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Start with a former baby-food salesman, add his brother, a globe-touring professional ballet dancer, and what do you get? The perfect team to run a successful truck dealership.
Say what?
"They knew nothing about trucking," John Cerni, now president of Cerni Motor Sales Inc., says of his father, John, and his uncle, Charles, who started the company in 1961.
Actually, Cerni's father also worked for a time at Chrysler Corp. And, when the care and feeding of 10 children became a bit overwhelming for the wife of an on-the-road husband, he signed on at a local GMC Truck franchise. "Later, he had an opportunity to buy it," Cerni recalls.
He then called his brother Charles, who at the time was performing in Puerto Rico. "Uncle Charlie was getting older and wanted to come back to town," Cerni explains.
The brothers split day-to-day chores to take advantage of each brother's strengths. "Dealerships are really four separate businesses -- truck sales, service, parts and leasing and office administration," Cerni notes. "They broke down those departments into different responsibilities. Dad was in charge of service, parts and administration, and Uncle Charlie took care of sales and leasing."
Every day brought new learning experiences. Once, Cerni remembers, his father asked his uncle to paint the "fifth wheel" on one of the trucks -- the horizontal wheel-like structure that allows the forepart of the truck body to turn freely. "Uncle Charlie started walking around the truck counting the tires, and when he got to the fifth one, he painted it," Cerni chuckles.
A few years later, growth necessitated a move to a new, $300,000 building on U.S. Route 422 in Niles. "Back then, that was a tremendous amount of money," Cerni says. "I remember Dad saying, 'What have I done -- how will we pay for all this?'"
What the owners didn't do then -- and have never...