By Steve McLinden
“Our reputation is no accident,” reads a message board on PlanetPaint Collision Center’s street-side sign, easily visible to customers and employees of a rival shop directly across Rufe Snow Drive in Watauga, Texas.
It’s clear that competition doesn’t scare PlanetPaint Manager Jack Nitzel.
“If I owned a bunch of body shops, I’d want everyone of them to be next to one of those,” he said, pointing in the direction of the national-chain shop. Nitzel claimed the competitor typically won’t take cash jobs like he does, and it creates other situations that unnerve their patrons. That drives dissatisfied customers over to PlanetPaint, said the manager.
A native of Paterson, N.J., who grew up tinkering on all things mechanical, Nitzel has seen the industry from several vantage points. He’s been in the body-shop biz since 1966, when he was charged with creating the first collision-repair school for Lincoln Technical Institute at its hub in Indianapolis. Nitzel would open similar collision schools for the trade school, in Denver, Chicago, Hartford, Conn., and finally, Grand Prairie, Texas, about a half-hour drive from where he has settled at PlanetPaint in Watauga, just north of Fort Worth. But when asked how he made it to the Dallas area, Nitzel says he jokes, “I made the wrong turn.”
Nitzel knows opportunity when he sees it. Before he was lured out of retirement four years ago by the shop’s ownership group, they had spent $1.3 million building the PlanetPaint facility, which sports an eye-catching sign, an efficient and professional presentation, and a layout and founding work ethic that set it apart from most other independents.
The shop is also tidy, bereft of the usual body-shop clutter, and its offices and waiting areas are clean and spacious. While Nitzel has an office up front, he’s seldom there. He prefers rubbing elbows with shop workers and customers. Though he is 69 years old, Nitzel is spry and active. He seldom sits during the work day and still plays racquetball twice a week, as he’s done for years.
PlanetPaint, which processes about 75 cars a month — more during active hail seasons, such as Dallas-Fort Worth just experienced — does fleet work for several local companies including Charter Communications.
“We like to say that this is where all the white vans come to get fixed,” Nitzel said.
While PlanetPaint doesn’t participate in a direct repair program (DRP) with major insurers, it is a “preferred shop” for Geico and several others, which is the next best thing, Nitzel said. While the shop takes on some custom work, such as the 1933 Plymouth Coupe kit car that was on site, that work has a woefully small margin and is not a primary focus, the manager said.
The shop does light mechanical work but won’t become a full-fledged mechanic shop due to enormous capital investment needed to bring in the kind of equipment that specialty requires these days, Nitzel said. Among the tools of the trade at PlanetPaint are a $100,000 Blowtherm paint booth, a computerized paint-mixing system that uses Sherwin Williams paints, a Chief spot welder and Chief air compressor. The shop can hold 18 cars at once and has ample acreage outside for more, said the manager.
Nitzel, 69, took over the business after three months of “retirement.”
“There was nothing left to fix, and I was bored out my mind,” he said.
He talks warmly about his drag-racing career, which he began in 1985, doing his own race-car custom and repair work in addition to the driving. He customized a race car for ESPN that would be auctioned off for a charity fundraiser, among several other high-profile vehicle, including some he has owned or still owns. One, Nitzel’s 2004 Viper, was at the shop on a recent Friday morning during a visit by Automotive Report. Nitzel patiently put together the sleek vehicle from the ground up out of parts that he went to great lengths to track down.
“It took a year to get the parts together and another year to assemble them,” Nitzer said.
The biggest problem facing the independent body-shop industry today, Nitzel said, is finding quality body techs. Fewer and fewer are getting into the trade. When PlanetPaint run an ads, it typically generates just a few responses. Of those interviewed, many are “green” and know shockingly little about materials and other nuances of the trade, yet they demand more and more money, Nitzel said. Moreover, some of the major body-shop chains are offering $3,000 and $4,000 signing bonuses and benefits for new body techs, which can be hard to resist for body techs and can put an independent in a precarious situation, he said.
Spending any more on salary and benefits at PlanetPaint would drop the shop into the red.
“I would love to do it, but I couldn’t pay my overhead,” Nitzel said. “That’s why I worry about the future of the independent.”
While the manager tries to be flexible and do whatever he can to keep good people, sometimes it’s just not enough. It’s especially frustrating to watch employees struggle with health setbacks, said the owner, which is why he is rooting for a workable national healthcare program to fill the gap. Shop estimator Traci Arnold, who has battled cancer and other ailments for years, has been forced to miss work lately because she’s been so sick to her stomach. Because Arnold is uninsured, she’s become a low priority for caregivers, Nitzel lamented.
PlanetPaint’s easy-to-navigate shop website features consumer tips and answers to such frequently asked questions as how the insurance-reimbursement process works and what to expect during a repair. The shop’s stated mission, says the site, “is to provide the highest quality repair with outstanding customer service.” Its primary goal: “To earn customers for life.”
While PlanetPaint is generating its share of attention on the internet, Nitzel said it has also run into a problem with online “trolls,” reviewers who have either never patronized the place, or who use the shop but threaten to write bad reviews if it won’t do heavily-discounted work or repair damage that occurred before their wrecks, . “They try to hold you hostage,” he said. And by rule on most review sites, “I am not allowed to rebut them.”
Nitzel’s prime source of new business is word-of-mouth, and that’s what keeps the business open.
“Reputation is everything in this industry,” he said.
Auto magnate Don Hall, an industry stalwart in Indianapolis, once told Nitzel something her hasn’t forgotten: “He said that spending more money on customer service is a better investment than all the TV, radio and newspaper ads combined you can buy.”
Indeed, the vast majority of PlanetPaint’s reviews are glowing. One customer in Watauga wrote: “The final product was very well done; they matched the spoiler’s paint job to the eight-year-old paint job of the car’s body extraordinarily well and brought the car out looking good as new.”
Another in Fort Worth noted: “Jack always does great by us and our business. They do incredible work at a fair price. We constantly mention them when our friends and customers ask for recommendations!”
Nitzel sees himself in his shop-manager post for years to come, he said. Never mind that in addition to his neighbor there are about ten other collision shops within a ten-minute drive.
“Our plan is to keep doing the right thing and going the extra mile for the customer,” he said. •
