Gainesville, TX, had 18,107 people in it in 2023, a Google search shows -- modest, respectable growth of some 713 souls since the 2020 U.S. Census. Several members of the Ott family live there, one of whom runs Auto Body Concepts.
Not the one you might think.
Wendy Ott oversees day-to-day operations of the 40,000-square-foot facility, including 30 staff and 18 DRPs. The operation draws “a little over $6 million a year,” said Dan Ott, who as the co-owner of a collision center, spends his days rehabbing and flipping houses.
Divvying up began in 2018.
The Otts had built a second shop in Ardmore, OK, three years before, with Dan often trekking 40 miles north. When its manager left, this became a daily commute. Wendy began running Gainesville, after handling payroll for both.
Dan spent 2024 enduring significant health ailments while grieving the deaths the year before of his two brothers. Wendy grew Gainesville.
They closed Ardmore in February, the property is for sale, and Wendy “womans” the Texas desk -- unless she’s out with the community, vendors or agents.
Taking It Personally: Bottled Water, Cookie Runs
One innovation in six years steering the ship has placed shop-branded bottled water at local schools’ sporting events. Auto Body Concepts gets marketing and goodwill, schools keep the markup. A second is bringing cookies to insurance agents, a “sweets” deal sugaring the shop’s DRP work.
Auto Body Concepts.
“I like supporting local,” said Wendy. For instance, she’d just returned from a trip to one high school’s plant sale, coming away with several to beautify the shop layout. “I don’t advertise, anything like that, but if a student comes by, wants to sell a yearbook ad,” one goes to Auto Body Concepts, which also buys from local vendors.
The shop offers customers free pick-up and drop-off, and sometimes guidance on filing insurance claims.
“Everything we can to make it easy,” Wendy said. “We make sure we do little things.”
The Otts were born and raised in Gainesville. “We know everybody,” Dan said.
“The Otts are known throughout the community as hardworking, dedicated and genuinely good people,” wrote accounting team member Rheta Gilmer via email, proposing this profile.
“She makes employees feel like family, and they respect her,” Gilmer wrote.
Family Business, and Ups and Downs and Downs
More formally as families go, the Otts have three grown kids, and Dan also has an adult daughter. Wendy and Dan have been married since their teens, for 32 years.
Dan’s two older brothers, Bruce and Brian, died in 2023: one of cancer, spreading undetected; one of a staph infection while awaiting a heart transplant, he said.
“2023 was the worst year of my life,” he said.
Bennie, a detail tech at Auto Body Concepts.
Then Dan’s cardio conditions reared up and revealed themselves, raising questions of why he didn’t die while ziplining in Cabo San Lucas that Christmas. His “widow-maker” -- Dan’s reference speaks to the result when an artery responsible for much of the heart’s blood-flow gets blocked -- was 99% clogged. A second pathway was 94% stopped up.
This was after the cough.
He connects a “COPD”-like malady to isocyanates in car paint and 35 years in the industry while ‘fessing up to a life of alcohol and tobacco, now vastly reduced.
He coughed for two weeks on the holiday. The hospital visit when the family returned got things rolling on his 2024 medical journey. Permanent heart stents, exercise and medication for cholesterol and blood-thinning now help enable his heart’s daily duties.
He “had a mini-stroke” when stents were installed, vastly increasing circulation -- and releasing a cocktail of “pent-up toxins into the blood.” Recovery included “learning to talk again,” among other things.
One-Time Corner Shop Now 20X Bigger
“Wendy’s had a lot to deal with,” Dan said. “I call her Wonder Woman.”
He was asked about this time what he’d do if given, at age 18, a new car -- but one he could never sell, trade in or replace. This is a body. His body. “You would take care of it,” he said. “So you don’t end up with junk.”
But he’s not 18 anymore.
That would’ve been not long before he and Wendy -- at the time a paralegal -- took over the shop his dad had started in about 1960. By the early 2000s, after Dan had run shops and owned one in Denton, 30 miles south of Gainesville, and started an aircraft refinishing company, the couple moved back to run Auto Body Concepts, buying it in 2001, Dan said.
Flaco, a painter at Auto Body Concepts.
It began as 2,000 square feet in the corner of a lot in 1960. Growth began with buying a former bar in front of the shop for highway visibility. The shop is now an acre across both sides of the street.
“We own the city block,” Wendy said. “We keep our body men across the road. They’re loud and dirty, so we like them over there.”
The I-CAR Gold-certified shop has several Platinum estimators and body men, three paint booths including a cut-in, and in-house paintless dent repair.
“We sit at the end of ‘tornado alley,’” Dan said.
Paradox of ‘Let Stuff Go’ and ‘Just Do It’
Wendy’s non-plussed by the attention. “We just do it,” she said.
At one point, Dan was still “auditing anything over $5,000,” he said. His move to renovating houses came after Wendy told him, “‘You gotta let stuff go.’”
Wendy has no plans to follow her own advice. “He walks through occasionally, but wants to do something different, the kids are doing something different,” she said.
For her part, she likes “that somebody comes to us and trusts us with their second biggest investment. They’re trusting we’ll give it back to them in hopefully better shape even than when they bought it,” she said.
Work “should be something our family would want. I want people to say, ‘Where did you get that repaired?’ in a good way.” She likes “knowing we’re making something.”
She also likes working with insurance companies, “as long as we can make good partnerships.”
Paul Hughes