I often ask shop owners, “Do you feel as though you own your business, or does your business own you?” I’ll bet you can guess which answer I typically receive. As a technician-turned-business-owner myself, I too know the pain very well. For many it is a feeling that working harder does not yield the [...]
It’s time to get real – not that I am not always ‘real’ with my readers, but I need shop leaders to embrace the importance of this message! Collision customers don’t need an estimate; they need their vehicles repaired properly and without a lot of fuss. The only remaining question is the best way [...]
Most of you have heard the quote, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Most of us, however, have never learned how to plan. At least when it comes to strategic and financial planning for our businesses. Many business owners are, unfortunately, under the assumption that they would need a Certified Public [...]
It’s that amazing time of the year again! You know, family, feasts, giving, being grateful for our blessings in life… the whole holiday thing, right? For those of you running a business, it can also be a very difficult time of year. If you feel a little, or a lot, overwhelmed during the holidays, [...]
Whether you operate a small shop or a big shop, someone has to manage all those cars and people out in the shop – you might as well get great at it, right? Seriously, production is where you earn the money the people in the front office sold. Your job is to retain as [...]
One of the commonalities between most collision repair shops is chaos. I believe many shop owners have become complacent with chaos, chalking it up as a “normal” part of the industry. This belief in my opinion is insanity. Having been involved with collision repair for over 35 years now, I have witnessed an interesting [...]
One could easily debate that an auto body shop is an unlikely place to see an assembly line, especially when you try to visualize “assembly line” in the traditional sense. However, there are many more similarities between collision repair and the assembly line than you may realize. When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line [...]
“You would not believe how good it felt to throw that insurance adjuster out into the street!” In complete disbelief, I continued listening to this shop owner describe his recent proclaimed victory. “If they won’t let me put new OEM parts on this lady’s Pontiac, they can take it to one of their damn [...]
For collision shops that want to improve cycle time and decrease unnecessary work-in-process (WIP), scheduling is a necessity. However, I also believe far too many shops over-complicate scheduling, spending hours trying to predict the future using unstable labor hours. What I mean by unstable is that some people and even electronic scheduling systems attempt [...]
As I write this, I am on a long flight home from Australia where I had the pleasure of speaking to shop owners facing many of the same challenges as those in the U.S.A. You know the usual topics – labor shortages, pressures dealing with insurance companies, speed of technology, etc… I also heard [...]
