HHarvey Prestige
If you’ve been in the business for 34 years and created two shops with a reputation for excellence, you can expect to be up for a few awards.
Such is the case of the legendary Heydon Harvey, who created one shop in Nerang and now another in Upper Coomera on the sunshine state’s Gold Coast.
Harvey is a thinker, a man who sinks his teeth into a bodyshop issue and doesn’t give up until he’s solved it. Right now he is sitting on a business that attracts customers from a very wide base. With his manager, Mark Slorach, his son Glenn as workshop foreman and wife Marilyn as office manager, the family has put its stamp on Gold Coast auto repairs for the past 20 years.
Harvey began his career at Thornleigh on Sydney’s north shore, where he ran a bodyshop for 14 years before taking off for more sunshine and marine life on the central NSW coast. He bought a marina which, he says, he just didn’t like and went back to the business that earned him the money to buy the marina in the first place.
Slorach has been with him since “forever” Harvey says. “The whole team here is terrific.” Harvey’s opinion of those that work for him is reflected in the most interesting ways.
In summer, when the heat in this part of the country can be unbearable, everyone would like to hit the beach or the pool. At HHarvey Prestige you don’t have to go anywhere because a pool is right outside the lunch room and the workers use it to cool down before tackling the afternoon’s work. Little wonder that everyone wants to work there.
Of course, a swimming pool won’t make a large shop the best in Queensland. Probably, clean, tidy and efficient will help, but the stand-out initiatives put the icing on the cake.
At Nerang, Harvey won three awards from Paint&Panel. It was a big shop with as many as 120 cars throughput a week. That shop was 3400 square metres. The Upper Coomera shop is 4700 square metres with 2200 under cover.
Lighting is set-up to look like daylight “We had a guy going around daily with a light metre shifting the lights around for the best result,” Harvey says. “Then there’s booths, downdraft and ceiling down draft as well and a foreman who colour matches all cars and tells painters what to paint colour to apply.”
All of this means time saved. That’s also not to mention the amazing 70,000 litre vertical tank that sits beneath the concrete in the yard (pictured) and piped and filtered right through the shop. A half hour of rain and the tank is full.
And then there’s the PVC welding curtains. These six by five metre curtains stop welding showers pitting the windows of adjoining repaired cars in the bays. “I have seen thousands of windows pitted by welding spray,” Harvey says. “Now we have automatic curtains between repair jobs, courtesy of Car-O-Liner, that stops this from happening.”
Wrights View
Heydon Harvey and his HHarvey Prestige bodyshop illustrates for us all the finer aspects of the bodyshop business. The great tools of the trade, respect for the workforce and innovative capital equipment designed to produce a quality job. This is a great large shop and long may it prosper.