It’s April 2022, my distributor’s representative has changed again. This is the fourth time in four years. One of my main suppliers has been a business partner for the last twenty years. He is retiring and will let his son take over the business. I [...]
Charles absolutely wanted me to share some sales tips for collision shops with you. Our observations in the field indicate that sales are often neglected in Canadian body shops. Charles has visited over 700 shops and we come to the same conclusion. In this article, [...]
As part of our conversation about the auto parts shortage that has plagued the market since 2021, Charles Aubry, Patrick Piché and I also discussed auto estimation and how valuable it is. This article highlights my interview with Patrick Piché from Akzonobel. Let’s first recall [...]
Whenever they can, Charles Aubry and his wife watch the show My 600 Lb Life. While reflecting on the collision shop industry, Charles draws a parallel between the drama around the show’s subjects and shops that maintain excessive work-in-progress (WIP) loads. He calls it “My life [...]
In the last few articles, we have learned and unravelled six of our seven performance rules for optimizing capacity at collision shops. In summary, a good communication with the team, a sound methodology and a strong capacity planning and analysis tool are the three main [...]
We often hear the usual: “I get all my vehicles to repair on Mondays and I deliver them (heaven willing) on Fridays. I've been doing this for 20 years, and it works.” Why change a winning formula? What is the point of receiving and delivering [...]
A repair appointment is given to a customer. This simple act happens a thousand times a day across Canada. What the customer doesn’t see is the thinking behind deciding on the repair start date. Ideally, it would be the date when the customer drops off [...]
Not overloading a workshop seems like a simple piece of advice. However, this is one of the collision shop managers’ most common weaknesses. This was true before COVID-19, and even more so as work returns. The workshops have been hungry, their pantry is empty, and [...]
With the first two rules for making your body shop successful, you learned to set goals for your team and to communicate them to your team. Now the next crucial rule is to monitor and analyze goal achievement. Doing this properly is a matter of [...]
