By Steve McLinden
Cars were always a calling for Shreveporter Jack Giles, owner of Jack’s Body Shop.
“I just loved them from the time I was young, especially race cars,” he said.
When he wasn’t attending school, a teenage Giles found himself hanging out at Eagle Body Shop near his neighborhood, serving as an unofficial helper. Eventually, the shop hired the eager Giles full-time, even sponsoring his racing car when he was old enough to take up the sport. Ironically, when the Eagle shop closed its doors, many of Giles old co-workers would follow him to Jack’s, which has been a collision-repair staple for 24 years in the southern part of this city of approximately 200,000 people.
The shop, at 10260 Linwood Ave., sits about three quarters of a mile west of busy Interstate 49, making it especially convenient for locals to get there, although Jack’s draws motorists from throughout the region, from Bossier City to Grand Bayou to east Texas.
Jack’s is a certified repair shop for most insurers, a status “that tends to simplify the insurance claim process for the customer,” Giles said. Word-of-mouth about the shop’s vaunted service ethic continues to be a main source of new and repeat business.
“We are now seeing a third generation of drivers coming to the shop from a lot of the families we have served since we first opened,” the owner said.
During slower times of the year, however, the shop may run a slick, slightly tongue-in-cheek TV commercial to drum up work. On it, a silken-voiced female announcer summarizes shop services, then says, “Tell daddy to take you to Jack’s,” followed by the broadly-smiling, sunglass-wearing owner Giles giving the thumbs-up, exclaiming, “At Jack’s Body Shop, we make your body bee-a-u-tiful.”
But it’s the quality of work that keeps generations of motorists coming back, stressed Giles.
“Satisfying the customer is our most important goal,” he said. “When you do that, the profit will follow.”
A major hail storm, featuring golf-ball to baseball-sized hail, hammered the Shreveport-Bossier City area in early April, filling Jack’s — and a tent that was set up outside to handle the overflow — to the brim with dinged-up vehicles, boosting Jack’s 2018 bottom line significantly. About 85 hail jobs have flowed through the small shop this year, the shop ledger indicates.
The long litany of hail repairs was finally completed in early November, though the shop manages to remain extremely busy. On the second Friday of November, there were 28 vehicles in house, for example. The shop keeps regular Monday-through-Friday hours but staffers often work weekends to streamline the project flow, said Giles, who regularly pitches in on all forms of repair work there.
Some repeat customers at Jack’s are more regular than they’d like to be.
“I have one who is a doctor who has wrecked four or five cars,” Giles said.
Other patrons are notable, such as James Burton from nearby Dubberly, La., who was the guitarist and band leader for Elvis Presley’s famed TCB band.
Giles recalls his early days in the collision-repair trade in the 1990s when he was still hand-writing estimates. While those estimates were reasonably accurate, they were also very time-consuming, which is one reason Giles enjoys the shop’s Audatex automated estimating platform. It allows the shop, insurers and appraisers to collaborate on a single system, which improves cycle time, productivity and accuracy for all parties, he said. Other trade tools at Jack’s include a trio of frame-straightening machine, including a Cheetah brand Star-A-Liner, which is designed for use on vehicles ranging from unibody cars on up to extended-cab trucks.
For all paint repair work, Jack’s uses PPG automotive paints that are custom-mixed in house for exact color matching. The shop’s premium downdraft spray booth filters the air entering and leaving the enclosed painting space, eliminating contaminants and helping protect the environment, said Giles. The same booth also serves as an “oven” to cure paint, which gets the vehicle out of the booth and back into the hands of the customer faster.
Jack’s website (www.shreveportbodyshop.com) summarizes all its shop services, equipment and the technology it uses, also covering the claims-settlement process and insurance dos and don’ts, plus before-and-after photos of repair jobs. Giles said he is proud to pay staffers more than the industry standard.
“If you pay them well and take care of them, they will take care of you and they will stay with you,” he said.
The owner’s son, Colton Giles, a former Shreveport firefighter, is co-owner and serves as shop manager as he helps out with other shop tasks. He and his dad are avid sportsmen. Shop-founder Giles is a long-time board member of Bass Life Associates, a non-profit conservation organization supporting youth fishing, lake stocking and trophy-bass conservation.
Jack’s sports an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and draws consistently positive social media reviews on Google and elsewhere. One woman on a 2,000-mile trip wrote that she was ecstatic with Jack’s after making an emergency detour there after experiencing a loud noise from a plastic piece that was hitting her tire as she drove on the nearby interstate highway.
“Mr. Jack was willing to take a look and we dropped right in,” she wrote on Google reviews. “He fixed it in less than 10 minutes. Jack is a truly genuine person with a kind heart.”
Another reviewer called Jack and his team “great men who really helped me out by repairing my vehicle within my out-of-pocket budget; the customer service was amazing … and I was treated no different, despite being a female.” •
