Only in a town like Albury

The French family has been part of the Albury repair scene since 1973. In 2006 their superb shop grew to dominate the district.

B.F.PANELS IS THE KIND OF REPAIR SHOP you’d only find in the country. Where else could you acquire an 11,000 m² site close to a highway and build on it a massive shop (2500 m² under roof), ancillary buildings, water storage, salvage yard, virtually unlimited customer and work-in-progress parking ‘ and then have room left to plan a separate shop to handle repairs and painting for trucks and busses’ Only in a big country town like Albury where there is plenty of industrial land and enough repairs in the district to keep a staff of 34 busy.
It wasn’t always like that. Founder Bob French started in Lavington in 1973 on a small rented site. Then he bought and built in 1978 and stayed there until the present site came up for sale in 2006. By that time his sons Scott and Mark had taken control of the business and they planned the new shop from the ground up.
B.F., in common with many country shops, has tow trucks and a big fleet of courtesy cars ‘ essential for the distances and occupations of owners while their cars are being repaired. B.F. has a novel way of being compensated for courtesy cars. It charges its customers a once-only amount of $75 if the job is under $5000. There is no charge for the bigger jobs over $5000.
Hits tend to be bigger in the country, Scott French says. Higher speeds, fatigue and plenty of roadside trees create challenging repairs. Of course, under country conditions the percentage of total losses goes up too. The shop’s equipment reflects the kind of work it is called upon to do. Its two big Car-O-Liner benches are continually busy. Smaller jobs go on a series of Z racks.
While there is enough work to keep the shop ticking along at up to 45 cars a week, it can’t be choosy about the brands it repairs. Country owners can have anything from a top of the range Mercedes or BMW down to a working ute or an old family banger. For that reason, a shop like B.F. has to be versatile, and that calls for technical skill levels and adaptability you wouldn’t find in more specialised city shops. The Frenchs built the main repair shop with a classical horseshoe production line which starts from disassembly and goes to alignment, beating, prepping and painting without doubling back. The old bugbear of moving cars because of bottlenecks doesn’t exist at B.F. The shop is also equipped with a mechanical division to handle remove and refit of engines and other non-body components. This again is part of the country shop story when there is no handy mechanic next door looking for work.
Building the new shop enabled Scott French to re-think equipment. He put in three Lowbake ovens, two portable IRT infra red driers and Weilander + Schill inverter spot welders. Sikkens is the paint of choice and has been for some time, but in May last year the company switched to DNS Quote Plus that not only handles quoting but keeps tabs on the entire business right through to accounting.
Scott French is interested in the repair industry at large. He supports real time, real money and is on NRMA’s advisory panel for his region. Obviously the shop is a PSR but being one of only about three shops in the area (10 years ago there were more than 12) B.F. works for virtually every insurance company. And although B.F. has a quoting and delivery area that most shops could only dream about, Scott French seldom sees an assessor. Once a level of trust has been reached, he says, insurers don’t need to send assessors to country towns to check up on the integrity of repairers.