Albany’s Darsey Oil Company is now Dilmar Oil Company

ALBANY — Knowing when things have run their course is often difficult to ascertain, especially when it comes to how you make your living, but for businessman Chuck Darsey making the decision to sell long-standing Albany business Darsey Oil Company came as clearly as the writing on a white board.

Darsey came to the decision to sell the decades old company to Dilmar Oil Company last year and sold the company his father, C. Hershel Darsey, started in 1952.

Darsey, an avid runner, said he made up his mind to sell the business over the course of a few weeks after being divinely inspired to make a mental list of the pros and cons of making the change.

As Darsey explains it, he hadn’t really been thinking about selling the business, but it had been in the back of his mind, when God decided to strike up a conversation, something Darsey said had never happened to him before.

“One Saturday morning I had a vision from God and I was awakened at 4:45 in the morning,” Darsey recalls. “I was woke up and God said, ‘here’s three questions you need to answer, and once you can answer those three questions I’ll bless this deal.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what deal you’re talking about, I don’t even have a deal.’ But He made it perfectly clear that I was to answer these three questions and then we’d talk again.”

“So that day when I ran it was like I had a whiteboard in front of me and I took each question and I could write the question and I could write my pros and write my cons. I could read everything that I was thinking and over the course of several weeks I was able to answer those three questions. They weren’t slam dunks by any means, but over several weeks I was able to answer the questions. And God assured me that he’d take care of it.”

While Darsey certainly didn’t have any deals in place to sell his business, the idea of doing so had been on his mind for a few weeks after reading in an article in a trade magazine analyzing the future for small, family-owned gas and oil companies.

“In March of last year, there was an article in a trade magazine that I read and I think it just nailed me,” said Darsey. “It was talking about ten years ago if you were (a certain) size, sold (a certain number of ) annual gallons, you were pretty big in the business, and ten years later if you’re this size in the business you’re going to get gobbled up, because the majors, big oil as I call them, they’re wanting to streamline and only have one or two distributors in each state. They don’t want 20-25 in each state anymore. So what happens is the big boys just start gobbling up the small ones.”

Darsey said he went home and shared the article with wife Cris and told her he felt like this was going to happen to Darsey Oil Company if something wasn’t done.

“I gave it to Cris and I said this is the position that we’re in,” Darsey recalls. “It was the first time she had ever heard that from me. It was the first time I ever said it myself. It was a day of reckoning basically. We were at that point where basically we had three options: you get bigger, you go out of business or you get purchased. Those were the three options.”

It turns out Darsey had been doing business with Dilmar Oil Company to purchase Shell products and had been approached by the company in the past, but had never been interested, until recently.

“Several years ago they came in and asked me if I was interested in selling,” remembers Darsey. “I said, ‘no not at all, that’s not even on my radar.’ So, maybe a year clicked off and they approached me again and I said, ‘nothing’s changed.’ Then Dilmar approached me again after I read that article and I took a little bit more interest in them at that time. I was a little bit more open to what Dilmar had to say but still not interested you know.”

But after receiving his message from God and working through the three questions on his white board, Darsey knew exactly what he needed to do.

“God assured me that he’d take care of it,” says Darsey. “So at that point in time I called up Dilmar and said, ‘I’m ready to talk seriously,’ still really not sure what I was doing, but I was acting in faith. Anyway, they came down and I guess the wheels started moving toward a purchase agreement and it happened in October.”

So in October of 2015, after 62 years in business Darsey Oil Company came to an end and Dilmar Oil Company opened its doors in Albany.

Any reservation he might have had about the family business coming to an end under his watch were also put to rest as he consulted with his family.

Perhaps more importantly than talking with his wife and children, Darsey discussed the decision with the man who started the company way back in 1952, his father.

“It took him a few days for it to sink in and then he’d come back and ask me some questions, which was very good, and we had conversations back and forth,” Darsey says. “He’s always been a deep thinker so he’d throw some other questions out there so I’d go back and we’d converse over that and finally he said, ‘I really think it was the best decision. I hate to see it go, but it was the best decision.’ We’re still friends. And mom said the same thing. They were definitely in the conversation even though they didn’t have a vested interest in it. They had 30 years of their blood, sweat and tears in it also.”

Armed with the knowledge that his family and his creator had blessed the deal, Darsey said he made the decision to sell to Dilmar without a shred of doubt and has not second-guessed his decision once. In fact, he says he’s only grown more convinced he made the right move.

Darsey said Dilmar has also done right by Darsey Oil employees, not only retaining nearly everyone but also honoring years of service and vacation time.

Dilmar named Darsey branch manager and allows him to make the decision about how long he wants to stay in the business.

Dilmar Oil Company is headquartered in Florence, SC and has branches in Willmington, NC, Henderson, NC, Charlotte, NC, Latta, SC, Charleston, SC, Atlanta, and now Albany.