Tooling Up: Shop builds volume, adds equipment
Growing up in St. Louis County, Mo., Steve White loved working on antique automobiles with his father. At the time he never imagined that his dad’s expensive hobby would lead to a multimillion-dollar collision repair business.
When White entered a body shop program at the local technical high school, he quickly realized that he’d found his calling. Two veteran shop teachers took him under their wings, and he was eager to absorb everything they had to teach. “The instructors there were both very much old-time guys. They actually taught me how to use lead, which was already something that wasn’t being done,” he says. “I was always a quality-oriented person. I wanted to know the best way to do it, not necessarily the fastest.”
In June of 1986, White achieved his goal of opening his own shop—in the same week he married his wife, Valerie. “It just happened to work out that way. Pretty crazy times, but we were young and broke and didn’t know any better,” he says.
In those early days, White Auto Body in Florissant, Mo., was a small shop with seven bays. When the business started generating money, White debated whether he would invest the capital in a frame machine or a paint booth. He recalls, “I determined that I could always polish the paint and make it look acceptable, but if I didn’t have the frame right, the foundation of the vehicle wouldn’t be right, and everything else wouldn’t work.”
Eventually he had enough capital to install the needed paint equipment, but he didn’t stop there. He followed these technological advances with a computerized management system, as well as a state-of-the-art unibody-measuring system. The system uses a robotic arm to precisely measure the damage done to a car’s frame. Then it produces a blueprint that allows the technicians to assess how accurately they’ve restored the car’s unibody.
“Picture a map laying over a map, and in one the roads aren’t where they belong,” White explains. “Visual aids are a big deal, especially when you’re trying to convince a person who’s unaware of how to fix a unibody-damaged car.” This technology also proved persuasive when dealing with insurance companies. “What it does is stop the adversarial relationship right off the bat,” White says.
Today, White’s two body shops—a second location, White Auto Body West, opened in O’Fallon, Mo., in 1998—occupy a total of 33,500 sq. ft. and, together, boast 60 bays. “When I started my first shop, I had a toolbox full of tools and a big hammer. And it went from that to our new facility with nine frame machines and computerized measuring for unibody,” White says, adding that the management system has been essential to the business’s expansion.
On the other hand, upgrading the technology proved easier than establishing a loyal customer base at the new location. With one successful collision repair business under his belt, he was expecting the same loyalties to transfer to the new shop, but he discovered instead that he had to start from scratch. “You have to prove yourself. Loyalty is a lot like trust—you have to develop it. You have to do what you can and say what you do,” he says.
White credits his technicians with helping him gain his new customers’ loyalty. In addition to maintaining their technical credentials, including a minimum of 20 hours of continuing education each year, the technicians at White Auto Body are expected to demonstrate integrity on the job.
One surprising outcome of the positive work culture White has created is staff loyalty—the original White Auto Body shop in Florissant, Mo., hasn’t lost one technician in the past six years. “I hire only the best people,” says White, who is himself an ASE Master Technician and an I-CAR Gold Class professional. “I can teach someone to be a good technician. I can’t teach them to be a good person.”
SNAPSHOP
Name: White Auto Body
Location: Florissant, Mo.
Size: 12,000 sq. ft., with an additional 21,500 sq. ft. at White Auto Body West in O’Fallon, Mo.
years in business: 18
Volume: About 120 vehicles per month
gross annual sales: $9 million annually
Employees: 46 (both shops combined)