Seattle--When Bill Edleman talks about employees at Big E Auto Rebuild, the company he and his wife, Kathie, have owned for 38 years, he speaks about those who work "with" him, not "for" him.
"We have absolutely been blessed with a great staff," Edleman says of the shop's 17 employees. "I can't do any of this without them. Being lucky enough or smart enough to make the decisions in hiring the folks that I have here, particularly my long-term people, would be the best decisions I've made."
In addition to manager Tom Geer, who has been with Big E for 23 years, and estimator Dan Gorney, who has been with the company for 19 years, a number of the technicians have worked at the shop for 10 or more years.
"We work as a team," Edleman said of his success in maintaining such loyalty. "I think that's the biggest thing that people tell me when they come here from another facility: that everyone here helps each other get the job done. I require a spirit of cooperation on the part of everyone. If the body shop is slow and the painters are buried, I send a couple of guys over to help them out. And vice versa. It's a team effort to get the cars out."
The I-CAR Gold Class shop repairs about 30 cars a week, Edleman said, but he insists that the work get done Monday through Friday.
"We don't work weekends," he said. "I don't want people spending their whole lives here. We've worked hard enough by Friday night, and that's enough."
Edleman said he got his start in 1970 when he leased a small garage about four blocks from the shop's current location and began fixing cars while going to school at night. A four-stall shop was his next move, before renting his current building for a decade, then buying it.
Three subsequent expansions have given the shop 9,500 square feet, including a second floor that has offices, a parts room, a lunch room and a locker room with showers for employees, he said.
In the last year, the shop purchased two additional Chief frame racks that along with its existing Chief rack and Velocity electronic measuring system have increased the shop's repair capacity, Edleman said.
"We added a smaller rack but also Chief's Goliath, its largest heavy-pull machine," he said. "The three of them combined gives us a capability to work structurally on several cars at once."
Another recent purchase was a SPX/Robinair Cool-Tech air conditioning recovery and recharging machine, Edleman said.
"It was time to change out our old machine, and we're real pleased with this one," he said. "This one does a nicer job of cleaning the system out and making sure there's no moisture in it."
On the paint shop side, Big E has a double-wide Global Finishing Solutions prep station and a Spraybake paint booth, and has been shooting BASF's Glasurit paint line for several years, Edleman said.
"I've used three different jobbers in my 38 years in business, and I think Wesco Autobody Supply, who takes care of us now, has done by far the best job," he said. "Before switching to them, I met with both the owners (of Wesco) here in my office personally on several occasions. And every promise they made has been kept. They're great to work with."
A former employee of the shop who later worked for Wesco is now a regional representative for BASF, Edleman said.
"He's continued to be real conscientious about our satisfaction with the product and our support from BASF," he said. "The combination of Wesco and BASF has been a great move for us."
Edleman said he's also pleased that he made the decision to stick with the State Farm "Select Service" program because it's worked out well despite his initial concerns about some of the agreement's wording.
He said State Farm and four other insurer direct repair programs account for about 60 percent of the shop's business. Although those programs have shifted administrative costs from the insurer to the shop and placed increasing pressure on repairing cars "faster and cheaper," he said they still offer benefits in terms of work flow and cycle time."
If his hiring choices over the years that have helped him develop a loyal team of employees have been among the best decisions Edleman has made, is there a business decision he can point to that in retrospect he regrets? He said that while he's made some mistakes, he's generally very satisfied with his choices.
"I've been told for years, 'You don't need to repair cars as well as you do,'" Edleman said. "Or, 'You should be a commission or flat rate shop; you'd make more money.' I like the decisions I've made.
"They may not make us as profitable as we could be. But if I go out to dinner here in the community and somebody comes up to me and says, 'Hey aren't you from Big E? You repaired my car,' I'm not worried about what the next sentence is going to be. I know I'm about to hear that everything was good because we just make sure that it is. So I don't really have any decision that I really regret."