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For some folks, the easiest and most direct path is not always the most interesting one. For truck and SUV owners who live near Broomfield, Colo., Off Road Innovations (ORI) and Twizted Engineering is a favorite pit stop. If owner Darren Castine can’t get what his customers need for “the road less taken,” he fabricates it for them.

The dealership caters to the thriving off-road community on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains near Boulder. Like many fledgling businesses, the dealership endured the growing pains of acquiring shop equipment, setting the store, getting displays and inventory, finding customers and the all-important aspect of mastering cash flow. While those aspects of the Broomfield ORI are probably common to any business owner, what makes this two-service-bay shop unique is the route Castine took to becoming a business owner.

As a teenager in Athol, Mass., Castine’s first vehicle was a 1979 Chevy ¾-ton pick-up. Modifying his pick-up soon transitioned into fixing, building and modifying many of his friend’s vehicles. And while a knack for knuckle-busting and wrench-turning would eventually lead to his own business, college took Castine in another direction.

Castine decided to study engineering with a focus on robotics. This required a mechanical and electrical engineering education. Eventually, he graduated from Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston with a bachelor of science in electro-mechanical engineering. The degree steered him even further from a career utilizing his passion for vehicles. Castine worked several years as an engineer designing water control gates for dams. When the high-tech sector took a nose dive, Castine found himself unemployed and dissatisfied with the direction his life had taken.

It took a brief vacation to Colorado and an ad in the back of an off-road magazine for Castine to realize what he wanted to do with his future.

“While I was laid off and looking for a new job, I came across this business opportunity to start your own off road shop in the back of one of the four-wheeler magazines. I had just come out to Colorado for a three- or four-day vacation because of the four-wheeling that was out here,” Castine says. “So I went back home, gave it some serious thought and then left everybody I knew, everything I knew and cashed in everything I had, including the retirement I had been building over the last three years. I moved to Colorado and opened Off Road Innovations.”