad I did!”