People Places & Racing News

Retailer Spotlight: Kaizen Tuning

By SEMA Editors

Seven years ago, Scott McIver took a big gamble right in the middle of the recession: He opened Kaizen Tuning, specializing in high-end retail aftermarket sales, fabrication and dyno tuning in Boxborough, Massachusetts.

“It was brutal, but we really saw a need,” he recalled. “I took delivery of one of the first Nissan GTRs on the East Coast. I’ve been to Japan many times and have seen how that car is treated over there. You don’t even need an appointment at a Nissan dealership for service. Here in the United States, [the dealership] didn’t really know how to handle a $100,000 supercar. They were treating it like a Sentra or a Maxima. That wasn’t going to work for me, so I started servicing it out of my home garage. After we were probably a month in, I had about five of them in my driveway. My wife told me it was about time to find someplace to do the business full time.”

McIver has seen his gamble pay off. Today, Kaizen Tuning has grown to a 10,000-sq.-ft. enterprise employing 10 highly skilled people, with sales topping $1 million annually. The retailer is well known throughout the New England area for its expertise in high-performance sports cars, starting with the Nissan GTR and Mitsubishi EVO and including Porsche, Subaru and Audi platforms, among many others.