Oregon Body Repair Shop's Green Approach Reflects Environmental Awareness (VIDEO)

Kadel's Auto Collision Repair Service has been serving Oregon for over half a century.

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - Kadel's Auto Body is among the Northwest businesses that are seeing life through green colored shades. And like others they have learned that going the extra mile for environmental integrity brings serious business in return from a public keen and aware of the need to be stewards of the earth especially when working with paint and potentially toxic materials.

Kerry Glass with Kadel's Auto Body says they have a 97% customer satisfaction rate, based on an independent study. "We get a hold of those three percent and find out what we can do better to meet their real needs," Glass said.

Kadel's Auto Body opened a long time ago. It was 1954 when their first shop began serving customers in Tigard, Oregon. Over the years, the company's services have expanded to the greater Portland area, Salem and Boise, Idaho.

They now have 12 locations - and Kadel's says they are all dedicated to the same principles their company was founded on over 50 years ago.

Kadel's has one of the most highly trained and certified staffs in the nation. Glass says Kadel’s Technicians are I-Car and ASE certified. These are independent organizations that offer training and certification programs to ensure that technicians are up to date on the latest auto body repair techniques and safety standards.

Kerry Glass: “Kadel’s is a business that’s been around since 1954. We have twelve locations scattered around this metro area, the Salem metro area, Vancouver and Boise, Idaho.

“We repair a lot of cars. We are the largest collision repairer in the Pacific Northwest, and I think we’re the tenth largest privately held collision repair center in the United States.

“We’ve been doing it a long time, and we’ll fix on an average 28,000 cars in a year, and that’s a lot of cars.

“One of the things I’m proudest about, with Kadel’s Auto Body is that about half of our business comes from repeat customers or friends and families of repeat customers. We think that’s a pretty good statistic, saying that we’re doing our job the right way.

“We survey our customers, actually we employ a company that surveys our customers, and 97% of our customers are happy on the first survey. Those 3% that aren’t, we call them up and be sure that they are happy by taking care of whatever problems are out there.

“97% of them say, ‘Yep, this is a good place, and I’d recommend them to my friends and family.’

“Something that we don’t talk about a lot, or we don’t talk about enough, is there’s a lot of competitors in this business; if you go into the phone book you’ll find maybe 250 competitors out there. And if you look at the Yellow Pages they all say the same thing, ‘We’ve got computerized estimating,’ ‘We work with these people,’ paint certifications and all that stuff. And that’s great, as well they should have, and we should have, as part of the industry standard. But, there is one thing that belongs to Kadel’s that nobody else can say, is that we do fix more cars than anyone else in the Pacific Northwest.

“We fix more Hondas than Honda, we fix more Fords than Ford, more Chevy’s than Chevy. I will tell you if you have a car, chances are we fixed a bunch of em. And we have within the circle of this company, the experience to do that. We have a lot of experience fixing a lot of different kinds of cars.”

S-N: Tell us about the ecological business, the pollution prevention excellence seal that I see here.

Kerry Glass: “The eco-biz is a program put together by an organization called PTO. That’s a pollution prevention organization made up of all of the bureaucracies from the cities around the Portland metro area, and frankly, throughout the entire state.

“This program was put forth by this group of people to help businesses become more conscious about how they operate in the business theatre as it applies to the ecology that we live in. To be ecologically certified means that we don’t produce any waste, that we’re efficient with all the chemicals and paint, things that we use to perform our tasks; that none of that is ever discharged, that we have no parking lot run off, that even our wash bays, where we wash cars before and after, there’s a lot of road grease on those cars and of course we use ecologically certified soap. All that stuff used to run off, go in the storm drain, and next thing you know was in the Willamette River.”

Vince McDonnell: “This is actually liquid paint that is ran through a cooker, and it basically cooks all the thinner and separates the hard waste or liquid waste to a solid waste. And an environmental company comes in and picks this up.”

S-N: “We like the blue skies, we like the blue water, the green trees, it’s kind of why we all love to live here. Knowing that there are businesses that really go beyond the call of duty to make sure that that’s true and will continue, is really great.”

Kerry Glass: “You’d be surprised just how many people value this organization and how many people ask ‘Are you a green company?’. It’s a question that is being asked more and more frequently. We have people that show up at our door and say ‘I’m here because I read the press release that said you are ecologically certified’. Wow! It’s not just the people that are driving hybrids, it’s everybody, and I think everybody has the same concerns. I think it goes along with living in the Northwest.”