Published May 2001

Auto-body shop grows tenfold with new facility

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

Charlie Cruzen is a details man. And he runs his business, Charlie’s State Avenue Collision 1, as a details man would: with an eye to the “little extras” that make for satisfied customers.

For example, after a customer’s car has been repaired and painted, washed and vacuumed, a rose is placed on the driver’s seat. It’s Cruzen’s way of brightening the day of a person who has just been through a trying ordeal.

“A collision, along with being a horrible experience, disrupts a person’s life,” said Cruzen, whose shop has about 40 vehicles being worked on at any given time. “We deal with it every day, but we try to remember what the customer is going through.”

This philosophy is apparent throughout Cruzen’s newly constructed, $3 million facility, which replaced the old metal building Charlie’s was operating in at 9015 State Ave.

The 30,000 square feet of covered floor space, about 10 times the size of the old shop, includes an area for estimates in which customers drive into a covered, well-lit area. That way, Cruzen said, they don’t have to deal with the weather while walking into the office.

Charlie’s also includes an office with modem hookups for “roving insurance adjusters” so that customers and their insurance companies can meet face to face in comfort, Cruzen said.

“We decided in doing this to look more toward the future,” said Cruzen, who opened the Marysville shop in 1984. “The trend is that insurance companies are getting away from drive-in centers” for insurance adjustments.

“What we’ve really tried to do for customers as well as insurance companies is reduce the cycle time, the down time,” he said. “People are so dependent on their cars.”

To reduce a car’s down time, Charlie’s employs state-of-the-art equipment, including paint booths that shorten the paint’s bake time and short-wave infrared lights that enable the paint to be cured in a nine-minute cycle vs. overnight, Cruzen said.

But he points out that he and his staff of 18 won’t cut corners to reduce down time.

“Everything we do is handcrafted,” Cruzen said. “There are no shortcuts.”

And there are no shortcuts when it comes to workplace safety, either, said Cruzen, whose eye for detail included making sure every auto-body technician’s stall had a hoist and that the air, whether in the paint shop, body shop or sanding station, was well-ventilated with systems activated to keep fumes and dust away from workers.

And then there are the numerous sprinkler systems working in conjunction with fire monitoring systems.

“We spared no expense with safety,” Cruzen said.

Plans for the new shop got under way about three years ago, with construction starting a year and a half ago, said Cruzen, who bought an adjacent lot and tore down an old house to give him 49,000 square feet of space to work with.

“In 1990, I think we could have filled it,” said Cruzen, whose shop joined with Collision 1 more than a decade ago in order to give his business some advertising power.

For more information, call Cruzen at 360-653-3094 or visit the company’s Web site, www.collision1.com/marysville.html.

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