All Around the Town, Dee's Has Your Car Covered

“Ready?” asks Frank Durantino with a bit of a laugh. “Are you ever ready? My parents even took out a second mortgage on our Bloomfield house.”

Durantino was looking back to 1997, when the Dee’s Shell service station location he had previously worked as an auto mechanic for on the corner of Darling and Kingsland Avenues in Nutley was up for sale. He had been a mechanic there for roughly four years, but had left. “I knew that I didn’t want to work on someone else’s car unless it was for myself.”

So the 1989 Bloomfield High School graduate and fireman of 17 years bought – with his parents’ before mentioned aid – Dee’s Shell. Within a few years, he’d paid his parents back. “Every dime I made went toward my parents’ second mortgage.” He then laughs, recalling the night before he officially took ownership. “I was lying on the bed in my parent’s house, looking up at the ceiling, and asked, ‘How…?”

Durantino was successful right away at the location, where he doubled gas sales and the garage went from very little business to substantial, and that led to his opening a second Dee’s location, the current Dee’s Auto in Bloomfield at 211 Watching Avenue. He eventually sold the Darling and Kingsland station and, in July of 2008, bought an existing service station at 19 Beach Street and named it Dee’s JFK Service. He was, once again, a two service station owner.

“And here,” he said proudly as he sat in the Beach Street office, “we doubled gas sales and the garage service quadrupled.”

Both locations are AAA and NAPA Auto Part recommended repair facilities and official New Jersey vehicle inspection stations, and employ ASE Certified technicians that can service both domestic and foreign vehicles. What Dee’s does best is educate its technicians on the newest technology (there are a variety of computers at both sites), focuses on excellent customer service, and fosters keeping relationships. With regard to the education, “The world is evolving at such a fast rate, moving at such a breakneck pace. If you’re not – when we say we can’t change – you become a dinosaur.”

And that comes with doing the job right, forging relationships. “We just don’t need a customer for today,” says Durantino, whose station locations are right off the Garden State Parkway are sometimes pivotal to travelers who break down in addition to regular customers, “but for a lifetime. And the more volume you do, you open yourself up to more complaints and praise.”

“We try to be as competitive as possible, and do the best job as possible all the time.”

All this comes with the territory, and Durantino accepts it, and he credits his work ethic, implanted in him by his dad, Frank Sr., and his family support group.

Dee’s Auto and Dee’s JFK Service also are very community minded. The Watchung station services all the Saint Thomas Parish nuns' cars, and Dee’s also sponsors the Policeman’s Benevolent Association Annual Golf Outing and Bloomfield Recreation Department girls softball teams.

Dee's Auto, 211 Watchung Avenue, (973) 893-9191

Dee's JFK Service, 19 Beach Street, (973) 748-8873

http://www.deesautoservice.com/