Easton, Calif.--Like a lot of California collision repair shop owners these days, Doug Rosendahl is in the market for a new spray booth.
"We're in the process of getting bids right now," said Rosendahl, the second-generation owner of Rosendahl's Auto Body. "Times are changing, and we're going to have to go to waterborne paint here in the next couple of years. But we wanted to increase our production anyway. We've really exhausted our current booth and have pushed as much through it as we can."
Rosendahl said he had narrowed his choice for the new booth down to two brands: Global Finishing Systems, available through Precision For Collision, and AFC Finishing Systems, available through the shop's Standox jobber, Patterson Paint.
But the booth is not the only investment the company has made recently to make sure it is equipped to make high-quality repairs. Last spring, for example, Rosendahl said he bought a Lenco Autospot resistance spot welder.
"It's not something you can use everywhere, but where you can use it, it works real nicely," he said. "It's definitely a time-saver and makes a good, factory-looking weld."
More recently, the company bought a Car-O-Tronic Vision computerized measuring system for use with its Car-O-Liner bench system and Whitney frame rack, Rosendahl said.
"We just got the Vision measuring system this year, and one of our techs is going up to Precision For Collision, who we bought it through, for training on it," he said.
Rosendahl said he grew up in the industry, his father having been a partner in a shop for many years before launching Rosendahl's Auto Body in 1979. The younger Rosendahl, just finishing high school at that time, said he started doing bodywork at his father's shop and took over the business when his father retired in 2001.
He said that among the toughest challenges he's seen as owner is increasing demands by insurance companies that recognize there are "more body shops than there is work out there."
His 5,000-square-foot shop has eight full-time and two part-time employees, Rosendahl said, including a collision repair student at Fresno City College who works at the shop in the afternoons. He said several of his long-term employees were hired through the school, which enables the shop to develop employees that meet the shop's quality expectations.
"It takes a while when you hire a student, but it eventually pays off," Rosendahl said. "Often, when I just run an ad and try to hire somebody, we have problems. There's a lot of bad habits out there."
Ongoing training is also important for technicians, Rosendahl said, and the shop has earned the I-CAR Gold Class designation.
"I think it's good publicity, plus there's a lot of liability involved in what we're doing," he said. "It's good to know the proper procedures to make good-quality and safe repairs. I think one of the best decisions we've made has been to try, as we've been financially able, to keep up with equipment and training. I think that's been our best asset."
Another good decision, said Neal McCarter, an estimator and office manager who has worked at Rosendahl's for about 10 years, has been to keep the company's focus on collision repair.
"There are some shops that have their own mechanical department, but there's so much ongoing change in that area, so much diagnostic equipment that you can't keep up unless you're going to be in that business," McCarter said. "You can't keep everything in-house like you'd like to, and you're dependent on someone else a bit, but we're specialists in what we do, and we let them be specialists in what they do."
Rosendahl said specializing has allowed the company to develop a good reputation in its small community of Easton (just south of Fresno) and steady work without a lot of advertising.
"We advertise in the school sports programs, but that's about it," he said. "We have some direct repair programs and one dealership in town that does refer us some work. But we're a small community, and word of mouth really helps us. We have a lot of return customers and a lot of their referrals from the small communities around here."
In fact, Rosendahl said he'd like to expand his facility beyond what he can do at the shop's current location, but he wouldn't want to move far.
"If we could find some property without having to leave the area, that would be a goal," he said. "But it's hard to pack up and move once you're established in an area and everyone knows where you are. If we were just doing DRPs and dealer work, it wouldn't matter as much, but we do a lot of repeat business, and people know where we are."
So in the meantime, Rosendahl said he relies on a fairly simple principle to keep work coming in the door.
"Our goal is to make our customers happy and to do the highest-quality job we can do," he said. "Make people happy, and they'll come back."
