Author
Shane Brewster
Founder & Automotive Electrical Specialist
The Problem I Kept Seeing
Everyone was guessing. I built a process.
When I started jump starting cars professionally, I noticed something immediately: nobody had a process. Not consumers. Not roadside companies. Not even AAA. Everyone showed up, connected cables, and hoped for the best.
The result was predictable — failed jump starts followed by unnecessary tows. I would regularly arrive at calls where another service had already declared the car "needs a tow," only to get it started within minutes. Not because I had better equipment. Because I was following an actual diagnostic process instead of guessing.
That's when I realized something that became the foundation of everything I built:
You should never have to tow a car that's having a battery-related problem.
If the underlying issue is the battery — whether it's dead or bad — a proper jump start works 100% of the time. There's no such thing as "too dead to jump." That's not how the science works. I set out to prove that, and I did.
From side gig to professional enterprise
What started as a way to make extra money became a company built on a single principle: follow the process, and the jump start works every time.
Having a process doesn't just mean you succeed — it means when something is off, you can identify it immediately. Every step is a checkpoint. When you're guessing, everything is ambiguous. When you're following a process, the anomaly reveals itself.
I started perfecting how I communicated this to consumers. Plenty of people would call and say they'd been trying for hours, or that another company told them they needed a tow. Within minutes of arriving, I could see exactly where they went wrong — not because I was guessing better than they were, but because I was fact-checking what was happening on-site against a systematic process.
As the company scaled, I hired technicians and trained them on the same methodology. For the first time, there was a roadside company that followed a strict, repeatable process for every single jump start. That's what made us different.
Field to Boardroom
I didn't enter this industry from a boardroom. I entered it from the roadside.
Many leaders in the roadside assistance space come from operations management, technology, or finance — and those perspectives are valuable. My path was different: I started at 2am on the side of the road, diagnosing batteries in parking lots and on highway shoulders, learning the business one jump start at a time. That ground-level experience shaped how I think about every part of the industry.
First to market: roadside assistance for college students
In 2018, I founded Campus Roadside — the first company to identify that colleges and universities needed dedicated roadside assistance and the first to brand and operationalize it. The company formally partnered with Florida State University and ran a successful program for half a decade, collecting thousands of data points on the next generation of drivers.
Since then, others have entered the campus roadside space — which is a good sign that the market is real. What I've found is that the programs that succeed tend to be led by people who understand the on-site realities: how failure modes differ across vehicle types, why a one-size-fits-all dispatch model breaks down at the campus level, and what students actually need when they're stranded. That field knowledge was my starting point, and it's what made Campus Roadside work from day one.
That field-first foundation changed everything about how I made decisions as I scaled. When I built systems, they were based on thousands of real-world data points — not market research decks. When I trained technicians, the training came from patterns I'd personally identified across every vehicle type, battery condition, and failure mode. When I made strategic business decisions, they were grounded in operational reality, not assumptions.
That's a rare combination in this industry. And the market is starting to validate it.
The industry is consolidating — and that's exciting.
Private equity firms and experienced technology leaders are now investing heavily in roadside assistance, bringing capital and scale to an industry that practitioners like me have known for years is underserved by technology and ripe for process-driven transformation. That convergence of operational expertise and strategic investment is exactly what this space needs — and it's where my experience adds the most value.
From Campus Roadside to the field to building a company — that trajectory gave me the ability to see the entire value chain — from the moment a driver turns their key and gets silence, to why the advice they Googled didn't work. I've personally touched every link in that chain. And that's exactly why I built the guides on this site: so the process that worked 5,000+ times on the roadside can work for you in your driveway.
What I Learned From 5,000+ Jumps
The insights that most guides get wrong
Dead battery ≠ bad battery
Consumers would constantly say "my battery is dead, I need to replace it." I would tell them: your phone battery is dying right now — you're not going to Apple to replace the entire battery. Car batteries work the same way. The charge level goes up and down. What determines whether you actually need a replacement isn't the charge — it's the health.
Health is the lifespan — how much life that battery has left. Charge is how much energy is in it right now. Energy can be recharged, no different than humans. That analogy resonated with consumers every single time.
Why a jump box beats jumper cables
Here's what most people don't realize: if the host car is already running, there are plenty of situations where jumper cables aren't providing a true jump start. It depends on the math.
A jumper cable isn't a jump start device — it's a connection device. You're connecting car A to car B, but car A has uncontrolled variables: what type of car is it? Does it meet the CCA requirements of car B? What output level is it actually operating at? With a portable jump starter, you're in a controlled environment. You know exactly what output you're dealing with. That's why I always recommend a jump box over cables for consumers.
Walking consumers through it over the phone
I got to the point where I could walk someone through an entire jump start over the phone. They'd call saying they needed a tow because they "already tried" to jump it. But did a professional actually try? Did they follow a process? In most cases, no — and that's exactly why it didn't work.
Why I Built This Site
Scaling expertise beyond the roadside
After thousands of calls, I realized the biggest impact I could make wasn't showing up one car at a time — it was putting the process online so anyone could follow it. Every guide on this site is built from the same methodology I developed in the field and trained my technicians on.
JumpMyCar.com exists because most jump start content on the internet is written by people who've never held a set of cables under pressure. I have. And now the same process that gave me a 100% success rate across 5,000+ vehicles is available to anyone with a dead battery and a phone.