Northwest Body & Frame is located in Austin, Texas.
Technician Carlos Marin tightens a bracket on a suspension system.
Technician Juan Bartollo assembles a bumper after painting.
Terri Fickle is the service writer.
In 1996, Faigen started a towing business, but closed it in 1997. "It was too hard to find drivers and it was just stretching myself too thin," said Faigen, who still has a couple of the tow trucks on his lot. Northwest, which is nestled on a tree-covered, five-acre lot, has eight bays. It employs nine people. Faigen bought the business in 1994, three years after it opened. He soon instituted I-CAR training for all the techs.
Along with technical competence, Northwest emphasizes customer service, which has helped the business build a steady repeat business and resist financial pressures to align itself with insurance companies' DRP programs. The shop relies on work for Advantage Rent-A-Car and other fleet owners for about 20 percent of its business.
"We chose not to be [a DRP shop], because we believe we work for the customers and not the insurance companies," Faigen said, sitting in the office with Battin, office manager and bookkeeper Linda Sprankle, and service writer Terri Fickle.
"You can't play pool on two tables," agrees Sprankle, sitting a few feet away. In fact, an interview with Faigen turns out to be a friendly freefor-all, with everybody in the office interjecting their comments about Northwest and the state of the body repair business.
It's a team effort. Asked, for example, how many square feet the office and shop occupy, Faigen thinks for a moment and then looks at each of the others. Together, they agree on 5,000 square feet. Everyone laughs. Walking to a file cabinet, Fickle paraphrases a quote about the problem of cluttering the mind with too many details. She thinks maybe Thomas Edison said it. Everyone laughs again.
Faigen compliments his coworkers: "The smart thing to do is surround yourself with people who are smarter than you."
Faigen, 45, got started in the autorepair business in the 1 980s. He worked for an aftermarket parts store, when one of the store's customers offered him a job managing his body shop. He left that business to manage an
In fact, one customer and his son visit Northwest nearly every day to check on the progress of their truck, Faigen said. Like most all body shops, Northwest has a supply of customer stories. There's the one about a woman who brings a plate of homemade cookies whenever her car needs work. Then there is the college kid who wouldn't come pay his bill-in fact, he wouldn't even talk to the shop to make payment arrangements. Faigen's crew figured out where his parents lived.
"So we called his mom," Faigen said. "She paid it, and thanked us for not pressing charges or not taking back the car." While its formal policy says the business requires full payment before the customer's car is released, and that it does not accept personal checks or credit cards, Northwest will work with customers who are pressed for cash. It will even set up payment terms for customers whose repair bills aren't covered by insurance. Northwest also provides free loaners for some customers who need a car while theirs are being repaired.
As every shop owner knows, some weeks are more stressful than others. During a two-day period recently, Faigen had to deal with the sudden departure of one of his managers, and the discovery that his Web site was down. The company that hosted the site hadn't told him, and also had failed to remind him that his domain name registration had expired. So someone overseas had snatched up the name and offered to sell it back to him, he said.
"It never got renewed,' Faigen said "With everything else in this busines that was one thing I didn't worry about." Rather than pay someone to get his old site back, he decided to change its name and, of course, the host. "I have to build my site from scratch," he said. "But we should have a new site up in a day or two. When find a fire, I put it out quick."