Family-owned shop thrives in pastoral New Jersey

Pronounced “Bonnie,” the shop was started in 1999 and is still run by its founder, Dan Boni, Sr., who earned his stripes as a manager at a tire store chain before deciding to go into business for himself. To build a foundation in the Flemington community, he launched an advertising campaign emphasizing that his was a locally owned and operated business.

“I hire local people, and my money wasn’t going back into some corporation somewhere,” Boni explains. “My prices don’t have to be as high as some other shops because I don’t have a corporate office that I have to pay. And if you have a problem with your car, you see me, the owner. If you don’t see me, you’ll see my two sons.”

Boni started off by renting a 3-bay gas station. “I was there for about 9 years, and I got so busy I had to hire more people,” he recalls. “I didn’t have enough room so I did a build out at a strip mall and now I’ve got 7 bays, five employees, plus my two sons who run the counter as well as the store when I’m not around.”

While Boni sought an independent atmosphere, he did take one thing away from his time with the chain. “They were always training the store managers, training the employees,” he recounts. “They had a center down at the corporate office where they had whole shops set up where they’d teach up-and-coming stuff. That was instilled in me, so when I opened my own business I did the same thing.”

Today Boni pursues a variety of classes through the normal channels…and some unanticipated ones. “The funny thing is,” he says, “the GM and Ford (dealers) just down the road from us are starting to get into it, and they’re actually encouraging us to attend their big classes—it’s only $30—which is pretty cool. They’ll teach about fuel injection, how to read the computers, how different sensors work and interact with things—we just recently learned how the sensors around the camshaft can get clogged up and throw everything off. They showed us how to diagnose that because I guess it doesn’t really throw up a code. And other cars would have that same problem.”

Besides the training, Boni has also invested in newer equipment. “We use the bolt-on technology to streamline servicing for customers, and we do a lot of the preventative maintenance and give the customer a list of what they’re going to need down the road. Say they have 60,000 miles on their car; we’ll tell them that their next servicing requires this, this and this. It works pretty well.”

What also might surprise you about rural New Jersey is that according to the state’s official website (http://www.state.nj.us/nj/about/things.html), the Garden State has more horses per square miles than any other state. Kentucky and Tennessee are free to question that stat, but for the auto repair industry this translates into the pickups that haul horses around in trailers.

“I’d say I do more of those and Suburbans than I do actual cars,” Boni notes, to which end he bought an extra-long 4-wheel Hunter alignment rack. “I actually have one guy who likes to do diesel stuff, so we send him to do a lot of training in that. We just did a diesel the other day where we had to take the whole cab off the frame in order to work on it. He can knock that out in about a day and half which isn’t too bad.”

They’re also experimenting with an online diagnostics center. “I guess we’re one of the first ones to do that,” considers Boni. “The people who do our website came up with that. Basically you put your symptoms down (in an email); if you’ve been to Advance Auto or Auto Zone for a trouble code, you can put that in. Then we’ll (text back) what your problem might be and roughly what the cost is to fix it. It sounds ok, but we haven’t had many people use it yet,” although some version of this could play a bigger role in the future.

Meanwhile they use Mitchell-On-Demand to track all their coupons. “If I don’t get a good pull, which in my opinion is a solid one percent, than I won’t do that advertising anymore” notes Boni. “My big is Money Mailer; I do very well with them. I’m around 2.5% return on them, which I think is a fantastic number in the grand scheme of things. But people out here are not big coupon (users), so I also advertise at the high school with the boosters and I put the banners up and stuff. At the elementary school near here I just bought a little over $1500 worth of school supplies for them. I donate that and they give me a little blurb on their school things for free.”

But is this type of marketing measurable? “Actually it is,” Boni maintains. “When customers come in, my sons and I ask how they heard of us. Word of mouth is huge in this area. Where I used to work, none of that translated to the way people are out here; it’s a whole different animal. These people want to be taken care of, spoken to, they want to understand. I’m a people person, I like dealing with people, solving problems.”

It should be noted that when translated from a particular term in Latin, ‘boni’ can mean ‘good men.’ Throw in a few good women, and you’ve got Boni Tire and Auto Service.