Sure, shop owner Danny Kimes could have sunk a lot of cash into advertising his Alma, Ark., -based Auto-Plex Collision Repair
shop, but in a community of 4,000 people, he wouldn't have seen much return on his investment. Instead, he established his
client base where it really counts — in the trenches.
In Kimes' case, that meant repairing hundreds of cars damaged by a particularly destructive 1999 hailstorm. The shop, which
was founded just six years earlier, started as a tiny, one-man operation in Kimes' backyard. He was buying and rebuilding
trucks as a side business to supplement his primary business, a new car dealership. As more people came, "he was able to succeed
in that and he outgrew that one-bay shop we had in the back of the house," explains son, Jason Kimes, vice president and current
operations manager of Auto-Plex.
By 1999, the shop had moved to a 7,000-sq.-ft. facility with eight bays and two paint stalls — and grown to a full-time occupation
— but Danny Kimes was still looking for ways to draw in more customers. When the hailstorm hit, Auto-Plex found itself inundated
with repair work.
One late spring afternoon there was a severe storm with softball-sized hail, Jason recollects. "Our family is from this area.
People already knew we were here," he says. "So they started coming in. Body shops started filling up in the area and people
just kept coming. The very next day at 7 a.m. we had people with insurance checks saying they had to get their cars repaired.
We were filled for months." Although it was difficult dealing with a sudden inundation of work, Auto-Plex weathered the storm and brought relief to a
lot of distressed customers. "That probably helped more than we realized," says Kimes. "We repaired some 800 cars or something.
By repairing that many cars in this small of a community, your name gets out there. We haven't looked back since."
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After three subsequent add-ons to the facility, Auto-Plex finally moved to a larger space — a 14,000-sq.-ft. building with
18 bays — in March 2006. The older Kimes still deals with customers directly, but Jason has taken over running many aspects
of the day-to-day operations. And the shop does plenty of business to keep the 18 bays filled most of the time. "I'm looking
at a full facility right now," he says.
How do they do it? "I surprise people all the time," Jason says. "They want to know, 'How do you average 50 cars a month when
you only have 4,000 in your immediate community?' "
Community outreach has been critical to Auto-Plex's success. It's a factor that affects many collision repair shops but perhaps
none more so than this shop located in a small, rural community. Word-of-mouth has helped the shop draw from the surrounding
area, to as far away as Fayetteville, Ark., about a 45-minute drive north of Alma. Jason attributes the customer satisfaction to the fact he understands his customers and their needs. "You grow up here and
you know the pace of living — you know the daily schedules and how everything works," he says.
