Anxious to move out of the overcrowded Koreantown market, Yang and new partners, including her brother and husband, acquired Civic Center Collision from Gabriel Estrada. Civic Center Collision has operated in downtown LA since 1946 but had fallen on hard times, existing on low-margin rental car fleet work and doing about $150,000 monthly. Despite the modest volume, Estrada had recently constructed the present 40,000 sq ft building, designing it specifically for collision repair. To make it work, Yang saw that immediate change was needed.

 

Working 14 hour days and relying on her "strong Christian faith" and the negotiating skills she acquired working with insurance companies as a paralegal, Yang refocused the shop on insurance work, eventually winning DRP contracts with Prudential, Fireman's Fund and Western General. Steadily increasing profits permitted her to buy out the partners, including her now ex-husband, and to equip the shop with modern equipment.

 

"Having modern equipment and training your staff to use it is very important to getting paid fairly by insurers," Yang explained, adding that she's presently looking at adding spot welders to the shop. "For example, when adjusters see old frame equipment or a new rack that's gathering dust, they're not stupid. They're not going to allow you higher rate hours to straighten and measure the frame because they know you won't really do it. You're sending the adjuster a message by the way your shop looks."

That message was made clear by an incident when Yang reinspected a Toyota. Civic Collision employees regularly attend the University of Toyota, earning the shop a designation as a Toyota Authorized Collision Repair Center, and so the shop is often asked to reinspect Toyotas repaired elsewhere. The reinspection revealed terrible frame work - "they put filler on the frame rail" - and when Yang reviewed the original estimate she realized it was way too low to do the job right, especially the frame work. When she confronted the veteran adjuster, he acknowledged that it was unreasonable, but explained: "I'd been in that shop many times and knew they seldom used their old frame pulling equipment. So I figured, OK, I'll write a very basic sheet and see if they call me for a supplement when they find the frame is damaged. They never even called."

The insurance work that Yang does definitely finds her, and not the other way around. "We do no advertising and don't have an outside marketing rep. I never leave the shop. We write a very reasonable ticket, we have good equipment and 80% of my staff is I-CAR trained. That means our work is good, and that's what they want. Good work, reasonable pricing. The adjusters don't nickel and dime me to death - they know I won't put up with it."

E-Auto Claims program

One increasingly important source of business is the E-Auto Claims program. E-Auto Claims is a third party claims manager that makes extensive use of the Internet to manage work done at shops in their network. Estimates are prepared on a Comp-Est system and transmitted to E-Auto Claims. Civic Center pays E-Auto Claims 15% of their labor and parts sales on all jobs done under the program. So where's the profit? Yang explains: "First, they allow us enough hours to repair the car properly" - at the prevailing hourly rate of $34. "Then you must remember that we have no marketing expense to get this work. No reps making $5,000 a month to call on insurers, no advertising, no time wasted dealing directly with the insurers because they (E-Auto Claims) handle all of that."

Not an ethnic shop

And what about the Korean angle? In a city known for its racial diversity, many people prefer to have their cars repaired within their own ethnic communities. "We certainly have valued Korean customers, but it's now only a small part of the business. After my ex-husband left, I let go all of the Korean staff and hired Hispanics. My production manager is Marco Rosales. I'm the only Korean. That doesn't make me very popular in Koreatown."

Yang said she seldom talks to other Korean shop owners - "the men are arrogant towards me" - and she chooses not to participate in industry associations. "I've belonged to ASA and gone to various meetings. There's a lot of complaining and a lot of people angry with insurance companies. That doesn't get you anywhere. It wasn't a good use of my time."

 

Paint department had problems

 

Employing two painters and four helpers with two down-draft booths, Civic Collision today sprays BASF paint. "At the old shop we sprayed DuPont," explained Yang, and when she came to Civic Center the shop was doing mostly rental-car fleet work but using a big-name European paint. "It was good paint but it was not giving me enough profit," Yang recalled. She talked with two jobbers and decided to go with an American-made paint, but not a major brand. "The price was good, very good. But we couldn't find anybody who knew how to use it. Retraining painters is a huge problem because of language difficulties. There was a lot of time-consuming mixing of chemicals, and we had fish eyes, drying problems between layers and the clear would die back very quickly. Two months later, we said 'no more,'" Yang recalled.