Despite being more low-key than celebrity car hosts like the passionate Richard Rawlings or the complex Chip Foose, Dan Short of FantomWorks has done quite well for himself. The owner of DRS Automotive Fantomworks, the auto repair place out of Norfolk, Virginia, is worth a cool $3.5 million.

Now, of course all that money hasn’t come strictly from his autobody shop. While he does excellent work, he also had a fantastic show on Velocity TV, eponymously named after his shop, that went on for eight seasons from 2013 to 2019. Many fans proclaimed that it was a cool, down to earth show that offered a lot of stuff that other car shows didn’t.

And the cool thing about Dan Short is that he’s a pretty fascinating figure. While mostly known for his car stuff, he’s had a life full of adventures and pursuits that we’ll touch on. At the end of the day, though, the man is a car guy first, and he fell in love with cars ever since spotting a 1967 Camaro in his youth.

He didn’t have the money to restore his used Camaro as a teenager, so he taught himself how to do it, and the rest is history…

Serving His Country

Dan Short with Army shirt
via Twitter

One claim to fame that many other notorious and well-liked car show hosts can’t make is that they served their country. Well, Dan Short did—in spectacular fashion, no less. At the young age of 17, he enlisted in the Army in 1979. He was a Green Beret for the US Army Special Forces and was deployed a lot.

But while he served on the medicine and weapons teams, he was always thinking about cars. As he told Earn the Necklace, “The guys would always give me a hard time because I would show up to work with grease under my fingernails, and people would look at me like, ‘You can’t do medicine with grease on your hands.’”

But all that time in the Army gave Dan Short a remarkable work ethic that he carried on later into his life. After all, he spent nearly a quarter of a century in the armed forces—eight years apiece as a Staff Sergeant in Special Operations, an Apache Helicopter pilot/test pilot, and a Major/Program Manager in Special Operations.

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Founded DRS Automotive In 2006

Dan Short leaning
via The Virginian-Pilot

Dan took classes in body paint and hung out in repair shops as a youth, while learning the trade and lending a helping hand. He bought his first car at 19, that ’67 Chevy Camaro he always wanted.

“As I went along in my military career, I realized I wanted to do something different, and I started having an inkling of creating my own company,” he told Pilot Online. “It’s one thing to build cars as a hobby. It’s another thing to run 75 cars at a time through a business.”

In 2006, he founded DRS Automotive, his own car restoration company. Soon, it expanded to manufacturing some parts. “We both manufacture many parts for cars as well as assemble many parts for cars. That’s really where we’re very different. Very few shops have the capability of manufacturing parts.”

He quickly got some big clients with big wallets thanks to his expertise. People didn’t seem to mind Dan building them cars from scratch, and he has the know-how to fabricate parts that might be rare or practically impossible to get elsewhere.

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FantomWorks On Velocity TV

Dan Short FantomWorks
via Scribd

Seven years after starting his business, FantomWorks first aired on Velocity TV. It quickly became popular with gearheads because of its down-to-earth atmosphere.

Obviously, the show helped skyrocket Dan’s revenue and income, not just because of the popularity of it, but also because clients came swarming to his shop because of the show.

Dan was earning a salary through Velocity TV somewhere around $10,000 to $50,000 per episode (according to Earn the Necklace), and after eight seasons… that adds up to a lot of scratch. Add to that the success of his own business, and that’s how Dan came to have a net worth of $3.5 million.

But no restoration place is perfect, and at one point, Dan almost lost it all…

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Lawsuit Almost Killed His Company

FantomWorks crew
via Radio Times

In 2012, before FantomWorks even aired, there was a defamation lawsuit aimed at Dan Short, levied by one of his former clients. The client alleged fraud and dragged him to court, saying Dan was shady and a liar and that his business practices were illegal.

This was all over a $2,000 car part price for a 1960 Ford Thunderbird that Short bought for $6,000 instead, which left the client feeling cheated.

Luckily, Short won the verdict and had his name cleared, and he would go on to have great success. He even filed a defamation countersuit later, but it was dismissed.

To think that it all could have come crashing down before his massive success has to give Dan Brown (and his bank account) a big smile when he considers his trials and tribulations!

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