Meet Wolfgang and Crissy Geiger of Elite Custom Paint & Body

Today we’d like to introduce you to Wolfgang and Crissy Geiger.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Wolfgang and Crissy. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In August of 2003, my son wrecked two of my cars within one week, when I arrived at the local body shop for an estimate to repair the cars, only the paint store was open and the body shop was closed. The owner’s widow told me that her husband past and the shop is closed. After we talked for about 15 minutes I handed her a check for the first month rent of the shop. It looked like a good deal for me to repair the two wrecks and restore a couple cars of my own, so on the way home I called my girlfriend Crissy – now my wife, to ask her if she would like to open and operate a body shop. Her immediate answer was: I never done anything like this but sure why not.

This was now 14 years ago; the two wrecked cars has been repaired but my restoration project still sits untouched in my garage. The first customer walked in the door the day we opened the doors, he asked us if we would like to restore his rusted out 1975 MGB, I told him we would love to. Crissy made us a web site and posted pictures of every step of the restoration process we made. This may have brought the second and third customer in to our door steps. And luckily, the flow of customers has not stopped yet. Today we have eight associates working with us on the finest classic cars we could never have dreamed of. Our clients are all over the nation, we also sent several cars over sees, mainly to Europe and Australia. If you love what you do, you will be good at it and I think it shows. This year we started to build our own cars – 1958 t0 1962 Corvette body on late model Corvette chassis. The startup is a little sluggish, but we hope to reach our goal for coming year to produce 4 cars. We have an unexpected high volume of interest in these cars although the first just nears completion. Hopefully we can move in to a bigger building and hire more people soon to build more of our dream cars…

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No, No and No again, is has been everything but smooth. After 18 years with a large textile firm, I quit my very well paying electro-mechanical engineering job just to discover how difficult it is to satisfy your customers and have some left overs to pay the bills. We used every bit of my sewerage pay and the 401k plan savings to survive the first years. 12 to 14 hours seven days a week was the norm. It looks like every investment in new tools, equipment, projects and training classes was a total mistake. My head still hurts from running against a wall for so long. Our labor rate was way too low to cover the cost and in addition I want everything perfect which takes even longer to complete anything. I think the biggest mistake of mine was to give the customers a fixed price for their restoration projects, which cost me most of the time at least twice as much and sometimes the parts we needed for the car was almost as high as the price a gave for the complete restoration. They say 80% of startup business will fail in the first year, of the 20% surviving 80 % will fail again in the next 5 years and then again only 20% make it to their 10th anniversary. We made it so far 14 years and are still trying to improve and produce the best possible product. The road is rough every day, but we are committed to succeed.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Elite Custom Paint & Body – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Our business is the restoration of classic cars. We are a one stop shop, everything is done in house, we have technicians specialized in every category. Our specialty is the authentic restoration of Corvettes and custom build cars. I am most proud of our new project to build our own cars – 1958 to 1962 Corvette body’s to be mounted on late model Corvette chassis. The urge to be perfect and attention to detail is properly the key to our success.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
The plans for 2018 are to complete 4 of our restomod Corvettes. Hopefully within the coming five years, we are in the perfect facility to stream line the production of our cars to produce about 10 cars each year.

Pricing:

• Labor rate is $60.00 per hour for restoration and custom build cars.
• New 1958 to 1962 Corvettes with modern technology, performance and safety is $196 000.00.

Contact Info:

• Address: 220 W. Patton Street,
  LaFayette, GA 30728
• Website: www.ECPB.biz
• Phone: 706 639 9493
• Email: wolfgang@ecpb.biz

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