Rebel with a Cause

Bob Juniper's radio attacks on the car-insurance industry raised hell -- and made his body shop the market leader

Back in 1992 Bob Juniper Jr. was just another bright, hardworking guy in a tough industry -- in this case, the unsexy, nonillustrious auto-body-repair business. "Then one day it hit me like a piano," he says. "I wouldn't be able to stay in business."

The collision-repair industry has always been a peculiar one: customers -- car owners -- want their cars fixed to the magically high standard of "pre-accident" conditions, while bill payers -- insurers -- want to keep costs down to magically low levels. The body-shop owner has to balance those two competing interests: fix the car the way the owner expects, and make sure the insurer will pay the full bill.

In the early 1990s a new wrinkle was added. Insurers began launching formal programs aligning themselves with a handful of body shops in each market. Shops that agreed to play by certain rules were in. Shops that didn't like the rules -- no matter what the quality of their work -- weren't, and they began to see their business siphoned away.

That's what Juniper saw happening to his Three-C Body Shop. To his mind, the choice he faced was this: either he could agree to make concessions in the way he serviced cars and get into bed with the insurers, or he could figure out a new way to find business.

He took his own way. Three years ago he began a marketing campaign that had at its center a for-the-jugular assault on the very alliances that he was being left out of. He launched his attack through ads on radio, billboards, and even hot-air balloons. The campaign not only set out to educate car owners about the collision-repair industry but also positioned his company as the ultimate oxymoron: the auto-body shop as consumer advocate.

It worked.

In some ways Bob Juniper Jr. looks the role of the auto-body guy. He has an eight-inch tattoo on his left forearm -- a dagger and a snake, just like his father's -- and another tattoo, of barbed wire and roses, that wraps around his upper right arm and over his shoulder. ("Whenever I'm depressed I add on to that one -- it brings me up," he says.) He usually dresses in jeans, work boots, and neat sweatshirts, and has a walkie-talkie at his hip.

But that's about all that's usual. His high-ceilinged office has a fireplace, a couch, a coffee table, and an eight-foot-long fish tank stocked with exotic varieties like dog-faced puffers and Picasso triggers; a full picture window looks out across a manicured front lawn toward the main garage. Juniper sits next to this window, surrounded on three sides by desks, which hold crammed Rolodexes, a computer and a printer, and a datebook the size of an unabridged dictionary, in which he carefully plans out all his time.

He has a ferocious type-A personality: he says he's up at 3:30 most mornings, at work by 5 or 5:30, and there for 12 hours. He works a few more hours at home, reading, for instance, all the day's mail. "I'm a stickler for it -- I know what information's being requested, how many bounced checks are coming in, what some of the insurance-industry estimates are," he says. "Consultants I've had in here critique this, but I'm the first to notice any unusual amounts of anything, and I'm real, real uncomfortable about letting go of it." He says he's exacting and can be short-tempered, but his energy isn't manic.

For the most part, Juniper's energy is channeled toward driving himself and his staff hard, getting increasingly record numbers of cars moved through the Three-C operation quickly and properly and profitably. Revenues grew from $1.2 million in 1992, before the aggressive marketing started, to $6.1 million last year, making Three-C one of the largest shops in the country. And as production manager Chris Sexton puts it, the Columbus, Ohio, company has positioned itself so that it now "draws the pickiest people in the city."

But get Juniper started about the state of the collision-repair industry, and he throws himself into a bitterly angry take on why body shops and insurance companies are at such odds. "In my experience, insurance companies offer to pay for just 60% of the work that really needs to be done," he says. "If you ask for the full amount, they'll negotiate the full amount with you. But initially they try to settle for about 60%. And I have a big problem with that -- I feel it's fraud."

He didn't always feel like that; on the other hand, the industry wasn't always the way it is today. Now 37, Juniper is like most body-shop guys: he grew up in the business. Three-C was founded by his uncle and then bought by his father, who made a nice living fixing cars in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, it was a typical operation: a single, cinder-block building alongside the "3C" highway that stretches through Ohio from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati. It made enough money to give Bob Juniper Sr. a living wage. When he was busy he would put out a sign: "No estimates today." He was a former army sergeant, and it was enough to do good, disciplined work.

Bob Juniper Jr. began working elbow to elbow with his dad when he was 15, coming on board full-time after graduating from high school. He had a rebellious period in his early twenties but took over the then-$104,000 business in 1984, at age 25, when his father retired.

The first thing he did was throw away the "No estimates today" sign. He started taking every job that came in and worked whatever hours were needed to move cars through. He wasn't advertising, but the business started growing -- 15% one year, 25% the next. Juniper was getting by, and he likened the work he did to that of an artist or a custom manufacturer. But cost cutting and efficiency measures had begun working their way through the economy, and a lot of businesses were changing. Collision repair was one of them.