January 2010 Charisma Enterprises
On the corner of Main and Church Streets in Phelps you will find Charisma Enterprises. Owner Sandy Whitacre and her husband Teddy have been in business since 1993 and currently enjoy running their retail business. Teddy had worked at Xerox for 26 years prior to that while Sandy stayed at home to raise their three daughters.
By the time 1993 rolled around the kids were out of the house Sandy wanted her turn in the business world. She had an opportunity to buy Upstate Restoration, which specialized in cleaning walls and ceilings and grabbed it up. A couple years later she also purchased Fingerlakes Ultrasonic which specialized in cleaning blinds.
Sandy and Teddy’s mother came up with the Charisma Enterprises concept because they were excited and enthused about what they were doing and thought their energy level fit with the name. Teddy especially liked the service side of the business and kept busy by cleaning decks, buildings or anything else that required power washing.
The work on the decks turned into opportunities for Teddy to build decks. He also repaired and restored other ones as time went on. A family member by marriage came on the scene in 1999 and he specialized in setting mobile homes. Teddy helped him with it and work orders for doing other work in the homes started to pop up and they quickly found that they needed more space for inventory.
The weekend of the Sauerkraut Festival in early August of 1999 saw the Charisma Enterprises storefront open up. Business continued to grow and at one point they had eleven employees. In 2003 they lost a key member of their team and scaled back their operation to focus on their store, while still doing quite a bit of service work for existing customers, especially deck related.
Business in their store has done well and out of necessity they added more space to it about three years ago.
Sandy and Teddy Whitacre
They currently stock or have access to 6,000 different parts for mobile homes or RVs. Sandy enjoys doing the bookwork and the selling side of the business while Teddy takes care of the computers, service related stuff and fills in to help Sandy with whatever else needs to be done.
When they aren’t working they both like to travel and keep up with their grand children and are excited about the one that is on the way. Hobbies for Sandy include crocheting, sewing and making homemade candy while Teddy enjoys watching action adventure movies ranging from older John Wayne flicks to more current ones like the “Die Hard” series starring Bruce Willis.
If you haven’t gone in to say hello to the Whitacre’s already please do. They have shown what service with a smile is about and you will enjoy your time with them. Call them at 315-548-4402 or reach them on their website at www.ceipartsrus.com if you have questions or would like to learn more.
