Big fish in a small pond

In Kimes' case, that meant repairing hundreds of cars damaged by a particularly destructive 1999 hailstorm. The shop, which was founded just six years earlier, started as a tiny, one-man operation in Kimes' backyard. He was buying and rebuilding trucks as a side business to supplement his primary business, a new car dealership. As more people came, "he was able to succeed in that and he outgrew that one-bay shop we had in the back of the house," explains son, Jason Kimes, vice president and current operations manager of Auto-Plex.

One late spring afternoon there was a severe storm with softball-sized hail, Jason recollects. "Our family is from this area. People already knew we were here," he says. "So they started coming in. Body shops started filling up in the area and people just kept coming. The very next day at 7 a.m. we had people with insurance checks saying they had to get their cars repaired. We were filled for months."

Although it was difficult dealing with a sudden inundation of work, Auto-Plex weathered the storm and brought relief to a lot of distressed customers. "That probably helped more than we realized," says Kimes. "We repaired some 800 cars or something. By repairing that many cars in this small of a community, your name gets out there. We haven't looked back since."

How do they do it? "I surprise people all the time," Jason says. "They want to know, 'How do you average 50 cars a month when you only have 4,000 in your immediate community?' "

Jason attributes the customer satisfaction to the fact he understands his customers and their needs. "You grow up here and you know the pace of living — you know the daily schedules and how everything works," he says.

In Alma, where many customers drive considerable distances to their jobs and public transportation isn't an option, it's especially important not to sit on a repair job. "We don't bring the cars in and let them sit around for parts because here everybody needs their cars," Kimes says. Auto-Plex also runs an Enterprise rental office on site, so customers don't need to worry about getting stranded. Speed and efficiency are two of the most important factors to their customers, Kimes explains.

Auto-Plex makes it a point to send out a customer satisfaction card with every repair. "I'm a firm believer in knowing what our customers want," Kimes says. "Through that we've learned that personal relationships and genuine customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand."

Kimes estimates that 60 to 70 percent of repair jobs come from word-of-mouth. In the past two years, they also got involved in direct-repair program relationships and plan to add more in the future.

The only difficulty Kimes foresees is finding enough qualified technicians to perform the work. "That is a problem — it really hits hard," he says. "Older body techs are getting scarce — they're happy where they're at and they don't want to change." Auto-Plex already draws technicians from the surrounding areas, including a vo-tech school about an hour-and-a-half from Alma.

Kimes also has found that the younger techs aren't able to handle start-to-finish repair work like the older generation — Gen X and Y techs tend to specialize. So Auto-Plex recently had to conform to the trend of an assembly-line operation, with separate preppers, body techs, painters and so on.

So how's the new operation working out so far? "We're still very early in the stages," he says. "Production seems to be more steady for completion of cars. It was something we had to do, not something we wanted to do. We had to change with the times. I was against it, but they're proving me wrong. So far customers are happy because they're getting their cars on time. It just seems like a different way of going about getting the same ending.