Sacramento, Calif.--One key to success in any business is to spot a segment of the population not being adequately served and to focus on that market. For Lee's Collision Repair, one such market is the deaf community.
"There are over 600,000 deaf people in the area, so why shouldn't they have a place to go to have their car fixed," said Mary Franklin, who manages Lee's Collision for company owner Wilber Sermeno.
"One of the unique features about our shop is that no one else in the area has a TTY," Franklin said, pointing to the telecommunications device for the deaf on her desk in the shop's front office. "When deaf people call using their TTY, we hear a tone that tells us to hook the call up to our TTY, and I can then type to whomever is calling."
Franklin, who noted that she is fluent in sign language because her brother is deaf, said she is also teaching Sermeno and the shop's other five employees at least some basic sign language "so that when an agent calls and says they have a deaf client, that person can come here and feel comfortable." The shop is also working with the NorCal Center on Deafness to hold a seminar at the shop in the coming months to provide deaf people with basic information about vehicle care and repair, Franklin said.
"Farmers Insurance and Enterprise have already said they will be here, FinishMaster has said they will have 3M give-aways here, and we'll have a barbecue and just show the deaf community that there's a shop here that cares," she said.
Lee's Collision Repair also has developed a number of other sources of work to keep the shop busy without any insurer direct repair agreements, Franklin said.
"A large percentage of our work is rental cars," she said. "We are almost the exclusive repairer for Alamo and National over at the airport. We do 90 percent of their work. We also work with Hertz and Avis."
In addition, the shop has several other fleet accounts, such as Frontier Communications, Franklin said, adding that it also exchanges referrals with several nearby tire and mechanical shops, and a body shop just a few blocks away that focuses primarily on one insurance company's work refers other jobs to Lee's.
"We just try to find really good local people and swap business as much as possible," she said. "I probably write eight estimates a week for customers who just come in off the street driving by, but we also have a lot of return customers or those referred by someone else."
Although she started work at Lee's about two years ago, Franklin said she has known Sermeno for most of her 14 years in the industry. Before that, she said was working as a graphic designer at a magazine in the Bay Area when a neighbor hit her car in the driveway; she took the car to the body shop owned by her landlord.
"He was busy, the phones were ringing in his office, so I answered the phone for him, and 14 years later I'm still in this industry," she said, laughing.
Although she now strictly handles estimating and office paperwork at Lee's, Franklin said her time at that first shop included hands-on work on vehicles, learning how to color sand, for example, on Saturdays while still working her graphic arts job.
"That shop owner pretty much led me through the repair process over the next three or four years, and when I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of it, he let me start negotiating with insurance companies and dealing directly with clients, and eventually I was pretty much running the office," Franklin said.
Sermeno, a native of El Salvador, was a technician at the second Bay Area shop at which Franklin worked, she said. That shop, she said, along with several others on her resume, have hired her to manage their offices and bookkeeping, often for a year or two in preparation for selling the business. She said she also ran her own shop in Belmont for about five years starting in 1997.
Franklin said she actually was in the process of planning her own move to Montana and out of the industry when Sermeno called her in 2005, saying he had moved to Sacramento and purchased an 11,000-square-foot shop and wanted her help run the business after he bought out a partner.
"And now I'll be here for a while," she said. "Wilber got over the bump of that transition (of buying out the partner), and now he's fixing up the place. With what I'm seeing him doing, the place is going to be fantastic when he's done. He's going to paint the whole building, they've already started with new concrete in the parking lot, and he's tiling the inside walls of the shop.
"He knows what he's doing, and he has a vision," Franklin said. "He wants everything done so it looks really nice. When you see someone who has a direction–the right direction–you tend to invest a little in that. So I'm staying."
Indeed, Sermeno said his vision is to make the shop look like the dealership shop at which he worked when he first came to the United States.
"They had a nice, nice body shop there, so I would like to do the same in the future," he said. "Little by little."
Other than Franklin, Sermeno said his crew is definitely "all family," with a production staff that includes his two brothers and three cousins.
The business gets great help, Franklin said, from parts suppliers such as John L. Sullivan Automotive Group ("they always come through for us") and its jobber for DuPont refinish supplies, FinishMaster.
"Bob Blair there is amazing, a great guy, a great support system," she said.
She clearly is pleased with her decision to move to Sacramento to work with Sermeno.
"He came here from another country with nothing and was polishing cars when he first started in the business," she said. "Now he owns a million-dollar building and is doing very well for himself. I'm just so proud of him. He's done so much."
