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King Collision Opens 4th Shop, 2nd in Boardman
BOARDMAN, Ohio -- A 40,000-square-foot repair and reconditioning shop along Market Street simply wasn’t large enough for King Collision to handle the rise in rear-enders, dings, sideswipes and other mishaps to vehicles that occur everyday in the Mahoning Valley.
As the accident rate rose, so too did the need for additional space at King Collision, which formally opened its fourth shop in the region at 5801 Southern Blvd., Monday afternoon.
“We’ve been looking into expanding, and this building came up for sale,” said Doug Fenstermaker, owner of King. The company renovated the offices, cleaned the shop and modified some of the equipment to accommodate overflow from its other Boardman shop at 8020 Market St. “It’s hard to believe, but we’ve outgrown our Market Street store. We could not keep up. It’s pretty exciting,” he said.
King hosted a ribbon cutting at the new shop, inaugurating the start of business today. The company took the occasion to present a $5,000 check to the United Way of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley.
The new shop is 10,000 square feet and should employ between eight and 10, Fenstermaker reported. Once this shop is fully staffed, King should boast roughly 100 employees among its shops in Boardman, Warren and Hubbard.
The company, in business 27 years, has built long-standing relationships with automobile dealers, insurance companies and individual clients who rely on quick, efficient and quality service, Fenstermaker said. “They keep coming back, or they keep telling their friends and families,” he elaborated. “We just do collision repair, so we don’t do any rust work or restoration work or anything like that.”
Fenstermaker said the focus is on getting a vehicle in for repairs and out as quickly as possible. “Everybody needs their car,” he remarked, “so we focus on cycle time.”
That could be as short as overnight to a couple of weeks, depending on the damage done to the car, the type of vehicle, or the availability of parts, noted Mike Sicilian, general manager of the Boardman operations. “It can depend whether it’s a foreign car, a domestic car,” he said. “It just depends.”
Sicilian said that the shop gets “a little bit of everything,” ranging from sleek, speedy cars, such as Vipers, to everyday passenger vehicles.
The new address is also a “go-green” shop, Fenstermaker emphasized, meaning that the company now uses only water-based paint in its repairs. On average, King repairs about 7,000 vehicles a year among its four shops.
“It’s been extremely busy, especially the way the Boardman, Poland, Canfield area has just grown,” he said. “There are more people coming into the area, so there are going to be more cars and more accidents. So, that’s what we’re here for.”
Pictured: Cutting the ribbon are Ken Garland, Kevin Dougherty, Gene Ghinda, Mark Pitzer, Doug Fenstermaker (company owner), Sherri Bendon, Jim Edwards, Mike Sicilian, Matt Fullerton and Diane Karlin.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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