Jerome Lundeen followed in his father’s footsteps when he opened Jerome’s Collision Center in Minot. His sons worked with him to extend the family business interests to several ventures in Minot and beyond, including a barbecue restaurant that sells its sauces around the state.

Jay Lundeen, the second-generation owner of Jerome’s Collision Center, said his business sense has been significantly influenced by lessons learned from his father. He learned what goes on behind the scenes that determines whether a business will be successful, he said.

“It was educational for me and it’s helped me with my other businesses that I’ve started since,” he said.

Jerome Lundeen had spent his early years in Deer Lodge, Montana. His family moved to Minot, where his father, Clarence Sr., an Army veteran who had grown up around Watford City, worked for Fisher Motors in its body shop. Clarence Lundeen later started his own collision repair business in the 1950s, just off Burdick Expressway near the Moose Lodge in a building that later became a brake shop. He moved his business several years later, in the early 1960s, to just above Minot Municipal Auditorium, where a parking lot now exists.

Jill Schramm/MDN Jarid, Jerome and Jay Lundeen stand in the body shop area of Jerome’s Collision Center. The Lundeen family’s array of business interests started with Jerome’s father, Clarence, who opened a body shop in Minot in the 1950s. Jerome started Jerome’s Collision Center in 1976.

It was a four- or five-stall shop with a paint booth and about six technicians, Jerome Lundeen recalled. Heated with a coal furnace, they held the dust down in the paint booth by wetting and crumpling newspaper to spread around the floor.

Jerome Lundeen said he learned the business through on-the-job training. He was sanding cars and masking them for painting as well as cleaning up around the shop when he was 12 years old.

“I started struggling with body work – struggling is the word – when I was probably about 15-16 years old. Nobody taught you much then. You just kind of watched the other guy, and my dad was busy running the business and making estimates so he wasn’t much help. He worked, too, in the shop when I was first working there, but then he was mostly busy running the shop,” he said.

Jerome Lundeen attended Minot State University for a time before switching to a college in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he moved to live with a sister. He returned to Minot, married and began helping around the shop again.

He was interested in buying into Lundeen’s Body Shop but the opportunity wasn’t there with his father, so he left to work for his brother, who owned Magic Mile, a body shop in south Minot. Several months later, in 1976, he started his own shop, Jerome’s, two miles north of Minot, giving Minot three body shops owned by Lundeens.

“We actually all three competed for a year and half until my dad passed on,” Jerome Lundeen said.

His original shop building was sold to SRT, and he opened a new shop nearby.

Jay Lundeen spent time at the shop during the summers when he was in high school.

“He would have me cleaning up, helping the guys, sanding on fiberglass boats and crying about it the whole time,” said Jay Lundeen, who wasn’t that excited about the business at the time. He supervised his younger brother, Jarid, who also came to help when he started high school. With much complaining, both concluded body shop work wasn’t for them.

Jarid Lundeen ceased working at the body shop at age 16, and Jay Lundeen left after high school to join the National Guard. Returning to Minot after a couple of years, Jay Lundeen said his perspective had changed and his father was willing to take him back, teaching him how to write estimates and run the business side of the operation. However, he planned to work at the body shop for only a year or two while he planned out his future.

“I still wasn’t convinced, but after a few years I fell in love with the opportunity to be my own boss, to lead my own agenda. I loved selling and working with customers, taking an experience in their life that’s not fun and in the end seeing that smile. So it was cool, and then I got hooked,” Jay Lundeen said. He’s now been with the shop for about 34 years

“My mom was at the shop a lot of times, too. Right up there working with customers, writing estimates. She did our bookwork for many years,” he said. “My mom is very outgoing, communicable, fun to be around, and that resonated with me because I like to be that way. He (father) is a little more serious, straightforward, so that balance was good.”

Jay Lundeen also said he is more focused on operations than on actual hands-on repair than his father was.

“I was never, nearly, close to as talented with doing collision work as my people,” he said. “I couldn’t fix anything any of our guys could fix. So that was a challenge for me because I knew, to be a young leader with them, I had to understand what they’re doing. So, I would spend a lot of time with those guys – little moments here and there.”

Meanwhile, Jarid Lundeen went to college in Moorhead, Minnesota, transferring to Minot State University.

“I really didn’t want to work in blue-collar industry. I wanted to work in finance or own a restaurant,” he said.

After graduating from Minot State, he worked as bar manager for the Dugout in Sports World in Minot. He later joined Wells Fargo Financial, eventually becoming a branch manager.

Jerome Lundeen purchased a tire store that was in bankruptcy in 2000, hoping to persuade Jarid to operate it rather than leave Minot with his family to advance in the finance industry.

“I said, ‘no way,'” recalled Jarid Lundeen, who agreed only on the promise he could buy out the business in 10 years. After operating the Minot Tires Plus for a few years, Jerome and Jarid Lundeen opened the Bismarck Tires Pus in 2003 and added Mobile One Express in 2005.

Today there is a second Bismarck tire store, built in 2019, and a store at Minot Air Force Base, bringing the total to four stores, now called Trusted Tire & Auto, and eight Valvolines.

Both Jay and Jarid Lundeen bought out their respective businesses in 2010. That left Jerome Lundeen looking to exercise his entrepreneurial spirit elsewhere. The result was the launch of Bones BBQ Smokehouse & Grill.

“I enjoyed cooking, even as a young kid,” Jerome Lundeen said. “My mom would give me her frying pan. I would start a campfire in the backyard and cook my eggs and bacon or sausage and she would furnish toast.”

In the years when his mother leased and ran the Capri Restaurant, he helped as a dishwasher and line cook.

“My mom made all her own food from scratch. In fact, she brought in hanged beef, hung it in her cooler and cut it herself,” Jerome Lundeen said.

The Capri Restaurant was the first restaurant in Minot to sell tacos, which it started offering in the mid-1960s after the restaurant building and bar owner brought a recipe back from his travels to Texas and Mexico.

“He’d have taco nights two nights a month at his bar, and mom would make his tacos for him,” Jerome Lundeen said.

In his 20s at the time, Jerome Lundeen said he wanted to buy the restaurant and bar, but the owner thought him too young. His goal to operate a restaurant never waned but was just delayed.

After a few years of research, Jerome Lundeen opened Bones in 2017 at 1412 2nd Ave. SW. The restaurant was named for his son, Jonah, whose nickname as a child was Bones because he was so slender. Jonah helped operate Bones when it first opened.

Jarid Lundeen acquired the restaurant two years ago and is working toward an eventual new location.

“I grew up wanting to become a chef. That was my dream,” Jarid Lundeen said.

Like the former Capri restaurant, food is cooked fresh at Bones. Meat is ground and sausage made on site, and the restaurant has its own barbecue sauce and dry rubs, developed by Jerome Lundeen with the help of family.

Jay Lundeen also owns Ask Fitness on North Hill and Precision ADAS, a company that works with advanced safety systems on vehicles. He has additional Precision ADAS shops in Bismarck; Helena, Montana; Spokane, Washington; and Boise, Idaho. He operates Patriot Fire and Safety in Burlington. Jerome’s Collision Center has expanded to paint large vehicles, such as fire trucks and semis, and Patriot handles the mechanical work.

Jay Lundeen said that although the family shares a love for business, there is a diversity in their approaches that creates a strong team.

“The balance in our family – that dynamic – is just a blessing,” Jay Lundeen said. “Jarid has strengths that Jerome and I don’t have. Jerome and I have strengths that Jarid doesn’t have and together we’re humble enough – after we lock horns as alphas – that we learn from each other. It’s made me better in my businesses.”

“Jay and Jarid have learned one thing from me, I think, and that’s customer service. The customer is always right,” Jerome Lundeen added. “And they are hard workers. I’m lucky with all my sons.”