Business Profile: Big and small, Perry Legend Collision repairs them all
Bill Rajewski, owner of Perry Legend Collision Repair.
Take a walk around Perry Legend Collision Repair building at the Lemone Boulevard industrial park, and you can see what owner Bill Rajewski means when he talks about “diversification.”
There’s a dump truck from Howard County and a Schwan’s food delivery truck, both with major body and windshield damage incurred during rollover accidents. There’s a small Volkswagen vintage kit roadster among the assortment of cars and pickups, along with a 20-foot motor home and even a jet ski.
Perry Legend has repaired 18-wheel tractor-trailers, ambulances, boats and farm machinery.
Rajewski, who’s also the general manager, tells the story about a shiny new John Deere combine that the customer had just leased from a dealer for $162,000. On its first journey out into the cornfield, the farmer managed to ditch the combine and bend its front axle. Fortunately for the farmer, Perry Legend workers were able to fix the axle for much less than the replacement cost of the unit.
Robert Powell, maintenance supervisor for MFA Oil Co., said Perry Legend recently rebuilt three wrecked truck cabs and painted several oil tanks. Powell said MFA has only one paint booth available, so he calls Perry Legend when he has multiple jobs that need to be completed quickly. “The building is huge; you can turn a truck around in it,” Powell said.
With 40,000 square feet of floor space and high ceilings, Perry Legend has become a regional destination for big-rig repairs, but Rajewski said the shop will “work on everything… If you’re going to have blinders on and you’re going to be single-sighted, then you can’t expand your business. Pretty soon, you’re going to have no business.”
Perry Chevrolet and Legend Automotive Group hired Rajewski in 1986 to start the collision repair center as a separate entity. Rajewski bought a portion of the private corporation in 1990, and he and Bill James of Legend Automotive Group purchased Justin Perry’s portion in 2000.
In January 2006, Rajewski bought James’s portion and now owns the shop himself. The business no longer has any relation to either the Perry Nissan or Legend dealerships, and the recently built Perry Nissan Collision Center on Providence Road is a competitor.
Rajewski plans to increase the size of his operation by 50 percent by taking over the building next door after the existing business’s lease runs out.
Wayne McCoy said he has brought three Corvettes to Perry Legend over the years. Ten months ago, he brought in a Chevrolet pickup truck that had crashed into a pole, causing $14,000 worth of damage.
“It was totally torn apart,” McCoy said. “The engine was over there, the frame was over there, and they put them all back together. You can’t tell now if it was hit or not. The workmanship is unbelievable.”
The repair shop is big enough to handle large buses and trucks.
Perry Legend also has specialized equipment that adds to its range of capabilities.
The dump truck currently on the lot, Rajewski says, will need replacements for its hydraulics, base and tank, and its frame is twisted. Fortunately, he has frame-straightening machines that measure height, width and length with lasers to make sure the vehicles are restored to factory specifications.
The Volkswagen roadster and the motor home both need fiberglass repair. Many shops have to mix and set fiberglass in small doses before applying it to a vehicle. Perry Legend has a “chopper gun” that allows the operator to spray a combined hardener, resin and fiberglass string directly onto the vehicle, which, according to Rajewski, is must faster and makes for a higher-quality finish.
A few feet away lies a Chevy Suburban whose rear-end frame has had to be reconstructed. Perry Legend Collision often manufactures its repair equipment. The new rear part will be seam-welded onto the old frame, and it will look like new, Rajewski said.
On the floor toward the center of the building lie an 18-wheeler-size truck frame and an alignment machine that Rajewski had Continental Co. design and build in return for relinquishing the patent rights. Semis that need their spines aligned get placed on this rack.
“Everybody has some of this equipment, but nobody local has all the capabilities that we have,” Rajewski said. “We can do it all.”
On the ceiling, 50 feet above, Rajewski points out the overhead crane that moves these brontosaurus-size monsters from place to place within the facility. The crane system also lifts vehicles into the air for certain repairs, such as installing a new exhaust system on one panel truck. Suspending the panel truck in the air allows the work to be done from below much more quickly and efficiently than if the vehicle rested on a lift.
Nearby are two paint-spraying booths in which eight vehicles can, assembly-line style, get masked, painted, baked and unmasked at the same time. There also is an enormous booth for sandblasting tractor-trailers and other large vehicles, a process that usually takes place outside of body shops because of the space required.
Meanwhile, out back, the shop has two acres of fenced-in parking for vehicles, with camera surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to discourage thieves.
Rajewski’s 28 staff members are usually working on about 46 cars and nine or 10 large vehicles at a time, he said. The company does about $3 million in business a year, only 65 percent of which comes from insurance claims, however. Most other body shops rely on 95 percent insurance work, he said.
That’s partly because Perry Legend is an independent body shop and partly because insurance companies declare more cars to be total losses now than they used to. Missouri law requires a wreck to be a total loss if the repairs will cost 75 percent or more of the value of the vehicle. The large rebates manufacturers give consumers have compounded the total-loss trend.
“If you have a $39,000 list price car that’s worth $31,000 after the rebate, then a $23,000 repair is over 75 percent, and that equals a total loss,” Rajewski said.