Even though Carl Cimino had been in the collision repair business for years, he felt completely unprepared when he opened his first body shop in March of 1982. “My desk was a cardboard box with a phone on top, and I was sitting on a bucket—that literally was my first day,” he says. He was also on his own after working with his brother off and on for several years.
Cimino started in the collision repair business at age 15, when he landed a painting gig at the car dealership where his brother Chuck worked as general manager. But the younger Cimino wasn’t interested in making body repair his career and enrolled in college on an ROTC scholarship. After a while he decided to drop out and return to the automotive industry. By then his brother was running his own business, and Cimino took over as manager of the 15,000-sq.-ft. body shop in Philadelphia.
It was a crash course in body shop management, and Cimino continues to draw on this experience today. “When I left college, I was about 21 or 22 and I was managing men who were double my age, and I learned then that they were an asset and they had to be treated like an asset,” he says. He worked hard to earn the respect of body technicians and credits this experience with the high retention rate in his current shops.
This early collaboration lasted five years, until the brothers had a falling out. So Carl Cimino opened his own shop—Cimino Complete Auto Center, a small, 2,000-sq.-ft. shop in a rented building in northeast Philadelphia.
Just two years later he’d gained enough experience to open a second site on about 1.5 acres of land in Bucks County, on the current site of Cimino’s Collision Express. “When I bought it in 1984, I didn’t use the whole property,” he explains. “There were two other tenants in parts of the garage, and then, over the course of the next two years, I didn’t renew the leases of the tenants and eventually took over the whole property.”
Expanding his business required a shift in priorities for Cimino. “One of the first challenges when I was a single shop owner was making that transition from being involved and hands-on working on repairs to being able to hire someone to write estimates and deal with the customers and begin to back out of that process a bit,” Cimino says. “That was a big mistake for me. I made a few mistakes with personnel, and I had to regroup a bit … and the same thing is true with multiple locations. Fortunately I have my brother as a partner in three of the shops.”
The Cimino brothers reunited in 1997. That year Carl Cimino was considering buying an auto body shop in Delaware. It was a great opportunity but far from his Pennsylvania base, and he realized he might have a logistical problem on his hands if he didn’t find help running the business. So he talked it over with his old mentor, his brother, who had a private plane and lived closer to the potential location. The two went in together and purchased the 10,000-sq.-ft. Blue Hen Auto Body in Dover, Del. Two years later they partnered again to purchase the 10,000-sq.-ft. shop that is now Brookside Collision Express in Brownstown, Pa. and, finally, the 6,000-sq.-ft. Richboro Collision Express in 2002.
“Three of our shops are 100 miles apart, which is kind of a logistical nightmare, but they were tremendous opportunities, and they have turned out to be successes,” Cimino says. The reason: a strong partnership between Carl and Chuck Cimino that draws on each brother’s strengths.
The Ciminos appoint managers at each location who conform to their management style and philosophy. They also have standard operating procedures on the shop floor and use the same technology in each shop—this allows them to move technicians between shops, depending on workflow. “We’re both hands-on managers,” Chuck Cimino explains. “Obviously, with four locations, two of us can’t be in four locations at once. It’s very important to have that key person at each location that you can count on. Every day we spend at one of the four shops, and we’re on the phone with all the others.”
At two of the locations Carl Cimino handles the vendor and insurance relationships, and at the other two, Chuck does. Today the brothers are in charge of 33,000 total square feet and 40 employees, and their business is thriving. Chuck Cimino says the two are lucky because their strengths complement each other, but admits that “sometimes families can work together, and sometimes they can’t.”