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Glass Doctor Auto’s Chuck Bucholz (in foreground) is passing the glass to Reed Kunnanz, who takes over the company July 1. The windshield replacement firm is moving to the Moorhead Industrial Park in three weeks due to construction of the 11th Street Underpass. (Photo/Nancy Hanson.)
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
The future of Moorhead’s Glass Doctor Auto is clear – a new owner and a new location, both coming in July.
Chuck Bucholz, who purchased the local vehicle franchise in 2016, has achieved the retirement dream he set for himself eight years ago: He has sold the company to Reed Kunnanz, one of the trusted technicians who work there, restoring the shattered windshields of cars, vans and trucks for commercial and private clients.
“As the 10 years I’d allotted were counting down, I made it known around the shop that I was looking for an heir apparent,” Chuck says, “and Reed raised his hand. He’s a car guy. It’s been an easy transition.”
That’s not the only change coming up July 1. Bucholz has known for two years that his current location at 1100 Second Ave. S. would be wiped out by construction of Moorhead’s long-awaited 11th Street railroad underpass. Excavation of the street between Glass Doctor and Hornbacher’s will mark the beginning of the new three-block dip beneath the BNSF main line and Hillsboro line that bisect the city. Construction is expected to begin in 2024. A retaining wall and lift station will be built on his present site.
“We’ve had great help getting ready for the move – the Moorhead Business Association, the city and the Economic Development Authority people have all given us a hand,” Bucholz reports. He has also received some financial assistance because he was asked to move to clear the way for the project. The neighboring strip mall, the former site of Hornbacher’s now home to Dollar Tree and Tasty Asia, will also be torn down to make way for the long-awaited alternative to hours of daily traffic backups at the railroad crossings.
Customers with shattered windshields will soon find the Glass Doc in new quarters in the Moorhead Industrial Area at 1413 23rd St. S. near the Busch malting plant. The owner has no qualms about losing some of the visibility of his longtime location on the main drag: “We’re a destination business. When people need us, they will be able to find us.”
New owner Kunnanz grew up in his family’s body shop in Minot, North Dakota. He worked as a locomotive engineer in the rail yards of the Bakken oil field for 10 years before moving to Fargo-Moorhead three years ago, when he joined Buchholz’s company. “Growing up with my dad and grandfather’s body shop, I was already pretty familiar with this business,” he notes. “I’ve always had something like this in mind.”
The auto glass business has changed dramatically over the past two decades. For Chuck, a past employee of Great Plains Software and Microsoft, the trend toward digital automotive technology was already clear when he bought the business from Marv Degerness. “It’s not just manual labor anymore,” he points out. “The windshield is an integral part of the modern automobile. We don’t just replace the glass in cars newer than 2018. Installation requires recalibration of cameras and driver assistance systems.”
That requires ongoing training, much of it online. Says Reed, who belongs to the generation raised in the computer age, that has been less of a stretch: “There’s new information coming out all the time, but it’s not all brand new to me. The technology has been changing all the time since I was in grade school.”
The new Glass Doctor Auto facility is slightly larger than the current building, which was designed on the traditional service station model. That’s a solution in part to two trends – vehicles that are growing larger, including semi trucks and box trucks with higher profiles, and the variety of windshields required to satisfy the range of vehicles on which they work.
“What we have in inventory now is just a sample. We depend on Glass Doctor’s fully stocked warehouse for lots of what we need,” Bucholz explains. Along with the high-tech sensors integrated into the glass has come an explosion of specific designs, sometimes several for the same model of vehicle. Jeep Cherokees, for example, employ more than 20 different configurations.
Chuck is proud of one particular digital-era aspect of his business – the dozens and dozens of positive online reviews by past customers.
He and his successor agree that the business is poised for even more success in the years ahead. “Newer vehicles are more of an investment,” Reed observes. “People tend to hang onto them a little longer.” That means more years of vulnerability to the all-time leading cause of windshield cracks and damage – flying rocks and debris in construction zones.
The future of the auto glass business, his mentor adds, seems clear: “As long as we keep providing great customer service and keep up with all the constantly changing technology, this business is going to keep going strong.”
