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Cars

Import owners race to Rennen

The 2-year-old repair shop has assembled a base of customers among owners of high-end foreign cars.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published July 9, 2004

TAMPA - It's a pretty typical day for Stephen Houzego at Rennen Import Autos. In his shop and adjoining lots, dozens of foreign cars - some new, some antique, some familiar, some exotic - are in the midst of various repair jobs and rebuilding projects.

His partner is out of town indulging his passion for racing. And every few minutes, one of Houzego's devoted customers drops in or phones.

One of them, a local TV personality, needs some repair work done, but he's heading out of town for the weekend and doesn't know when he can bring the car in. Leave the keys with the receptionist at the TV station, Houzego said, and I'll come down later and pick it up myself.

There's another customer who calls because he has a flat on his BMW 528I. For some reason, Houzego said, this guy has one flat tire after another.

"If there's a nail anywhere in the road, it'll jump out and get into his tire," Houzego said in his British accent. "He must have magnetic rims or something."

Houzego knows them all, all his customers and all the idiosyncrasies of their cars. That's one reason why, after just two years in business, Rennen Import Autos has become a favorite for discriminating owners of high-end foreign cars.

If there's a secret to Rennen's success, he said, it's that the company is able to offer a combination of intensely personal service and technical expertise.

"We're halfway between the dealerships and the mom-and-pop places," Houzego said. "I'd say 90 percent of our customers, when they first come to us, they've been to the dealers first. But at the dealers you're removed from the person who works on your car. You never talk to him at all."

Houzego, 27, started Rennen in 2002 with partner Jeffrey Dugliss. Dugliss was an experienced mechanic with a solid reputation among local high-performance car aficionados. Houzego didn't know or care about cars; he had been running a bar in London when he met an American woman and moved to Tampa to marry her.

Dugliss was tired of working for other people, some of whom knew far less about cars than he did. So he and Houzego bought an existing repair shop on West Kennedy Boulevard.

The shop they bought came with some problems. It had an existing customer base, which was helpful at the start. But Houzego and Dugliss knew they wanted to cater to South Tampa people with high-end and high-performance foreign cars. The old Chevys and Plymouths they were working on didn't project the right image.

"When people are bringing you their $100,000 BMWs," Houzego said, "they want to see other $100,000 BMWs out there."

Beside, the old place looked like a typical independent mechanic's shop, not like a specialized place that catered to well-heeled customers.

"No matter how much we cleaned, we just couldn't get that place looking nice," Houzego said. "We have women coming in here in business suits. They don't want to be sitting in some greasy waiting room."

Still, business was good enough that after only a year in business, Houzego and Dugliss could move into spiffy new digs a little farther east, at 1917 West Kennedy Blvd.

The waiting room is clean and comfortable with an oversized aquarium. Instead of the typical reading material at an independent mechanic - months-old, tattered copies of Popular Mechanics or whatever else happens to be lying around - Rennen offers the latest issues of lifestyle magazines.

"Yachting magazine," Houzego said, picking up a copy from the coffee table. "Not that I'll ever be able to afford a yacht."

The fact that right from the start, Rennen had someone whose full-time job was to attend to customer service set it apart from a lot of mom-and-pop places.

And paradoxically, Houzego said, Rennen got a boost from the bad economy.

"We started right after 9/11, so the economy was terrible," he said. "A lot of the places that went under, they were used to having income, they had expenses and payments to meet. We were new so we weren't expecting to have any income at first. We were set up for it so we got through it when others didn't."

Mostly though, Houzego said, Rennen's success is due to the expertise of his partner.

"Jeffrey just turned 28 but he knows everything about these cars," Houzego said. "He can do anything. He's not a guy who replaces parts. He's an idea guy who designs the parts and makes them. He just has that mind-set."

Longtime customer Dan Ross puts it more simply.

"These guys know more about the cars than the dealers do," he said. "They take care of me and they fix it on time. And they take me for rides in their fast cars."

Jesse Anaya, who has worked for Rennen for about a year and a half, is an accomplished mechanic in his own right, but can barely contain his admiration for Dugliss' automotive expertise.

"He's my hero," Anaya said with a straight face.

Dugliss can do just about anything with any car, but his passion is for race cars, especially Porsches. On a recent Friday at Rennen, among the many high-performance cars were a 1996 Mitsubishi Eclipse fitted with a 550-horsepower engine, a Porsche that's being transformed into a competitive race car for a local surgeon, and a D-Sport race car that Dugliss is building from the ground up.

A good chunk of Rennen's business is done on race tracks around the South, not in the Kennedy Boulevard garage. Rennen does a lot of race support, and that hot Mitsubishi will probably be rented out as a race car.

"Maybe six, seven years down the road, when we're not working 60 hours a week, Jeff might branch out and start his own race team," Houzego said.

Meanwhile, though, Rennen is continuing to make its reputation on quality work and an uncommon emphasis on honesty and customer service. It's not unusual for Rennen to advise a customer against a $2,000 repair that he was fully prepared to pay for.

"The way I look at it," Houzego said, "is that I'd rather have your business for the next five years than make this one repair."

[Last modified July 8, 2004, 11:53:17]