Dr. Dent specializes in car massages to preserve the factory finish

It happens to many of us. You walk out of a store to your car and find a dent in a door that wasn’t there before.

No worries: One Johnson County business specializes in making those dings disappear. And it expects to do the job without impacting the factory paint finish.

That’s Dr. Dent’s specialty. The Overland Park company has been offering paintless dent repair service since 1990.

“We get behind the panel, massage it and return it to its original form without having to do any body work,” said Mike Logan, who is one of three owners. “It preserves the factory finish and you don’t have the long wait you do with a traditional body shop. If there is a deep scratch we can also paint that in.”

Q: How did you get into the dent repair business?

Logan owns Dr. Dent with Justen Green and Delton Griffee, whose father-in-law Don Elliott started the business.

“I came in 2004 when they expanded the business and got trained by Delton,” Logan said. “I started training two weeks after I graduated high school….Justen came in 2006 after moving here from Denver.”

Logan said Elliott was the owner and operational leader behind everything for a long time.

When Elliott retired in 2011, the trio bought the business.

Q: What makes Dr. Dent special?

In addition to their paintless repair work, Logan said Dr. Dent repairs generally are done in a short amount of time.

“Dings can take as little as 15 to 30 minutes work while you wait,” he said.

Dr. Dent also offers a mobile service.

“We will come to the house for an additional $25,” Logan said. “We do quite a bit of this work….sometimes it seems we will do 12-15 cars a week.”

Dr. Dent charges by the size and location of the dent or repair needed, not by the hour.

If you do take a car to Dr. Dent’s location off of Interstate 35, the 6,000-foot-facility includes a waiting room for customers.

Q: How do you train employees?

Dr. Dent has eight technicians who work on vehicles.

It takes at least three to six months of on-the-job training to learn the appropriate techniques to work on dents.

“You are consistently learning something new,” Logan said. “When you first get trained you start out slow and start on a training panel that has dings and you spend all day working on them,” he said. “Over the course of six months you get better and better….There is more to it than watching a dent shrink and go away….You have to have a good eye, coordination and patience.”

Q: With three owners, who plays what roles?

“I am more in charge of overseeing the office area and Justen and Delton oversee the body shop and our used and new car dealership runs,” Logan said. “All three of us are hands-on with repairs to vehicles.”

Q: Where do your customers come from?

Dr. Dent has both individual retail customers and commercial clients including new and used car dealerships and body shops.

Logan said about 60 percent of Dr. Dent’s business comes from dealerships and body shops; 40 percent is individual retail work.

“If we have a hail year our retail can go up to 70 percent,” he said.

Dr. Dent averages 4 to 6 cars daily through just walk-in business.

Q: What’s in the future for Dr. Dent?

“We are looking to expand next year…in the eastern Jackson County area,” Logan said. “We are just in talks right now and searching around the area.”

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Dr. Dent specializes in car massages to preserve the factory finish."