By Steve McLinden
The former manager of a local Earl Scheib Paint & Body, Melissia Roland, seems dug in for the duration as an independent shop co-owner at her professional base of 972 Customs Paint, Collision & Auto Sales, just south of Dallas in Duncanville.
The 8-year-old business, at 1002 N. Duncanville Road, sits a few hundred yards off of mega-busy I-20, a major east-west highway that carries massive amounts of traffic to accommodate the swelling DFW-area population. The region has grown to nearly 6.7 million people, exceeding the Houston area in size, and proximity to the highway, Roland said, has helped spur trade significantly for 972, so named because the number is one of the chief Dallas-area phone prefixes.
Roland started tinkering with cars as a child, working side-by-side in the family garage with her dad, John Roland, who excelled at auto repair.
“My father was very handy with cars, and he had me studying right next to him,” Roland said. “I was his little assistant.”
Roland had another built-in advantage before taking the leap in shop ownership. She earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in Computer and Information Systems from prestigious Baylor University.
Roland and co-owner Chris Anderson opened the first incarnation of 972 Customs at a site in Garland, west of Dallas, in an industrial park that was not just well off the beaten trail, it was hamstrung by city sign ordinances that further hampered public visibility. The move to Duncanville a year later opened up a new world for the partners.
“We were running circles around the old Garland shop in sales almost immediately,” she said.
Ironically, the building they took over at the present location was also a former Scheib shop.
Roland’s managerial stint at an Earl Scheib in Garland, northwest of Dallas, came about almost serendipitously. Though she had minimal professional-repair training when hired, she was identified as a solid candidate and latched onto the Scheib gig as a manager, where she learned the ins and outs of the trade in baptism-by-fire mode.
The Duncanville shop gets customers from all over North Texas, mostly by word-of-mouth, she said.
“We pull from all over the area and get a lot of repeat business, plus we still get a lot of my old Earl Scheib customers,” she said.
Though “custom” plays a prominent role in its name, the shop takes on fewer and fewer of those time-consuming, low-profit projects than in the past.
“We do mostly insurance work now,” Roland said. “It’s just a better use of our time.”
Not that there aren’t still a few custom jobs in house. Veteran painter Ryan Born was working on a classic 1964 Chevy Impala during a recent shop visit. A souped-up blue custom 2002 Chrysler Concorde sits prominently on the side exterior of the shop, serving as 972 Customs’ attention-getting “mascot,” said Roland.
Repair services are mostly confined to full-service body work, though the shop will take on basic mechanical chores including brake and alignment work plus oil changes and other maintenance tasks. The business is negotiating to take over an empty building next door that is already zoned for mechanic work, a move that would facilitate the planned expansion of the shop’s services, Roland said. In the event of severe weather — or a storm of new business — the 5,700-square-foot leased shop can house at least 30 vehicles at a time.
Not counting the two partners, 972 Customs employs five and is seeking more help. The shop’s “Now Hiring” sign has generated several responses but none from qualified body workers, who are extremely hard to find, Roland said. A very low unemployment rate of 3.9 percent in the Dallas area has further reduced the talent universe. The business will sometimes take a chance on hiring promising workers to train for a body-repair post, she said.
The partners help pay the shop’s bills through their used-car sales sideline. Most vehicles are in the $2,500-to-$3,500 range and are more than ten years old. The shop doesn’t finance them, but it will likely do so in the future when it upgrades its car offerings, as is planned, Roland said.
The shop waiting area is clean and comfortable and includes a large-screen TV, tasteful decor and comfortable seating. The office is orderly with little aesthetic touches, including dark-wood cabinets. Children accompanying waiting customers are encouraged to try out a two-foot-tall toy truck that Anderson, a native of Arkansas, motored around in during his childhood. Originally from Mississippi, Roland’s family moved to Texas when she was in the fifth grade.
The shop has a 4.8 star rating out of 5 stars on Yelp. Wrote one recent customer, “Not only was the staff awesome, the professionalism was super. Check them out! You know good people when you meet them!”
The business also prides itself on responsiveness. A new customer who walked in the door on a recent Thursday morning seeking repair of a broken-off mirror got his car back in a few hours.
Sometimes the presence of a female as front-office manager can still be off-putting for some customers, mostly older-generation types, Roland said.
“Some of them feel like a woman can’t know what’s she’s talking about,” she said. “Some even ask me why they are dealing with the secretary; but when I go out and do their estimates, they are impressed and realize that I just might know what I am talking about.”
In recent years, insurance companies have made it progressively harder for small shops to survive, by steering work to affiliated collision-repair shops and established lists of preferred providers, said Roland. But she is quick to note that her shop has maintained “a very positive relationship with insurance adjusters,” in part due to her shop’s good reputation, a carryover from her Scheib days. When a nearby national-chain body shop gets slammed, it sends work over to Roland and crew.
“They know our guys in the back are as good as any,” she said. •
