Kansas City, Mo. -- "The day you stop growing is the day somebody else is going to take you over," said Dan Sommerhauser, who started working for Autobody Color (ABC) in 1962 as a delivery driver at the original store in St. Joseph.
Sommerhauser, now president of ABC, is a testament to his word. In 1969, he became the company's first outside paint salesman, 10 years later he and his wife, Linda, purchased half of the company, and in 1982, they took over full ownership. Now, ABC, which carries Sikkens Akzo Nobel, BASF, and any allied product needed for a body shop, has five stores: St. Joseph, Kansas City, Springfield, Jefferson City, and Larned, Kan.
The current growth in business is not coming from the paint side but rather from Autobody Equipment Solutions, a spinoff of ABC, which focuses on equipment sales and installations.
"This is my main press to the business now," Sommerhauser said, adding that his wife and his brother Jimmy Sommerhauser run the wholesale paint side of the business. "I started selling equipment 20 years ago but I got heavily involved about five years ago, and since then we do a tremendous amount of business, specifically ground-up installations."
Recent such installations include Rusty Eck Ford's Collision Center in Wichita, Kan., Collision Center of Columbia, and Shadow Lake Collision in Nebraska.
Autobody Equipments Solutions did the installation for Rusty Eck Ford's new collision center in Wichita, Kan., in 2004. Don Hull, general manager of Rusty Eck Collision Center said Sommerhauser not only installed equipment that was second to none but also helped with the design of the 20,000 square-foot shop.
"If I did it all over again, I would have done it the exact same," Hull said. "Dan and his crew were exceptional; they really treated us above and beyond our expectations."
Sommerhauser said he covers the five-state region of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas with his own three-man crew, truck, trailer, equipment, and scissor lift, so he does not have to rent anything on site.
"Having our own crew to do the installations assures that the reliability and quality of work can be depended on," Linda Sommerhauser said. "That is one of the most important things because some of the competition out there might sell you a paint booth, but it is just mailed to you in a case. What are you supposed to do with it then? They might have subcontracted somebody to put it up, but now you have a lot of people in the mix."
Dan Sommerhauser added that although he is not the cheapest in town, he is the best because he has top-notch installers and equipment that is tried and proven.
"We get it, try and make sure it works to our satisfaction, and then we take it on; that is how we do business," he said.
Sommerhauser said he has discovered a lot of his equipment, such as the Tsunami air line coalescers and Jun-Air air movers, at NACE in Las Vegas.
"Dan has never missed a NACE," Linda Sommerhauser said. "When he goes, he always looks for what is new. He may not buy it that year, but he will go back the next year to see if it is still around to find out if it was a quality product."
Dan Sommerhauser said his equipment is chosen and installed with the future of the collision repair industry in mind. He said the USI Chronotech paint booths are set up and ready for waterborne paints, the Jun-Air air movers can be added to existing booths to move air in a way that is cleaner and uses less energy, and the Tsunami air line coalescers are used to dry moisture in the airlines.
Other equipment that Sommerhauser said he installs includes prep stations, by Freedom Prep and Paint Centers, a company that he owns. The prep stations are manufactured by a business in Texas, he said.
The prep stations recirculate the air, which means there is no heat or air conditioning loss, and they are equipped with carbon filters, which catch volatile organic compounds (VOCs), he said.
Sommerhauser said the important thing about new equipment is that it can save money, something he found through an analysis of two similar shops, one using a new USI Chronotech paint booth and another shop using a 12-year-old USI paint booth. He said an inspection of each shop's utility bills showed a 47 percent savings for the shop with the newer paint booth.
The newer, more efficient USI booth was more efficient and used far less natural gas and electricity than the older booth, Sommerhauser said, adding that most paint booths pull about 24-26 amps on the cure cycle, but the USI Chronotech only pulls .2 amps.
"We sell a lot of great equipment," he said, "but our installation crew really wins us the deals a lot of the time. We are very fast and very good. We can put a USI Booth up and having it running in two weeks. We have had the same people doing it for years."
Autobody Equipment Solutions also upgrades equipment in existing shops and will relocate and reinstall equipment, Sommerhauser said.
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