West Bend, WI – There’s a relatively new face at the front of the store at Auto Safety Center in West Bend, WI. Master Technician Tim Dabroski, who has been with the locally owned shop for seven years, has moved from the repair shop in back to the front desk taking on the new job as managing partner.
“To find an employee like that, what a gem,” said Mike Hilzley. “Tim just kept saying, I treat this business like my own and that really stood out to me.”
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As Auto Safety Center opened a second location in Cedarburg, Hilzley knew he couldn’t be in two places at once. “I interviewed a lot of people for the manager job and didn’t see anybody that would have the passion for our people and our customers the way Tim does.”
The interesting thing behind the job shift really is a credit to staff who encouraged Dabroski to apply. “Tim’s coworkers planted a seed and said, ‘Why don’t you just become the manager,” said Hilzley. “That got the gears turning. Tim came and talked to me in the morning and by early afternoon we offered him the position. There’s just nobody else that I could picture doing this who would have the same passion for it.”
Growing up in Waukesha, Dabroski always had a fascination with cars. “I was about 12 years old when I started tinkering with cars,” he said. “My dad had an interest and when I look back, I wasn’t a Spiderman or Batman kid, I didn’t do comics, but I was always playing with Hot Wheels.
“Just like the one song says I probably put 100,000 miles on my knees. Anything that had wheels or cars or dump trucks; I was always into it when I was a kid.”
Dabroski said his dad taught him how to drive when he was about 11 years old. “He worked for a construction company, and we could drive in the quarry,” he said. “My dad had the opportunity to just buy this beat-up pickup truck from the company and we just kept it out there. So, when he’d go to work, I would go and just drive around for hours on end.”
As Dabroski recalled some significant steps in life, he marked the moments noting his vehicle at the time.
“I went from the pickup truck to a brown ’77 square body pickup truck and I drove it through high school. My first car was a ’78 Cutlass that I bought with no brakes. I handed the guy $200, gave him all the money I had and fixed it in the garage… I ended up driving that car through tech school for two years.”
Dabroski attended University Technical Institute (UTI) in Illinois after high school. “It was the fall of 1992 and I worked at a tire store that was owned by Sears,” he said.
Through hard work, Dabroski went from rotating and balancing tires to working as a mechanic on the night shift. “It as trial by fire but it was exciting to do shocks and struts and front-end alignments.
“At the time I thought I was making a darn good wage with a whopping $5 an hour; I was pretty proud of myself,” he said.
While comfortable in Illinois, Dabroski returned to Wisconsin to help his mom keep her home; he took a job at Heartland Service in 1994.
“I just did everything there; they really threw me into the mix, but I was always hungry to learn anything I could,” Dabroski said. “It morphed from doing suspension work and tires and alignments to doing drivability problems.”
Dabroski became the go-to guy for diagnosing problems. “I always had a saying – it’s easy to fix the car, the hardest part is figuring out what’s wrong.”
An ad on Craigslist eventually led Dabroski to Auto Safety Center. “In September it will be seven years,” he said.
“When I first got here, I looked at it as a challenge. It was an opportunity where I could use my experience of being in the bigger shops to try to make it better. My thought was, if you’re not learning, you’re not growing.”
Combining 31 years fixing vehicles, Hilzley said Dabroski brings more to the table than just his knowledge of what’s under the hood.
“Passion and compassion,” said Hilzley. “Tim is passionate about our industry, he cares about what happens, things are done correctly, and he wants to know that people are being taking care of.
“He has compassion for people; whether it’s our employees, or our customers. What’s going on in life? What’s best for them? How can we help suit their needs?
“There’s three things we go by, and Tim understands that to his core. Is it good for the car? Is it good for the customer? Is it good for the company? That’s how Tim gauges, what he’s doing.”
Hilzley encourages people to come talk to Tim and see why he is the family man that he is.
“He’s such a good leader,” said Hilzley. “Tim is an amazing family man. I always used to say he’s the best technician I’ve worked with. But he’s a better person.
“So come meet Tim for yourself and get to know him and you’ll just see what I see.”
