Quote: Great review for sure but the score card is incomplete.
When shopping for a body shop or restoration shop, there are THREE major criteria to be met.
1) QUALITY
2) TIME FRAME
3) FINAL COST vs ESTIMATE
Now by reading this thread about your car, and seeing other posts by AMCR I think I can answer the first two with some certainty, however I will speak for most people when I ask... Did AMCR stick to their estimated cost? With the extra work that YOU ask for, I can understand being charged extra, but did they ever raise the cost of the project or go over their famous "$25K MAX labour special" for reasons that they discovered?
...and a question for TIM....If you did indeed stick to your estimated price....Did you "make money" or lose your shirt...by that I mean taking the total amount charged divided by the total hours spent...are you making minimum wage?
...Again a question for Tim...has a project like this made you rethink your $25K deal OR or quite contrary did it reaffirm your offer?
Big thanks to Mike Scala for the review! We really enjoyed working on your car.
As I indicated originally, we are never going to get rich doing what we do for the prices we charge. We made enough money to live and that's all we ever try to do. We live and work in a country setting and our overhead is nothing compared to most other shops.
Yes, we stuck to our bid(s). We had a communications error on the redo of the bottom and we still stuck to our word. Mike, being the classy guy he is, gave us a nice gratuity over and above the amount of the price we charged him.
We take responsibility for taking longer to do the job on the points that are our responsibility and the owner has taken responsibility for the delays that were his. All in all, no harm, no foul.
Will we do more $25k max jobs? Yes, the shop is full of them. And I get new requests for bids often. I never finished the web site and never posted pictures so it's 100% from these postings and word of mouth.
I will say this though. We would much rather do the $18k max partial jobs like we did on Rich's RR vert. And, if you lived here Alan, it's all we would do. We would send you everything else.
Will we do work at these low prices forever? Heck no. We could probably raise them by $10k and still be just as busy just because people want a fixed bid.
I don't want to cause a debate here and I won't respond to any trash talk on Mike's thread. But, we know our capabilities. My partner Mike Snyder can replace metal and do body work better than any human I've ever known. He is the one who gets all of the credit for us being able to do work at fixed bids. It's not surprising to me that others are afraid to simply because they don't have the level of experience he does. In order to cover overhead, many shops have to work on several cars at once and therefore have one real journeyman body man or painter and several people with much less experience. All we have is Mike, Hubert is back part time and me for mechanical.
When we started this journey, we were referred to several experts for help. When it comes to welding, body and paint, some of the same experts now call Mike Snyder for advice. I won't mention names but I think you'd be surprised.
