Schaefer's Service Center, Inc.

History
In November of 1973 Bob and Sherry Schaefer, in spite of the skepticism of their parents and local parts houses opened Schaefer Service Center, Inc. at 104 Kettle Moraine Dr. N. in Slinger, WI.

Our first location was a former 2 bay Standard station that had been vacant for several months. The location had gone through several owners in the past several years. No one had the right combination to make it successful, Bob had been working as a "mechanic" since he was 15 years old at a local gas station giving him a customer base to draw from. We started our business with Bob doing all the mechanical work himself. He had the help of his dad as the parts chaser and for phone answering. Sherry worked the front counter on the days she had off from her job at a local hairstyling salon. Bookwork was done at night after Brad; their 1-year-old son went to bed.
We bought most of our parts in those days from a man by the name of Bob Heidershey from National Parts because he was the only one who had enough faith in Bob to set him up with stock to open with.
In late 1974 we were able to hire our first Technician, Greg. He and Bob worked a lot of hours; lots of late nights, weekends, snow days, and everything else nature threw at them.

In 1979 we made our first move to a larger location. We bought a used car dealership on Hwy. 60. We added on a 30x60 addition to the existing 30x40 building. We knew we needed to move when our customers started to tell us we need a larger location when they had to walk a block down the street to retrieve their vehicle because we had so many cars parked on the street.

Our move proved to be a successful one. We continued to grow our business with increases every year in sales. Our son Brad started to work with "dad" when he was 12 years old and fortunately stayed with us full time after his graduation from college as the manager at our 109 Hwy. 60 location. In 1987 we bought another location. This was a 4 bay Amoco station in Slinger also. Essentially Bob ran the Amoco location and Brad ran the Service Center location.

In 1998 we found out that we were going to lose our lease at the Amoco location. We had great employees at this location that we did not want to displace so we started to look at our options. We had talked about combining the repair facilities into one because of the difficulty and expense of equipping two locations. We found a 6.5A parcel in Slinger and decided to take a major step and build a 12 bay state of the art repair facility. On the same piece of property we also built an Amoco C-Store (now a BP) with a Car Wash.

This move also has proven to be a successful one. We opened the new repair facility on November 1,1999.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Please see us for current specials and promotions!

Customer Corner
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
1:31:42 AM