Kent, Wash.--Dick Bennison said the guiding principle at Riverside Collision Center is simple but challenging.
    "Our philosophy around here is you can be heroes for 20 years, but you're only as good as your last job," Bennison said. "My main concerns are quality and customer satisfaction."
    Bennison said he is particularly proud of some recent independently gathered evidence that has him convinced that the company's 22 employees share his focus.
    "We have Customer Research do follow-up phone calls with our customers, and we've gone 10 months with 100 percent saying they would refer others," he said last month. "The folks at Customer Research even called here to make sure we were sending them all our customers to call, and I assured them we were."
    Bennison's background is not typical for the industry. Prior to purchasing Riverside Collision about seven years ago, he was a general contractor.
    "But I had some understanding of the industry because my dad had owned service stations, so I grew up around the auto industry," the 51-year-old Bennison said. "And basically I've been self-employed my whole life. Riverside Collision has been here about 17 years, and when I bought it, it already had a good-quality crew and a good-quality reputation. I got into this because I wanted to have something to sell when I retire. Of course, I don't plan to retire until I'm about 70," he said, laughing.
    Bennison said he believes that part of what has helped ensure that the I-CAR Gold Class company maintains a focus on quality is that he has continued to pay technicians an hourly wage rather than one based on a flat-rate or commission system.
    "I think I have happier employees and better quality work because of that, so that's been a good decision," he said. "We don't have as much trouble finding and keeping people because they want to work here because they know we have a reputation for always being busy and always doing quality work.
"It seems like the shops in this area that have slow times are the commission shops, and the shops that are busy all the time are hourly," Bennison said. "It's a circle: I think we're busy all the time because we pay hourly, so you do good work, which gets you referrals, which keeps you busy."
    It's those word-of-mouth referrals and a good location just off a busy highway that keep Riverside Collision full of cars even when others shops in the area are not, Bennison said. The shop also has eight insurer direct-repair agreements, which he acknowledged is more than most shops have.
    "They do send us work, but the main benefit is that it helps make the process quicker because we're not waiting for adjusters," he said of the DRPs.
    The shop was fairly well-equipped when Bennison bought it, he said, including having two nearly new paint booths housed in a covered outside area, which also includes an area for detailing behind the main shop. He said he is particularly happy with the DeVilbiss paint booth.
"The other one is more complicated and computerized and requires more maintenance, but the DeVilbiss has all mechanical relays, so we'll be able to buy any parts we need for it for the next 25 years."
    Bennison said he did remodel the shop's office and added a second Chief frame rack since he bought the company. The shop uses a Blackhawk Shark measuring system.
    Bennison cited the shop's paint jobber, Auto Paint Specialty, as among the companies that have helped Riverside Collision over the years. The shop has sprayed Nexa Autocolor for about four years, and Auto Paint Specialty through PPG is able to help Riverside see not only how its paint shop is performing but how the shop's overall performance numbers stack up against other shops in the country.
    "We run 160-plus cars a month through here, and we have about 10,500 square feet," he said. "The comparisons they run indicate we're among the most productive per square foot in the nation."
    He acknowledged that 10-hour days for the production crew are sometimes necessary.
    "Right now, I'm just trying to keep getting more efficient, because it would be nice to get back some of my net profits that seemed to have gone away since 9/11," he said.
    While Bennison said he has no interest in opening a second location, he does wish the company had a little more room for vehicles both inside and outside the shop.
    "We tend to fill this place up all the time," he said, pointing to cars filling every stall in the shop and parked in double rows outside. "The Monday before the storms the other month, we had a hard time fitting all the cars inside when we tried to lock them up that night. And that was before the storms."