By Steve McLinden
By all appearances, Big Wheels Body Shop seems like a long-entrenched local institution, with its warehouse-sized stature, wrap-around parking lot jammed with trucks and busses and the bustle of more than a dozen and a half workers about the premises. But it isn’t. The 30,000-square-foot south Fort Worth shop, which will approach a whopping $3.5 million in sales this year, is a mere 14 months old.
How does such a start-up go from square one to square ten in such a short span? Meet Will Cicalla, the impetus behind the huge new repair juggernaut, a Pittsburgh native who lives and breathes customer service, civic involvement and personal responsibility.
A self-described Air Force brat, Cicalla’s family landed in Lubbock near Reese Air Force Base long enough to start and finish high school. There, he took trade classes in auto-body repair and boldly declared to his instructor one day that he’d open his own shop someday. While a talented fix-it, Cicalla was also a rabble-rouser, compelling his teacher to respond, “Well, anything can happen, but I don’t think so, Will,” recalls Cicalla with a laugh.
After graduation, Cicalla went to work for several independent collision shops and soon got in tight with DuPont, taking classes on the finer points of paint and repair. It was DuPont, in fact, that helped Cicalla land a dealership repair gig in the “major leagues” of Dallas-Fort Worth where he would work 14 years for various truck dealers.
One fleet customer, Mark Petty, was so impressed by Cicalla’s work ethic and management style that he offered to finance a new large-vehicle body shop for Cicalla if he was so inclined. Cicalla jumped at the chance. Someone had helped out Petty the same way, it turns out, and the financier was paying it forward. That enabled Cicalla to secure the facility, which had sat vacant two years after Walls Manufacturing had moved out, on favorable terms in a seven-year lease.
Big Wheels had just five employees when it kicked off but quickly expanded to 17 as word-of-mouth spread on its work quality and versatility spread. The shop repairs rigs, buses, RVs, garbage trucks, cement mixers, earth-movers and an endless array of other heavy equipment, performing all structural and cosmetic repairs on interiors and exteriors.
No doubt the shop is doing something right. In its first full year of operation, Big Wheels posted $2 million in sales against an original projection of $800,000 and is on its way to a $3.4 million second year, against an initial $1.5 estimate, Cicalla said.
“My walk-in ratio is bigger than anything I have ever experienced, even at the dealer level. I get four or five walk-ins everyday; it’s just unbelievable.”
At the start, Cicalla brought over a few workers with him from his previous management post at a large Fort Worth truck dealership, then found other quality — but short-tenured — workers who had been laid off from shops when the oil bust hit Texas. He got other breaks, too. Axalta Coating System, previously part of DuPont, agreed to finance paints and supplies for the shop until it got on its feet.
Fleet work is the bread and butter at Big Wheels. Among the shop’s truck clients are Gold Star Transportation, Swift Transportation, Estes Express Line and Lone Mountain Truck Leasing, among more than 20 others. Most of those firms are self-insured, so Cicalla doesn’t have to perform in the delicate intermediary role that conventional auto body shops managers play with insurance adjusters.
Cicalla sees the industry as a relationship business, so he resolves to treat all customers like family.
“When they call you and need you, then you want to be fast to respond to their needs,” he said. “I tell our workers to do their work with pride and treat customers the way they’d want to be treated.”
The owner-manager recently added three more employees to reach the 20-worker level, all young trainees with ambition but minimal repair experience. Cicalla prefers that approach to bringing in new blood from hiring from questionable trade schools.
“I told these guys to save their money and learn here,” he said.
Cicalla assesses workers based on attitude and attendance in addition to performance.
“I tell them if they are going to put time in for me, I am going to put time in for you.”
He said he offers health insurance and additional benefits that other shops don’t in order to retain good staffers “and because it’s the right thing to do.”
The owner-manager gives his workers broad latitude in their repair strategies instead of allowing them to lean entirely on him.
“I let my guys make decisions because I want them to think for themselves,” he said. “I tell them to not to come in to me with a problem without first having their own plan.”
Cicalla gets some family help, too. His mother, Lori, does the books in addition to holding down an outside job. His wife, Shelly, works in the office and also maintains the shop’s Facebook page. An outside group set up Big Wheels’’ attractive web page (bigwheelsbodyshop.com), which has a list of services, shop photos and links to reviews. One trucker customer commented: “I recommend (Big Wheels) to all the drivers. I got my alignment done here because they have top-of-the-line equipment.”
The shop, which is clean and bereft of the all-too-common industry clutter, offers warranties of two to five years on work, which is relatively rare in the industry because of the wear and tear that rigs and other commercial vehicles typically endure. To streamline the operation for customers, Big Wheels will assess a job, pre-order parts for it and then call customers back only when their vehicle is next up on the repair queue. The shop can replace frame rails and do minor mechanical work if need be.
Shop equipment includes two giant “heat and bake” paint booths, one 18 feet by 18 feet and the other 18 feet x 16 feet, which were built locally with the baking element manufactured in Minnesota, plus a Hunter Laser Liner computer alignment machine. The facility exclusively uses energy-efficient LED (light-emitting diode) lighting.
Big Wheels has had as many as 48 vehicles and pieces of equipment in the 30,000-square-foot facility at one time. Should Big Wheels need to expand, there are three acres behind it. However, any company expansion will likely come through new locations in Minnesota and the East Coast, where Cicalla has already had discussions with business people interested in opening Big Wheels locations.
Cicalla, a master marketer, remains civically active. He is a staunch supporter and member of the Texas Association for Pupil Transportation, which has aided him in winning contracts from a majority of school districts around the area. He also maintains a close relationship with Arlington, Texas-based Vale Training, which offers training programs for estimators, examiners, appraisers and adjusters. Vale trainees travel out to Big Wheels in groups and do individual estimates on repair jobs there. At the end of the session, Cicalla will let them compare their estimates to his.
For those occasional odd heavy-equipment repair jobs that the staff is not fully familiar with, Cicalla seeks assistance from Axalta, which invariably has people familiar with such work and is willing to advise the manager. Among the projects in house on an early May afternoon was a $300,000 rig that professional racer Tony Stewart had used to transport his competition vehicles.
Cicalla has two grown kids, one a six-and-a-half foot son who is a pitcher for Richland College baseball team (with a fastball exceeding 90 mph), and a daughter in the Philadelphia area who is one of the top sales performers at a Toyota dealership.
Cicalla said he will never forget the big break he got from financier Petty in helping him launch Big Wheels.
“I will pay it forward some day to someone else — I swear I will,” he said.“That’s how things should work.” •
