San Jose, Calif.--Some shops use a slogan about "meeting their customers by accident."At L&M Body Shop, it's the owner who met the company by accident.
"When I came to the previous owner about five years ago with my Mercedes that I wanted him to paint the bumper on, he was talking about being tired and wanting to sell the business," said Ray Heidari, who now owns the company. "I saw it was a very good business, so I talked to him some more and wound up buying the shop. When an opportunity comes knocking, you have to take it."
Heidari said cars were among his hobbies since he was a kid, but he came to the new venture with no experience in the industry.
"I'm an electrical engineer with a master's degree in electronic design and fiber optics," he said. "But when I bought the shop, high tech was going up and down. You could go to work for a company and then get laid off six months later. You can't plan your future based on such uncertain jobs."
By contrast, he said, most of the things he's learned about this industry have been positive surprises.
For example, "I've been surprised by how much referral business we have," he said. "I have such beautiful customers. They come back and they send their family with very good statements about me. We do some dealership work and have agreements with two or three smaller insurance companies, but 80 percent of my business is referrals."
Heidari said the 10 to 15 percent growth the business has enjoyed each year since he purchased the business stems largely from his philosophy about focusing on customer satisfaction and top-quality work rather than on money.
"Money comes second," he said. "If you satisfy your customers, they will have some referrals for you, and that's the best advertising." For example, Heidari said he prefers to work on late-model, high-end German and other European vehicles but won't turn away a customer who has been referred to him even if that customer's vehicle is a 1960s Volkswagen bus. He also has turned down several larger insurers interested in having L&M participate in their direct repair programs.
"Expansion is good to a point as long as you don't lose your quality," he said. "We can't work on more than 20 cars a week. It's out of our reach. Our quality would go down, and I'm not after that."
Sometimes it's little things that can help make the whole experience of getting a vehicle repaired more pleasant for a customer, Heidari said. Although he cleaned and remodeled the shop's front office shortly after buying the business, another office remodel is in the works. And Heidari takes obvious pride in the colorful landscaping in front of the building.
"One appraiser once told me, 'I don't know of any other body shop that has a lot of flowers and roses out front,'" Heidari said. "But life is not only about business. Every time I pass by my flowers, it gives me a different feeling about this place."
The flowers are also symbolic of Heidari's other goal: to become as "green" a body shop as possible. Toward that goal, he said he's making the switch to waterborne paint this year, well ahead of any requirement to do so in his area.
"We've been using Glasurit at this shop for about 17 years, and BASF is superior in waterborne in every aspect I looked at," Heidari said, "particularly since so many of the high-end German cars are sprayed with BASF at the factory. My painter is already certified for waterborne, so all we need to do are some improvements to the booth." Like all but the very newest booths, Heidari said his Spraybake booth does not move a sufficient volume of air needed to dry waterborne paints. He said he's considering the various air accelerator systems that can be retrofitted to the booth, trying to find the most efficient one available.
"Because if you want to be environmentally concerned, you have to be environmentally concerned about your power consumption also," he said. "So we're going to change the lights in the booth to low-consumption units as well."
Another recent purchase for the shop was a Chief Velocity electronic measuring system to supplement the shop's Chief Genesis system, Heidari said.
"We like the Velocity better because the laser is smaller and reads the targets better," he said.
Given the challenge Heidari said he's found in trying to find good-quality technicians, he's glad that a number of his dozen employees have been with the company since even before he bought it.
And though there are a handful of other collision repair shops within just a few blocks of L&M, he said he isn't concerned about the competition.
"I just do my best. I don't look at their shops, so I don't know what they are doing," Heidari said. "To me, it's more important to just be on top of your work and make sure every car leaves in perfect condition. Getting to 90 percent in this business takes a '5' in terms of effort on a scale from 0 to 10. But getting that last 10 percent takes a lot of energy, a '10.' And we want to be close to 99 or 100 percent. That's the challenge."
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