He started in small ways. Keeping with his plan to attract women, he hired women to greet female customers at the door and walk them through their appraisals. In the shop girlie calendars came down. In the front office Jim and his staff started dressing more professionally. Tabletops were cleaned off and adorned with potted plants. And when it came time to pick up their cars, customers were greeted with a free car wash, a thank-you note on the front seat, and a couple of pieces of candy.
Advertising shifted toward women, too. While the ad budget stayed at 2% of sales, Jim moved his print ads from the sports page to the society page. On the radio he addressed women's fears head-on. "Ladies," the announcer began, "if your husband has just wrecked the car and you dread the thought of walking through a grease pit or sharing the couch with a dog or getting wolf whistles as you walk through the garage, then why don't you come down to Graley's? Let Cristi, Michelle, or Cathie greet you and give you a cup of coffee." Small though those changes may have been, they reaped big rewards for Graley Autobody. Between 1985 and 1986, the company's sales jumped from $525,000 to $1.6 million. Convinced that he was moving in the right direction, Jim started spending even more. In 1986 he secured $180,000 of financing to open a second, much larger shop across the Ohio River on a well-trafficked boulevard in downtown Huntington, W. Va., and decorated the interior along the lines of a popular local three-star restaurant. In the main office he put in plush red carpeting accented with glass-and-brass decor and topped it off with a fancy chandelier. In the body shop, the off-white linoleum floors were buffed to a high gloss. Body men were asked to organize their stalls.
With the purchase of a new computer-information system in 1987, Jim moved toward his dream of a paperless body shop. Rather than depending on confusing and often illegible work orders, he envisioned the day when body men would pull orders for repair jobs from their PCs. But rather than overwhelm his employees with too much too fast, he started by replacing the old work orders with clean, clear computer printouts.
And for those customers who called looking for a quick answer on when their cars would be ready, Jim installed a closed-circuit-TV monitor. Now, without so much as stepping away from his keyboard, he could scan the shop floor and know exactly where a repair job stood.
But as Jim well knew from all his management texts, guaranteeing speed and volume in the shop inevitably relied less on fancy computers than on employee enthusiasm. He looked for ways to inspire employees as well as customers. He custom-designed $250,000 worth of bake ovens for factory-finish paint jobs. He spent $40,000 on frame straighteners and another $30,000 for laser wheel-alignment machines. While this equipment allowed him to speed service on late-model cars, Jim figured it would also make the work of his employees easier, faster, and more lucrative in their body shop.
Their body shop. That's how Jim wanted his workers to think: his profits were their profits. The profit-sharing plan he discussed -- another idea gleaned from his foray into management theory -- would be, he knew, an uphill battle.
Jim's employees, like many in auto repair, were used to being paid a flat rate, based on the standard number of hours it takes to repair or replace most parts. To make more money a body man turns hours, or does a job in less than the time allotted on the work order and goes on to the next job. "Body men like to be able to dial their own future," explains one shop owner. But while this system gives each man a measure of autonomy, it narrowed Jim's choices. "I have no way of getting my men to care about the quality of their work or the wasted parts per job," says Jim. He figured those two problems alone added up to 10% of sales. The solution: put the men on salary and give them a percentage of profits. "I need them to care if the light is left on in the bathroom."
Jim had only to recall the blank faces that greeted his speech in 1985 to know his men weren't ready for profit sharing. Most were put off by the 34% pay cut they'd have to absorb at the start of profit sharing, despite Jim's explanation of how they could quickly more than make up that amount. So instead of harping on profit sharing, he decided to institute programs that implied what profit sharing is all about: trust. He started holding daily "release meetings" -- get-togethers for employees to vent their frustrations and concerns. Company-sponsored training kicked in, and for each course completed workers received a badge to sew on their uniforms. There was the "safety fund," rewarding employees $25 for each week there were no workers' compensation claims filed, and the recycling program, to siphon money collected from scrap metal into a new employee lunchroom. And there was the promise of new uniforms and better benefits.
Despite a setback here and there, by the late 1980s Jim was fast becoming noticed within the industry: "He's definitely been in the forefront," notes Denise Lloyd, publisher of BodyShop Business, a leading industry monthly. Asked to do speeches, quoted in articles. One shop owner, Dave Williams, even fashioned his entire shop on the Graley concept. "There are few people you can look to for inspiration in this business. Jim's one of the few," says Williams, owner of Precision Collision, in Wheelersburg, Ohio. Newcomers to the industry -- pedigreed newcomers -- agreed. Mark O'Neil, a Harvard M.B.A. and former McKinsey & Co. consultant who studied the industry with plans of his own national auto-body rollout, puts Graley's "on the cutting edge." Of all the players he interviewed, O'Neil declares Jim one of the industry's elite. "I've come from the top down, but he's come from the bottom up."
