The Three-C campaign was picked up by the trade press, and soon other shops were calling, wanting to use the same material in their markets. In 1994, Juniper and Hughes started a separate company, Jupiter Marketing & Advertising ("that's Jupiter, like the largest planet, not like my name"), to copyright the material and sell the best ads -- Three-C has tried 50 so far -- and to do ad placement. Vaughn Owens, who joined the operation last year, says wryly, "We're probably the only collision-shop-focused marketing agency in the world." Some 30 shop owners in 15 states have done business with the now-$2-million marketing company. Tom Rompel, owner of Factory Paint & Body in Tucson, is one of them. He says, "The marketing approach was brilliant, I thought. Just take the issue to the consumers and let them make the choice."
* * *
Determined to change the collision-repair experience for the customer, Juniper has taken the fruits of big volume and borrowed big bucks to change his facility -- not only to accommodate more cars but also to accommodate a new image. The company has expanded to the property next door and now uses an 80-year-old canary yellow cottage, decorated inside with plum-colored wallpaper and sprays of lilies, for customer-service areas and central offices. Twenty computers throughout the complex are networked, allowing service reps to update job orders from anywhere in the facility, and technicians to print out estimates and parts orders simultaneously.
A chief financial officer, Norm Hicks, joined the company at the beginning of 1995. He puts together a one-page monthly synopsis of 17 indicators for the business, including things such as profitability by job area, and average ticket price. He also helps generate stats on everything from the amount of materials each technician uses to the amount of work in process. As a result of having increased volume and understanding where the company makes its money, Three-C last year turned around two years of losses.
In the company sales office, all the walls are decorated, at first inexplicably to an observer, with photographs of the major insurance companies' buildings. Juniper uses them to legitimize his own operation. "When people say, 'Well, the insurance company told us you were really hard to work with and really expensive,' I point to the buildings and say, 'When my body shop looks like these buildings here, that's when I'm charging too much.' "
* * *
Leslie Brokaw (leslie_brokaw@incmag.com) is the senior editor of Inc. Online.
* * *
BY THE NUMBERS
January 1993 marked the turning point in Bob Juniper's ad campaign
|
Three-C 1992 |
Three-C 1995 |
Typical body shop, 1995* |
| Gross sales |
$1,218,000 |
$6,089,000 |
$450,000 |
| Cost of goods sold (direct labor and materials) |
$785,000 |
$3,453,000 |
$283,500 |
| Cost of goods sold as a % of gross sales |
65% |
57% |
63% |
| Advertising expenses |
$114,000 |
$518,000 |
$4,500 |
| Advertising as a % of sales |
9.4% |
8.5% |
1% |
| Pretax net profit |
9.4% |
3.7% |
5% to 6% |
| Number of employees |
11 |
65 |
5 |
| Size of facility, in square feet |
10,000 |
45,000 |
4,000 |
| Cars serviced per week |
12 |
80 to 90 |
6 |
*Inc. estimates, based on information from the Automotive Service Association, a trade group; Autochex, a private company that conducts customer-service interviews and financial-data collection for body shops; and Collision Repair Industry Insight, a privately owned trade publication.
CAMPAIGN COSTS
Juniper cut his budget way back for 1996: "It's like launching a rocket -- it took a lot of fuel for three years to get our presence way up, and now we need just boosters to stay there."
| Advertising expenses |
1993 |
1994 |
1995 |
1996* |
| Radio |
$346,000 |
$384,000 |
$337,000 |
$100,000 |
|
| Billboards |
30,000 |
50,000 |
65,000 |
30,000 |
|
| Buses and taxis |
32,000 |
50,000 |
70,000 |
30,000 |
|
| Hot-air balloons |
5,000 |
6,000 |
6,000 |
10,000 |
| Plane banners |
2,000 |
5,000 |
5,000 |
5,000 |
|
| Newspapers |
0 |
10,000 |
25,000 |
50,000 [a] [ |
| ] Brochures |
0 |
20,000 |
0 |
0 |
| Acquiring names and doing direct mail |
10,000 |
50,000 |
10,000 |
25,000 |
| Total |
$425,000 |
$575,000 |
$518,000 |
$250,000 |
|
|
|
|
*Projected |
[a]After acquiring a small body shop outside Columbus, in 1995, Three-C bumped up its newspaper budget
