Sorry to dig this up, but I feel that I need to weigh in on this subject and make an official statement on behalf of BLP, since Mark Thompson, and Mike Wheeler were nice enough to let me know that this conversation was happening outside of my knowledge. Thank you for that, both of you. After my discussion with Mark Thompson in person today about this issue, I find it necessary to tell our side of the story. A FACTUAL story, with no spin and no emotions or people unrelated to the topic’s opinions skewing things. When Beau’s car first came into our shop, I recognized it from a previous owner, who was also a customer of ours. In fact, if I am not mistaken, I believe it was the previous owner who referred you to us in the first place Beau. Regardless, we knew the car, what it needed and its existing issues that the previous owner decided were not in his budget. Beau presented many items he would like to perform to the vehicle, namely a fuel system and a ECMLink tune. Due to email issues on ECMLink’s end and verbal miscommunications between myself and the guys over at ECM Tuning, Beau’s ECU took right around 2 months to get socketed, chipped and sent back to us. (Those of you in the DSM community know how hard 2G GSX ECU’s are getting to find). I will be happy to take my part of the blame for this delay. Fair is fair. The fuel system and remaining items Beau requested were done and waiting for the ECMLink ECU to arrive. Once it showed up, we tuned the vehicle within a day or so and the vehicle was delivered to Beau. I believe it was two days later, Beau’s car shows up on a flatbed totaled. The girls that hit Beau literally almost took the passenger apron and core support off of the car. This is no simple tug and pull, align it and ship it job as it is being portrayed. The FMIC and charge piping were completely destroyed, and missing due to the fact that Beau had another shop do the original estimate and preliminary checking of what needed to be repaired/replaced. That shop, or individual failed to give Beau his intercooler, charge pipes and various other items, namely fasteners, which will be an issue when the car IS done at the frame shop. We told Beau he should get his parts from whomever looked at the vehicle, but he was not concerned about it. It’s true, Beau’s car sat at our shop from October until the middle of June, he is correct on that timeline… the part he is leaving out is that despite being paid $1,900 by the insurance company, like he offered up himself in one of his comments, he did not have the money to pay us to have the frame repaired until February 2nd of this year. At that point, he was put on the busy list of cars to be worked on at Mike’s Frame and Alignment. Those of you that know Mike and Steve, know that this shop has been backed up for 20 years, because they are the best at what they do and people are willing to wait for their services. Beau was in no hurry at any point along this timeline until this FB post last week, nor have I spoken with him about the matter in recent months. Throughout the vehicles stay at BLP, I have spoken with Beau over the phone many times, giving him updates and expected timelines according to what I was given by the frame shop. I will admit that Beau usually calls me, which I know I should be more proactive about in these situations. I run the day to day tasks and ins and outs of keeping the shop running smoothly, and on top of that write service, order parts and do whatever needs to be done to make the business work. Those of you that know me a little closer know that I am having some health issues of late and have been absent from the shop a lot. We are currently looking for a service writer because we are aware that our communication could use some work. I am only one person, I can only do so much. I try my best, as any of our customers that have actually done business with us know. I hate to bring it up because it seems to stir the pot, but Beau, you have not paid the remainder of your invoice from September of last year either. You state that you paid up front, in cash, which is true, but when I asked you to pay for the old bill, you asked me if it could wait until the frame repair was done. I told you that would be fine, because we have a good report together and I trusted that you would pay it with no issues. Your transmission and twin disc clutch are just fine. They are in the same place they were when you dropped them off months ago asking us to look them over. For those of you that have never been to our shop, we typically have anywhere from 30-40 cars in our queue, ON our property to be worked on. Some are long term projects like Mark Thompson, Dominque Wallace and Justin Campbell, ALL members of this group and understanding of the situation they are in with our shop, and completely comfortable with it. These customers are aware of how busy we are, how backed up we can get and how hard we try to keep everyone happy. For every Beau Bish there is out there wanting his car yesterday, we have 20 more people that are demanding our attention and are paying their bills and not posting slander on the internet prior to even informing us that they are dissatisfied. As Chris Houtchens has stated, you cannot please everyone all the time. That is a lesson we need to learn at BLP. If you cannot work with our schedule, our timeline and our pace of doing everything the right and correct way, then I ask that you go somewhere else. We do not work on cars to get rich, and anyone that knows us personally knows we are not. We do it because it is what we are excellent at doing and what we love. There is a difference between a garage mechanic slapping a small block in a 240SX and what someone who is truly passionate and meticulous about cars does the job. Anyone that has ever seen any of our builds can see this without being told. Other shops have even made comment on our build quality, and the way the whole build comes together. I have done follow-ups with customers who initially had the same mentality that, “it was taking too long”. These customers have without fail determined once receiving a final product and appreciating the attention to detail and level of quality state that they’d do it all over again if given the choice. I believe that speaks volumes. Hindsight is 20/20 and we are impulsive and emotional creatures as humans. It is too easy to act harshly in today’s world thanks to the internet. To get to my point about Beau’s situation. As for how much we like Beau as a customer? I felt so bad for his situation that I GAVE him parts off of a good friends car that had been parted out to help him get the vehicle back together quicker. Also, I did not charge Beau a PENNY for storage for having his car at our shop for the entire time it was there, paid or unpaid. I cannot think of anything more we could have done for Beau personally other than fix his accident damage ourselves, which if we had a frame rack, we likely would have. I think it speaks pretty clearly that Beau came back to us to have the car fixed since we are not a frame or a body shop as many have pointed out. He obviously trusts us, or else he would not have returned. I cannot speak for the delay at the frame shop since BLP was paid and Beau’s GSX was put on the list at Mike’s. I do know that the passenger fender apron and radiator core support are no longer available as new, and Mike had to source an apron and a core support from wrecking yards, which took a lot longer than anyone anticipated. I can tell you is that much like us at BLP, Mike is usually at his shop at 8pm, 9pm or later when I go home at night. The man is dedicated and does not know the meaning of the word ‘NO’. He will take on a job he knows he shouldn’t just to help a guy out. I have known the man for 20+ years and have nothing bad to say about him. Steve used to work for us at BLP. The guy doesn’t know when to quit and is great at what he does. He would literally give you the shirt off of his back if it were the only one he owned. Keep in mind these guys do insurance jobs on wrecks, curb hits during the winter and during race season they are the go-to shop for frame and alignment setups. I can only assume that they have been buried until just recently because of race season during Spring time and then the Hill Climb and Speed Week all at the same time. I spoke to Mike personally about Beau’s car yesterday. The timeline I have been given is late this week, or sometime next. You have to understand that I can only tell you guys what I have been told. Subletting work out to another shop, trusted or not almost always comes back on a shop, because they are not doing the work themselves and to their standards or on their schedule. Something always goes wrong, whether the job was quoted incorrectly, the job done improperly or just plain took longer than anticipated. I spoke with Mike about bringing Beau’s car down to his shop back in February when Beau paid his bill. He asked me a personal favor to keep it on OUR lot, until he had sourced all of the parts and was ready to work on the car, due to the fact that their parking lot is always full. I obliged. I even spoke to Beau about Mike asking for us to keep the car on our lot, since we have a fenced and gated lot, and he does not. They have had a rash of vehicle vandalism at their shop over the last few months, so he was concerned for the customer, being a partially totaled, easy pickings Eclipse GSX with no bumper, hood doesn’t close etc. In summary, Beau, I understand you just want your car back. I understand you are upset with timeline, but please understand and know that we are, and always have done everything we can do for you. We hold no animosity towards you, but I do wish you would have called and spoken with me prior to posting such a hurtful topic on FB. As was stated, if you had given us the chance to fix it and we told you to FO…then by all rights. As for Jeremiah Roiger… you know why your car took so long. A B13 SE-R Sentra, FWD Automatic for a fuel system and a tune? I’d love for it to be as simple as you make it seem. Keep in mind your car was at another shop here in town for MONTHS before you packed it up and brought it to us. There were issues with obtaining your ID injectors, you know the ordeal with that, you tried calling them too. There were issues with your MAF. You are aware of all of the details there. Even through THREE MAF’s we could not find one that functioned properly for your car. The USED Series 1 AEM ‘plug and play’ EMS? What is plug and play about re-pinning the ECU connectors from a manual SR20 box to accept your auto? What is plug and play about wiring in a UEGO wideband for feedback? What is plug and play about converting to MAP from MAF? I felt I was doing you a favor by only charging you $300 for all of that work. You know your situation with making payments. You did not pay us a dime for months during the government shut down, and we understood. You know that you were putting money into buying a house and working on your SRT6 Crossfire and not paying us to work on your Sentra. It wasn’t your priority, so why should it be ours? You asked me if you could skip a payment earlier this year because you were buying a house, after complaining for weeks that we weren’t working on your car. I obliged. Also, you left out that we were taken off of working on your Sentra and other customer’s vehicles because you blew up your welded diff in your SRT and didn’t have a car. We dropped EVERYTHING to help you out and this is the thanks we get in return? You tell me how this is all our fault and how we do not deserve to get paid. Again, we will take the blame for the time we did not work on your car when your labor was paid up and current. Oh and speaking of which, for the record, your bill is not $300…it is $561.93. You mentioned dollar amounts, not me. If you’re going to throw facts around, make sure they are correct. You know WE worked with YOU through this entire process, not the other way around. What other shop in town is going to begin work on your car, get paid nothing for the first 6 months and take payments a few hundred dollars each month towards a project and charge no storage fee? As for the air/fuels? We told you why it was doing that. You had a 4 inch long downpipe, open to atmosphere with a UEGO camped out 2 inches from the turbo. You stated that you would get an exhaust put on the car and bring it back for a re-tune so we could nail the air fuels down better…now all of a sudden you are bashing the tune and taking it to other shops. I considered you a friend, not a customer. I suppose I was wrong about that. You did the same thing as Beau….just post away on FB without stating discontent in person. I wish you luck with other shops, and luck to the shops you deal with. For what its worth, both your and Beau’s comments have kept me up at night since I first read through this posting. I guess I shouldn’t take it so personally, but it truly matters to us what our customers think and feel, so it’s hard to hear such harsh words from people who seems so pleased (remember the smile you had from ear to ear after driving your car the first time?) when they are face to face with you. Curious what people have to say about these comments now that facts are shared...
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 06:34:34 +0000
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