Detailers Digest, November-December, 2014

(We do not have a digital copy, but we have the text from this story on the cover of an international detailing industry publication.)

Get Your Shine On with Ephrata’s Bill the Buff Man, by Kimberly Ballard

Seattle Seahawk and Mariner fans had the Kingdome’s Bill the Beer Man. Grant County, Washington has Bill the Buff Man. With a detailing shop in Ephrata, a part-time By-Appointment-Only shop in Moses Lake, and three mobile units on the road, Bill the Buff Man Professional Auto Detailing and Janitorial Services provides high end detailing and paint correction services to an area that also encompasses Soap Lake, Quincy, and Grand Coulee. Ephrata, known as the scenic gateway to the Columbia Basin is located halfway between Seattle and Spokane and is surrounded by rich farmland, over a dozen lakes and rivers, and the Ephrata Raceway Park ― the Pacific Northwest’s favorite Motocross and stock car racing track.

Bill the “Buff Man” Quinn comes by his nickname honestly. “That’s what I do — buff vehicles all day, every day. It isn’t work; it isn’t a job; it’s what I love. All of us love it,” Quinn says. The “all” includes his daughter Shae Morrissey, who runs the day-to-day operations and is an accomplished detailer in her own right; as well as the Buff Man’s wife Lynne, who founded and runs the commercial mobile janitorial division.

Like most passionate detailers, the Buff Man began washing cars as a summer job when he was 13 years old living in Oregon. The first car he ever cleaned belonged to Pacific Northwest retail magnate, Fred Meyer. “It was 1973 and I did one side of his Jaguar XJ and another guy I worked with did the other side. We were paid .95 an hour and he tipped us $1.00, which we split. We were so proud!”

Cars are something the Buff Man has always enjoyed and he found a way to stay involved by learning automotive bodywork and painting, and even rebuilding engines. “I’m an old-school mechanic though,” he laughs. “Give me a car with a V8 engine, a carburetor and a distributor, and I can take it apart and put it back together again. New cars? Not so much!”

Bill never really left the automotive industry, but he worked for Genie Industries, a work lift and platform manufacturer for the construction industry for 26 years. In 1990, he opened his first part-time detailing business. He, Lynne, and Shae, who began detailing when she was just 9 years old, took in detailing work on weekends. Lynne did the interior and Bill did the exterior with a very young Shae helping wherever she could.

The Buff Man says he had always intended to take the business fulltime, but that moved up a year when he was laid off in 2009. By 2010, Shae, who had been living in Seattle, moved to Ephrata with her two sons, Cameron and Dylan, where she not only took an active role detailing, but also according to Bill, is the brains behind the business. “Shae is the unsung hero in my opinion,” he says. “I just show up and do what she tells me to!”

Bill says he learned a lot from his mentor during a different time in the detailing industry. “He was a mobile detailer when there were not many of them around, and he drove an old station wagon full of about fifteen different chemicals which he used to clean vehicles,” Bill recalls. “He never washed the car before polishing it because he said the grit of the dirt was a natural abrasive that cleaned the paint. He could take the crappiest looking car and make it look great.

“Also in those days, you didn’t have many choices in equipment. He used a rotary buffer that left swirl marks, but many people wanted swirl marks because they thought it looked cool. That is hard to believe today where the ultimate goal is the perfect shine, but with the equipment, it was hard not to leave them, so it was acceptable.”

Four years ago, the Buff Man began to sense changes in the detailing industry. “The formula I was using to detail exteriors wasn’t working. I was an old-school detailer losing a lot of business because I did not know how to remove scratches properly and safely.

“I could do great express details, and I was using what I thought was the very best ― I had a Craftsman 10-inch rotary buffer from Sears that wasn’t cheap; foam and wool pads; terry cloth towels; and a whole slew of waxes and compounds. I was also struggling to master the buffer because there is a careful balance between speed and the pressure. I was never completely comfortable with it.

“I had a lot of questions about paint correction. I knew there was a way to do it, I just didn’t know how, and I knew enough to know that you can do a lot of damage if you don’t know what you are doing. That was one of the things that drove me to find out more about it.”

The Buff Man started Googling. He found Renny Doyle of Attention to Details and Detailing Success in Big Bear, California. “I called him up and we talked. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to take that step, so he invited me to come out, sit on the sidelines and watch; attend a couple of his network’s meetings and see if I thought it was something I wanted to do. I did that for a couple of days and quickly decided his training would answer my questions and probably more.”

Doyle introduced the Buff Man to a Flex orbital buffer that replicates natural hand movement rather than that constant circular movement that caused swirls and can burn the paint if not controlled properly. “First of all, Flex is the most durable buffer on the market,” the Buff Man says. “You can throw one off a 10-foot drop and it will keep on working. I had dropped a DeWalt while using it and it broke into several pieces.”

There is a reason why Flex is so resilient. The company has been making professional power tools for seventy-five years and they were built originally for the construction industry, grinding and polishing granite countertops. They are relatively new to the automotive detailing industry.

Innovative professional-grade products, equipment, and skillful precision techniques expanded Bill the Buff Man’s business model from simple express details into high-end paint correction as well. He has a certification in paint correction from Attention to Details, as well as a certification in SONAX and Gtechniq product applications.

Last year, Doyle selected the Buff Man for his elite Air Force One Detailing Team who has spent the past decade restoring the paint on the original AFO presidential jet, now on display at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. This August he made the team for the second year. On the AFO project last year, he discovered Gtechniq nanoparticle protective coatings, Tech Shine, and SONAX Car Care Products.

This spring, the Buff Man decided to introduce a line of SONAX DIY products to his customers, so he attended a SONAX seminar in Indianapolis during the Indy 500. SONAX gave him a pass down onto the track where he “Kissed the Bricks” in a racing tradition dating back to 1996 when Dale Jarrett got down on his knees and kissed the remaining bricks left over from the original Indianapolis track, after winning the Brickyard 400.

“It hasn’t always been easy but it has been steady,” the Buff Man says. “Out of nowhere, Lynne came up with the idea of starting a commercial mobile janitorial business, and that has been very successful.”

Bill the Buff Man now has a 9-member team, but he is very active in getting his hands dirty whenever he can. He plans to send Shae down to train with Doyle and get her certification, even though she already has a jumpstart learning from her Dad and even bringing Cameron and Dylan down to visit their granddad on the AFO project this past summer.

Speaking to Shae about the dirtiest detailing job she has ever attempted, she shares this terrible story:

“It was a Land River. A family went to Costco and purchased 100 pounds of pork, which they packed on ice in a cooler. Unfortunately, it was summertime and they forgot to unpack it and left it in the Rover for over a week.

“There wasn’t any leakage of the juices onto anything, but the ice melted, the meat got hot and started releasing gases that built up until the pressure popped the cooler open. It smelled like a dead body!

“We couldn’t bring it into the shop, and we couldn’t work on it for any length of time or it would make you sick. We tried everything from ozone to Drive-Pur’s 3-step process for removing smoke and other disgusting odors. It took weeks but we got it where on cool days, it was bearable. The lady wanted to drive it to Seattle for a trip so she came and picked it up. She brought it back on Monday and said they had to ride with the windows down the whole time. We did a miraculous job but there was no getting it out completely.”

Shae says that sometime later, she saw an episode of Mythbusters where the team deliberately let two pigs decompose in a vehicle to see if they could clean it up. They discovered they had to remove anything with a porous surface because the smell permeates fabrics, plastics, etc. “After seeing that, I believe the only way to get the smell out completely would be to replace practically everything.”

She says they also have recurring problems with mice because so many people around Ephrata live on farms and park their cars in or near fields where mice crawl up through the engine, through the air filter and glove box, and get into the door panels where they nest and have babies. “Most people are so used to them, they ignore them until the weather warms up and they die and mummify inside the panels. That’s pretty disgusting too!”

How does the future look for Bill the Buff Man? If you ask Bill, he sees continued growth, but if you ask Lynne, she says he had better start slowing down! “We want to do what we have to do to be successful, but we are very honest and have built an excellent reputation. We aren’t really looking to change what we are doing, although an increase in business is always good.”