About Us

My name is Jerry Heirigs, founder and co-owner of J&M Auto Service, alongside my bride of 40 years, Mary Ellen. We are proud parents to two sons: Joshua and his wife Rachel, who live in Stewartville, MN, with our beloved grandchildren — Jack and sweet Molly Joy. Our youngest, Jeremy, lives in Sioux Falls, SD, where he works as an outside salesman for the wholesale division of J&M Transmission.

I am a South Dakota farm boy, I am one of 7 children, we grew up raising cattle and pigs on a large farm, we learned how to work hard and work as a team. I have been in the Auto repair industry for over 40 years, and a shop owner for 30 years.

When I decided to pursue a career as a mechanic, I always had it in the back of my mind to own my own shop. Probably because growing up, we worked for ourselves. My parents worked the farm and the kids helped out.

I went to trade school, they did a good job of laying a foundation to build on. But I always knew the real knowledge would come from working the job. So I worked in a variety of jobs, from fixing farm tractors and construction equipment, but I found my niche when I started to fix automatic transmissions. I found great satisfaction in taking something as complex as an automatic transmission apart, fixing it, upgrading it and having it work like a dream on the test drive.

That is why the company was started as a specialty transmission shop. As time went on, we needed to fix all of the other parts of the vehicle that affected how the transmission worked. From there it just made sense to fix and maintain the entire vehicle.

So now we are a full service repair shop.