A heartfelt enterprise

It's all there, emblazoned on the business section’s front page of the Feb 3, 2006, edition of the Fort Collins Coloradoan: "Family business' roots run deep."

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Since 1952, three generations of Houskas have serviced the cars, pickups and heavy-duty trucks of this city near the Wyoming border. Starting with patriarch Chuck, Houska Automotive Services has grown from a two-bay business to a 25-bay, 25-employee enterprise currently under son Dennis, who started off sweeping the floors at age 9. They have won “Best Family Business” in the local paper’s Best of Fort Collins five years in a row — no mean feat in a municipality of 144,000.

A truly comprehensive repair shop, besides being able to repair nearly all domestic and foreign cars (even orphan brands like Checker and Yugo are listed on their website) Houska is capable of handling considerable commercial work, including diesel diagnosis and repair, mobile fleet tire service, muffler and radiator repair; they even have a Mustang chassis dynamometer to test performance gains.

To handle these myriad duties, the team of 15 technicians is divided into six service writers, two parts personnel, five service techs and two accountants. Their fleet of eight free loaner cars and one shuttle help customers maintain busy schedules.

Significant acreage behind the shop allows room for a multitude of vehicles, including many motorhomes, and many areas like suspension, transmission, emissions; drive train, brakes, steering, wheels/tires. All of their work is guaranteed for 36 months/36,000 miles. For the latter, the shop has time-saving devices like Hunter’s on-car brake lathe, the TC3700 tire mount for handling high performance tires and wheels, the Road Force GSP9700 which measures radial and lateral tire forces, and the Hunter WA 140 cordless alignment unit, which has a color printer to provide spec reports for the customer.

As a NAPA Service Center and ACDelco distributor, Houska can

warranty parts for two years, participating in programs like the former’s Car Care and the latter’s Total Service Support (TSS), receiving 2 and 4 percent rebates. Along with warranty assistance, prompt and accurate delivery to the technicians is assured, while the use of RO Writer “provides supplier-smart ordering directly to parts stores,” says Houska. “Labor and parts are chosen and ordered with (each) purchase order, invoices are posted in-system, (along with) daily inventory control of fluids and hard parts.”

Besides servicing everything from Smart Cars to Freightliners and Peterbilts, or anything else with wheels (and sometimes without), Houska recently purchased a Goodyear franchise to compliment their other tire brands, initiating the Very Good Year Club to accompany it. With drawings held the first of every month, club members are eligible to win gift cards and prizes from an assortment of local vendors, retailers and restaurants, as well invitations to exclusive events.

Dennis Houska can create a program like this because of his “deep roots” in the Fort Collins business community, due in no small part to his fundraising activities. Since becoming a bone marrow donor for an ailing California boy in 1995, Houska has made this treatment for leukemia a “cause celebre,” holding annual fund raising events around holidays like Halloween (a blood drive) and Memorial Day (a 5K run). As a licensed courier with the National Morrow Donor Program, he transports bone marrow all over the country on a week‘s notice. He even participated in a 4,500-mile cross-country bicycle trek in 2004 to help raise awareness for the bone marrow registry.

Such attention to community affairs are displayed in other ways as well. The shop has gone green by recycling coolants and oil, burning the latter in special heaters during the winter, buying electricity from wind farms to power their lifts, installing low-watt lighting and additional sky lights for illumination, and upgrading their hybrid Toyota Prius shuttle almost exclusively to plug-in electrical use.

In terms of producing income, they are converting fleet vehicles to “dual-use” systems; bio-fuel for diesel, electric generators for gas.

This year Houska Automotive is commemorating its sixth decade in typically altruistic style: celebrating 60 years in business by completing 60 Acts of Kindness (which they actually exceeded).

“Our 60th Act of Kindness was a donation to the American Red Cross for Disaster Relief following the High Park Fire,” explains Houska, regarding one of the fires that recently ravaged portions of Colorado.

To cap off this celebration they helped promote a free concert on the campus of Fort Collins’ own Colorado State University, donating a vehicle to a Project Self-Sufficiency participant during the intermission. This is something the shop does every year, giving a car to a family in need.

Meanwhile the Houskas continually challenge other automotive businesses to donate as well, some of whom are following through.

Other programs the shop hosts includes Taxman specials around April and a women’s car care clinic, a free class held in March and September. Dennis’ son L.J., or Little John, so named because there once was a plethora of Johns working at the shop, is a co-owner of the shop along with his parents, helps oversee these classes. Mom Noreen handles the books, or as Dennis puts it, “has the most important job.” All three manage the marvelous staff, the shop and its environs, maintaining the quality established by Chuck Houska’s “legendary legacy to care for all our customer’s cars.”

So just keep in mind the next time you’re on a plane next to a jovial goateed man carrying a small cooler; you might have just encountered Dennis Houska on his latest mission of mercy. Protocol dictates he keep a low profile; just whisper a small thank you.

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