You are what you market

April 1, 2014
In 2002, the Fujarski family — father Larry, sons Karl and Nate — bought Shores Car Care in St. Clair Shores, Mich. 
You might assume opening a repair shop post-Sept. 11 would have been risky; opening said shop in metropolitan Detroit during an economic downturn perhaps more so.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

In 2002, the Fujarski family — father Larry, sons Karl and Nate — bought Shores Car Care in St. Clair Shores, Mich.

“I think in retrospect it was probably the worst time we could have gotten started,” admits Nate Fujarski. “Basically we just tried to position ourselves; my father and brother both had extensive dealership backgrounds (Larry as an assistant service manager with Buick, Karl as a lead VW/Audi technician), so we went with the professionalism and appearance.”

It had been an existing business, so they had a “bit of a database” from which to work, Fujarski says.

“In the beginning, we created some marketing campaigns to introduce ourselves to current clients, but it took a couple of years to really establish a direction through trial and error,” he adds. “And we realized that what you market is what you get: If you market something very low and inexpensive, you’re going to get just those people that want low and inexpensive. So we tried to toe the line between high and low, and positioned ourselves right in the middle.”

They had the German marques as a base, which they expanded by recruiting technicians, but things really started coming together after the Fujarskis began networking with Top 20 groups. “That really helped us develop a better structure,” notes Fujarski. “We were able to bounce some ideas off these guys, not to mention we could learn from their mistakes.”

Key to that structure was developing a procedural book.

“I think when you reach the volume we’re at, around $1 million a year, there has to be structure — from point A to point Z, from our customer service representatives, to our service advisors, to our technicians,” says Fujarski. “It’s a big puzzle; we took bits and pieces from people who were doing a portion of those things, and just refined it to our business needs. It is by far one of the best moves that we’ve made, because it allows everybody to know where everybody is at any one time.”

The system also allows the management team to see clearly where a breakdown is and to attack a problem quickly. “Developing our process took us a couple of years of accessing and putting that into black and white,” Fujarski recalls. “We feel that we have done our homework to make sure that this process is wired. Of course things will change, and we’ll make those adjustments. We always solicit feedback, and we put that in our Monday staff meetings. We empower our staff. We want them to run the facility, because they’re the people that make or break us.”

Should a problem involve obtaining a particular tool for a particular vehicle, they’ll immediately do so. “We never want to turn a job away,” Fujarski affirms. “We have a great rapport with our tool vendors to make sure that if we don’t have a tool available, they’ll get it to us; we’ve been overnighted tools numerous times to get the job done.”

“It may seem like a one-time hit, a big expense to get a particular job done,” adds Karl Fujarski. “However, it also opens up more opportunities for the particular vehicle that required the tool. There have been shops in the area that realized they didn’t have the necessary equipment to do a particular job, and they’ve actually sent those customers to us. We’ve got our footprint in this area; people know that even though they may be at a different shop, if that shop isn’t able to get the job done they’ll farm them out to us.”

That footprint also extends to their web presence. “When Facebook first came out, we thought, just as many businesses did, that it would be a great selling tool,” Nate Fujarski reports. “But for us, Twitter and Facebook have been more of a way to just stay in front of the public and make sure we’re on top when they think about repairs; once a week we post and send out a Tweet. That’s where we’ve taken our social media presence, and we’re actually having a new website built. It will be a little more interactive, and online tools like scheduling are awesome because it’s such an automated world these days — nobody really talks on the phone anymore!”

The past few years also have seen nearby Detroit go through it worst economic downturn yet. “I would say it’s definitely had an impact,” states Nate. “But we have provided a product that we think is good and is going to be here a long time, and I think people respect that. It’s always been a price-driven industry and always will be, but where we try to separate ourselves is with honesty and integrity.”

And there are plans for expansion. Because their father spends part of the year down in Florida, the Fujarskis are looking at facilities down there to purchase, as well as possibly another shop in Michigan. “The goal has always been three shops, there being one for each of us,” Nate explains. “We are very conscious of where we’ll go and what we’ll do, but we want to make sure that our home base is secured and it’s wired, meaning it operates 100 percent by itself, before we dive into the next venture. It’s a journey; there are a lot of things out there that we could jump into, but it’s just not the right fit yet.

“We’ve reached a point in our sales that a lot of shops haven’t,” he concludes. “And of the ones that have, I want to stress that a lot of the shops out there doing $2 million include car sales, body work, etc. We are solely a repair facility; there is no other revenue that we generate. That million-dollar plateau, that’s a good feather in our cap.” 

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