By Gary Butler
While most auto body and paint shops shy away from restoration work, a Waynesville, N.C., shop has actually found its niche by catering to a select group of customers who expect and often demand near-perfection in bringing their older vehicles back to life. But Recouped Automotive Center co-owners and brothers Robbie and Tim Bartholomew admit they had to struggle to overcome many hurdles to make their 10,000-square-foot shop, located at 3216 Asheville Road, the “preeminent restoration shop in western North Carolina.
“We worked many a 14-hour day back at our tiny shop in Cruso to break through and become accepted in the restoration and repair business,” Robbie said. He characterized Cruso as a little place “in the middle of nowhere” in rural North Carolina. Although the town is only about 20 minutes away from Waynesville, “It seems like another lifetime ago.”
“We worked so hard there to learn our trade, but the cards were often stacked against us,” he said. “The insurance company people originally blew my brother and me off, assuming, I think, that we wouldn’t be competent to take a car apart and put it back together again.”
Bartholomew said he and his brother fought against that stereotype by doubling down on what he calls “old school” work, meaning restoration jobs that were almost never paid for through insurance companies.
“We turned out some really nice work on classic vehicles that made it into car shows throughout the area, and those cars and trucks started to win trophies,” he said. “Then the guy who had won a trophy was really proud of that, and he would tell a friend, and word got spread around. And those guys with the older, classic vehicles also had newer vehicles that would need repair, and they started bringing those to us,” Robbie said. “That was how we broke into the insurance work, because the insurance reps saw that we were more than competent to repair vehicles to their standards.”
But the Bartholomew brothers also had technical challenges to overcome along the way.
“My brother, Tim, went to Houston, Texas, to UTI [Universal Technical Institute] and brought back a wealth of information about new techniques, and especially concerning paint issues we had been having,” he said. “Before that, in Cruso, we had struggled to get paint to stick to metal. There was definitely a learning curve there, but we got a lot of help from our man Randy [Stocker], who at the time was our paint rep. We went to a Sherwin-Williams facility in Atlanta with him, and that changed everything for us. Randy finally got fed up with the way the paint company was treating its reps, and he eventually came on board with us.
“But he played a big part in helping us learn the intricacies of paint, how it reacts to heat, what it takes to make it stick to metal and other surfaces, and about the longevity of the paint job,” Robbie recalled. “Then the rest of the crew just sort of came together when we moved here about seven years ago.”
The “rest of the crew” includes full-time mechanics, painters, and body men, with a combined total of about 300 years of experience and expertise between them, he said.
The learning curve that Robbie referred to also included how to deal with customers and let a certain percentage of criticism “roll off his back.”
“In the beginning, we wanted every single customer to be completely happy with our work,” he said. “But we found out that isn’t very realistic. I mean, if a psychologist can’t make someone happy every time, what chance could we have of doing that?”
Most repair and paint shops that do the occasional restoration often tuck that vehicle back into a corner and make it a long-term project, only accepting the job if the customer is willing to wait much longer than usual for the completed job. But Robbie says that is not usually the case with his customers.
“We are often just as much ‘under the gun’ to meet a deadline with our restorations as we are with insurance work,” he said. “But that is part of why we have developed such a solid reputation in the area — the fact that we can and do meet those deadlines.”
To help the Bartholomews meet their deadlines and expand their business, Robbie said they have plans to add more square footage to the existing shop.
“We want to give the mechanical side a little more breathing room, maybe provide more room for tires, and more bays for in-and-out work, meaning work that will be completed in one day,” he said. “And we have worked on some motorcycles in the past, and might revisit that market.”
Robbie said he and his brother have come a long way from the Cruso days, particularly in terms of their efficiency and level of expertise.
“We use a Mitchell program for estimating, and a more elaborate program to help us with disassembly and then reassembly,” he said. “And our equipment has also come a long way. In the beginning, in fact, we were using my grandfather’s old equipment, even some ground-down old needle-nosed pliers, to do the work. Now we have Snap-On tools, PPG paint mixed in-house, and some state-of-the-art equipment.”
Although the Bartholomews do a fair amount of insurance work, Robbie says he has little interest in cultivating status as a DRP (Direct Repair Program) shop.
“The insurance companies basically want to have a concierge service now, which means the customer drops his car off in an intermediate place, then it gets subbed out to someone who’s on the DRP list,” he said. “The only problem with that is that the customer may never meet the shop. And if that shop gets dropped from the DRP list, it’s hard for them to later reach those customers.
“It didn’t take me long to realize I intended to work solely for my customers, not the insurance companies,” Robbie asserted.
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes listening to Robbie Bartholomew to see that he is laser-focused on what his customers, especially owners of classic, what he tends to call “old school,” cars want, need, and have come to expect in a repair/restoration.
“We are going to be judged every time one of these cars is looked at, especially at these car shows,” he said. “And many times we face the challenge of taking a car like a Pinto, for example, and making every square inch of it shine and grab people’s attention. It needs to look better than the Shelby or the Charger sitting next to it, so the owner will be so pumped about it that he will tell a bunch of his friends about the reaction his car got at the show, then some of those friends will bring us their work.”
Robbie says their shop doesn’t find it necessary to advertise on radio or TV, “because we stay booked up about three weeks as it is.
“Quality work, attention to detail, and pride in what you present to your customers is all the advertising we think we need,” he said.
Robbie points out the sobering observation that many first-time shop owners are likely to get discouraged and give up, sometimes succumbing to the pressures of the growing pains.
“When we started, we weren’t making any money, we were over-taxed, and the government didn’t care whether we made it or not,” he said. “Your venders and suppliers can be even more heartless, and you end up feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders.
“So you just have to put your ‘big boy pants’ on and forge ahead. You’ve got to be tough, and you’ve got to want it bad,” he said. “But the rewards can be worth it, if you hang in there, especially with these restorations.
A car might come in here a complete pile of junk, but by the time you send it out the door people are lining up to touch it, to take pictures of it with their phone cameras.
“Those are the days that make this job worthwhile,” he said. •
