At 55 years old, Abe Guenter admits he could have “walked away and retired comfortably instead of building on” to AG Autobody, the collision repair center he has owned and operated in Warman, Saskatchewan, the past 32 years.
Guenter also admits, “I don’t work for money. I work for efficiency, which makes me money.” That is why he invested last year in performance-boosting finishing equipment from Global Finishing Solutions (GFS) and Canadian distributor Dormer Finishing Systems — an Ultra XD Paint Booth and Excel Workstation that are connected by a Side-Load Finishing System, with an adjoined Ultra XD Paint Mix Room.
“We used to be a body shop, not a collision repair center. We could fix anything, but it wasn’t a profitable shop. We did almost no insurance repairs. It wasn’t equipped to do collision repair, but we did some collision repair. Cars were different back then, so you could get away with it. We sought to not be the biggest but to be the best. That was always our goal. Whatever I did, I wanted to do well.”
“The GFS product line struck me as that cake with whipped cream and not just cake. Comparing to other booths and talking to other shop owners and managers, the GFS line had happy users. The folks at Dormer were very passionate about what they did. They didn’t do it just because they’ve always done it. They genuinely seemed interested in what they were offering, without the slightest bit of expectation that they would be getting the sale — and I have not been disappointed.”
“We built a new addition that is 2 ½ times the size of our previous production area. We load into our prep, we side-load throughout the prep into the booth, and once the car has been painted, the other side of the booth opens as well, and we side-load out into assembly. We’ve set the shop up so that we can control the flow of the paint department. Any time you can control the flow, you can manage your key-to-key times, your profitability, your technicians’ income.”
“We used to do two booth cycles a day. In this new setup, sitting on our hands, we’ll paint four cars a day. I fully expect that our capacity — in an instant — will be doubled. And I expect the system can do much more than that. With the correct person pulling the trigger, we should paint six cars a day. We also spray a lot of off-vehicle parts, and we’ll routinely have two or three different colors in the same booth cycle. So this will be a game-changer for us.”
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