Jim Lovejoy on Why Your Estimators Aren't Closing

"Let us know if we can help you." That's what Jim Lovejoy hears estimators say in shop after shop. And it's not a closing attempt. It's not even close.

In this episode, I sit down with Jim Lovejoy, Senior Services Consultant at Akzo Nobel Vehicle Refinish, who has spent over 25 years helping auto body shops improve their profitability, their processes, and their people. Jim has seen the numbers across hundreds of shops, and he noticed something after COVID. Closing ratios dropped 12 to 15 percentage points. Shops got busy, stopped training on sales, and never picked it back up.

Jim walks us through what a real sales process should look like from the first phone call all the way through follow-up. He breaks down the assumptive close, explains why follow-up alone can move your closing ratio by 10 points or more, and shares the lean workflow mistakes that are quietly killing your cycle time and profitability. We also get into the metrics that actually matter, what it takes to train and retain good people, and the leadership habits that help owners get out of the daily chaos.

This one is packed with value. Every shop owner and manager needs to hear it.

The BodyShop Leaders Podcast is powered by BodyShop Marketing, the agency helping collision industry leaders grow smarter and lead stronger.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I can't tell you how many times I have been in collision centers, and I hear the estimators, the advisors say, let us know if we can help you. That is not in any way, shape, or form a closing attempt. It's friendly. We're here, let us know. Okay. But I'm not telling you that I either want your business or that I care for your business.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Welcome to Body Shop Leaders, the podcast where we bring you insights, strategies, and stories from the collision industry's top minds. I'm Daniel Burkholder, and today I'm joined by Jim Lovejoy, Senior Services Consultant at Axo Nobel Vehicle Refinish. Jim has spent more than 25 years helping auto body shops improve profitability, efficiency, and performance. He's worked with top operators across North America, led training on staffing and shop operations, and become known for practical ideas around sales culture, lean process, and helping shops close more of the work already in front of them. Jim, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Thank you, Daniel.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

It's a pleasure to be here. Appreciate you taking your time, Jim, and I'm looking forward to this. I'm sure you have a lot of wisdom that we're going to be able to pull out and share with our audience today. So, Jim, just jumping right into the questions that I have here for you, is you've worked with a lot of high-performing shops over the years. When you walk into a great shop, what are the first signs that tell you they're operating at a different level?

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Well, Daniel, there's a lot of things. I think that one of the keys in life is it always comes down to people. And you can tell right away by how people greet you when you come in, whether they're paying attention to the fact that you came in. And this also speaks to, I know that you're going to ask some questions about closing processes later. You know, these are the things that we feel when we go into any business. And the customers or prospective customers are going to feel when they come in there. You know, do people actually act like they're glad that you're there? Or are you kind of a nuisance, right? It tells you what the culture is like. And I know that question gets asked later. But culture is a lot like air. You can feel it. You can feel when there's tension in the air, you can feel when there's a great environment, you can feel that, right? And so also when I'm in a shop, I'm always listening. So you may be the body shop manager and I'm listening to you. But if you have an estimator out in the other room and they're working with a customer, I've got an ear tuned into that as well. So I'm not ignoring you, but I'm listening to how your people interact with other people. So that tells me a lot about what's going on. And I'm also looking for visual cues, especially whether they're using auto-visual management or they're not. What I can see, what obviously any of us can see, gives you insight in what's going on and what needs to be done. Another cue is how readily accessible are metrics and the data that they use to run their organization. A lot of times with a really good organization, they have scoreboards up. It could be a management software screen in the office or a production screen there. Certainly out on the shop floor, we've all seen all kinds of things from the basic whiteboards on up, or even a piece of paper taped up every day, production lists that are given out to text. I mean, you see these. You see them in vehicles, on toolboxes, especially if they have scoreboards up, video screens, any of those things. All of those things give us information about what they're tracking and what they want their people to be focused on on a daily basis. Uh, how clean and how organized the shop is. I mean, that's not you know, that's pretty easy to see. And especially from a sales standpoint, if you go into the restroom up front and it's not very clean, well, 50% of your customers in particular are not gonna be real happy about that. And my girlfriend would be on that list. Okay. Uh and then how much chaos is there? Because a really good operation that has really good processes, they're busy. But it doesn't seem chaotic. It seems like it flows, kind of like a swatch, so to speak. And the people that work in an operation will tell you that, especially if you have people who've been there for a long time and it's evolved. They would tell you that it seems so chaotic. Um but now we could do so much more business, and it really doesn't seem that busy. So those are some key things I see and notice.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Jim, that's amazing. You gave us a whole list of things. I think the one that really stands out to me is the one that you can just feel it. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. You can feel those vibes when you walk into a location. And Jim, I'm sure over the years you've developed a sense of that really well. But also, our prospects, when they walk into our shops, are sensing that same vibe. Is there chaos? Are we happy to see them? Are we there to support them? Great answer, Jim. You've given a ton of value there. I'd like to move on to the next question that I have here, Jim, is around a big theme in your work is that shops need to stop being passive and start earning the repair. And if I can just go off on a little bit of a tangent here, Jim, if you can bear with me, I feel like COVID almost made this problem worse when all the shops were booking out months. They didn't really care anymore and they didn't feel like they had to earn that repair. So, Jim, as we get back to shorter booking times, what does this really look like in a practical day-to-day terms for a shop owner or manager that's trying to earn the repair?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

As performance groups, we were just talking about that before this started, are an important part of what I do. And we do a lot of financial benchmarking. So that gives me access to information like closing ratios. And I saw a distinct drop in closing ratio numbers after we got through that initial period of COVID because everybody's business dropped off, but then it came right back up, and everybody was busy for literally four straight years. And I saw it in the numbers, and we had other fish to fry four straight years. And I saw it in the numbers, and we had other fish to fry. We didn't have to worry about closing ratio charts. It was like, how do I get the parts for this? I've been waiting three months for something. So getting parts and getting that volume through the facility became paramount. And I don't need any, I don't need to close anymore. I don't need any more volume at my door. I can't get out what I have. The people who probably had been around for quite a while, it's just human nature, would get rusty uh at those skills because I haven't needed to use them. And until somebody actually tells you from a leadership standpoint, okay, we need to focus on this again and we go over them and retrain people. But what about the people that came in that weren't with us before? And we never trained them on a sales process until we actually say something and initiate some training with them, they're gonna it's business as usual, right? So I think one of the things is from a sales standpoint, you have to take a look at yourself and position yourself as the body shop of choice in your market. And that means that you have a reputation with everyone, all the stakeholders, customers, prospective customers, insurance companies, employees, referral partners, that they all prefer you over somebody else. Like you are the the choice, the logical choice to do business with in that market. So that would be my thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

That's amazing. If you can get all of those parties to view you as the preferred shop, you will do well. I like that answer. Jim, moving on again. You've talked about this idea that it's not always about getting more cars, but about closing more of the opportunities already in front of you. Where do most shops lose that business?

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Okay, so let's start with kind of the if we had to boil the essence of this down to four key things and then talk about steps and and some other key things, features. The essence is first of all, we need to build trust. Right? We have to most people, it's their second most expensive possession. Um, if you don't own a home, it is your most expensive possession. Safety is a paramount issue for you and whoever else is in the vehicle, your family, your friends, etc. Uh, resale value when you go to trade it in, all of those things. Trust is paramount. We need to focus on the value. This is the benefits portion of features and benefits. We have to be able to close confidently, and that means asking for the business. It means being direct and being professional. I can't tell you how many times I have been in collision centers, and I hear the estimators, the advisors say, let us know if we can help you. That is not in any way, shape, or form a closing attempt. It's friendly. We're here, let us know. Okay. But I'm not telling you that I either want your business or that I care for your business. So I hear that unfortunately, Daniel, too often. So everything flows out of that. We talked about being the body shop of choice. And so that means that you have a unique selling proposition. All of the things that go into why somebody should use you is somebody else. And all of your people should know it. Okay? So it starts with that. Then you need to have a defined process. And that includes things like the first step is engaging the customer. Um, and actually, our first sale, Daniel, is when people call on the phone and how we greet them. And do we attempt to even get them into our facility? That is the first sale, the first close is getting them to agree to an appointment to come in. Right? People are afraid to ask for that. One reason is because some people don't know when they can get in. I don't know when my lunch is gonna be, I don't know how long it's gonna be, I don't know when I get off work. So it's not a black or white issue here, right? If somebody doesn't want to schedule an appointment, they don't have to. But this is our first opportunity to take control of the sale, and we need to explain the features and benefits to them on why, if they do schedule an appointment, what's in it for them? Because that's what we all want to know, Daniel. What's in it for me? And what's in it for them is if they schedule an appointment and there are other people in there waiting for an estimate, they get helped right away. If you have an appointment at 11 o'clock today, Daniel, I need to get you in at 11. And anybody else that shows up right before you do, I need to explain the benefit of scheduling an appointment. And I have one coming up, and so I can either do this or this, but I do have to take Daniel when he comes in at 10. So that is our first opportunity to schedule them into the facility. So how we greet people on the phone, whether we do things like that is important. And also, we were talking about culture and the feeling when you walk into a business and whether they feel like they're glad that you're there or not. How we greet them when they come in, whether we greet them, whether we just sit on the phone because somebody called before they came in and we don't acknowledge them. Those are all key things. We notice these things, right? The second step in a process is we have to identify what their needs are. Yes, they've had some sort of an accident, they've got damage to a vehicle. But what are their personal needs? What is important to them? We have to figure those things out. We have to explain the solution to them in terms that in ways that they can understand. Now, it may be a huge hit, and we've got six or seven pages on the estimate. We don't have to explain every little thing to them. But we need to understand, they need to understand, and we need to educate them on the process and how we're going to fix their vehicle properly so that they feel that it's safe when they get that vehicle back, and they'll be happy that we fixed it for them. This can involve a lot of things to help us get there. It can involve props, and I'm a big fan of props. Here's my hood prop. You can't even see it very much. Nice. But there's a hood prop that I use in estimating classes. I've done a ton of props. There are printouts from the various equipment that we have. If you do your own calibrations, if you do any of your own mechanical, if you do your own alignments, or you have vendors that obviously you get that from structural polls, all of those things. If they have concerns about the vehicle being safe, that's certainly when I think that you would want to take them out for a brief shop tour and show them the equipment that you're going to use to work on their vehicle to bring it back to pre-accident condition. So there are a lot of things that we can do in the process once we figure out what their needs are and what their concerns are, to ally those concerns. And again, make them feel like this is the place to get their vehicle fixed. Explain them what they can expect throughout the process. This is transparency. There are a lot of things that can go sideways in the process. Certainly, the insurance industry can be, depending on who you're working with, they can be challenging in the process, and we may have to get the customer involved. At the very least, they need to understand what's going to happen as we fix the vehicle, how often we're going to get back to them. Would you like us to get back to you? Etc. So there's a lot of information. The average person gets in an accident once every seven years. And yes, we have plenty of body shops that have customers that they see one or more times a year because they're always bumping into something, they've got kids that are doing it, and they're great customers. But there are a lot of people that haven't been in an accident in a long time and they don't know what to expect. And you know, things change rapidly in this industry. We have to make sure that our prospective customers understand what they can expect throughout the process. Then we have to earn the business. We have to ask directly. We talked about this already, right? There's always a concern that we're going to be too pushy, right? I don't want to be considered that type of a salesperson, right? So what I always recommend using is what's called the assumptive close. Asking that yes or no question is hard for some people. Nobody wants to be told no, right? So the assumptive close assumes that I've just put 30 to 45 minutes into working with this customer. I've done a lot to put this estimate together, that I have the right to ask for this close. I assume that I'm going to get the close, right? Because I put this work in. So it's not a matter of asking them, do you want to do business with me? But it's when. So an assumptive close would be, would you like to bring the vehicle in next Tuesday, or would Wednesday be better? They're going to do one of two things. They're going to pick one of those days, or they're going to say that doesn't work. Now, this is like peeling back the layers of the onions. Then we ask more questions. Would another day work for you? This may be where we find out they have an objection that we have not by the things that we've said and explained to them we haven't met yet. And that's good because now I know that this is something I need to focus on. We also want to create urgency. In most cases, we're busy. And we've got a lot of customers on the schedule. We want to make sure we get them in and so they can get their vehicle back properly. So we want to communicate that in a way that they understand that if I wait five days, that means it's going to take five more days before I can get my vehicle fixed. We're trying to create a balance here. We're not trying to be pushy, but we want them to know that if you wait, it's going to be that much longer before you get that vehicle back and before you put this bad experience behind you. So we may have an objection that came up, as we just talked about. They may have mentioned elections to us. So it's at this point that we need to try to overcome those objections. We need to, and this is where we get, God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. This is where we listen. Right? So we have to listen completely. And it never ever hurts to repeat something back and say something like, I want to make sure I understand what you mean here. Repeat it back to them. Because either you're going to be right or they're going to say, No, that's not what I meant, and now I can figure out what they meant. Otherwise, I'm going in the wrong direction. Right. And then we have an opportunity to respond to those, to overcome them, and now we try and reclose again. Alright. So assuming that we possibly didn't get this one, despite our best efforts, right? Follow up. Now, this is a key part. Because this can impact your closing ratio by up to 10 percentage points or more. And there are an amazing number of body shops that do very little of this. And typically it involves a couple different parts. It can actually involve a number of different things. It can involve a physical letter, phone calls, texts, emails. But you have to have a communication plan. And the plan can typically incorporate several of those elements as you follow up with them before they make a decision. If somebody's going to get their vehicle fixed now, they're going to make a decision within five to ten days. A lot of them will make a decision within about five days. So we have this window here. We have to have a plan about how we're going to communicate with them to find out what they want to do and if they have any other objections that I can overcome with them. Finally, we need to keep track and keep score. We need to give our people feedback on how they're doing. Why did we get this? Why didn't we get this? Etc. We should be having a brief sales meeting once a week if we have one or more estimators besides the manager to discuss progress on unsold estimates. This is the accountability piece here. Now, if I'm the only one who writes estimates, I gotta look do that look in the mirror session myself weekly and look through my things and ask myself, why didn't I get these? Did I follow up properly? Do I need to do anything that I haven't done yet? So those are the key points in the process. There's a lot of different tools people can utilize. Certainly, our website is one. All of our marketing efforts should be pointing to our website. Any videos, any facts about our company, awards that we won, all of those things should be on there. They would help paint the picture of us as a body shop of choice, right? We may even have the ability to schedule appointments on there through the website. So that's a tool. Any logs that you use on closed estimates, your follow-up letters that you send out, Therapool, and anything else that you use in the sales process. Finally, on that topic, people do business with people that they know and trust. 100%. We have a 30 to 45-minute window here to get to know these people, figure out what their needs are, and explain the process in a way that we develop the trust that they need to have, especially because of safety and all of the technical aspects that go into this. So those are my thoughts on the sales process.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Jim, you have given us a mini sales masterclass. That was amazing. I wish every shop in the country could hear this because every shop needs to have a sales team. Their estimators, their CSRs are their sales team. And I don't think shops understand this fully. So that was amazing, Jim. I appreciate that so much. You gave us so much value there of stepping us through what a sales process should look like. And I think any shop that's serious about growing can take the simple steps that you gave us and just start implementing them. So that's that's amazing. Appreciate it, Jim.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

When uh we were talking about how I looked at the statistics and I saw in the numbers that we processed that the closing ratios since COVID started until probably about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, when business started to slide, right? I looked at the numbers and I saw that it was off by 12 to 15 percentage points. So I put together, I wouldn't really call it a class, but it was something that I could do. I did for AASP of Minnesota. I did it in all my performance groups, but I put together a segment on this, basically telling people, hey, you guys have this is what I see in the numbers that we have for 400 people. And we got to get back on the stick here.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Yeah, that's amazing, Jim. I really appreciate that. I think we're gonna pivot the conversation a little bit now, Jim, and we're gonna start looking more at maybe process. Now, obviously, we really cover off the sales well. Now, you've spent a lot of time helping shops with their efficiency, with their lean process. What are some of the most common like workflow mistakes that quietly are killing the profitability?

SPEAKER_00 24:40

It starts with having an organized facility up front as as well as in back. Our classes and our material on lean is actually a mix of three different disciplines, and we call it a process-centered environment. And so within that, one of the lean processes is 5S. And that's having a clean and organized facility that that actually works for you. I can find the things when I need them. There, there's a place for everything, they're out, they're always there. If somebody isn't using them, and so it starts with being organized like that. The things that I'm going to use the most are the closest to me, and the materials that I need the least are the furthest away, et cetera, et cetera. So using organizational processes like 5S is important, using visual management, knowing where everything is, where it's supposed to be, being able to look at vehicles, know exactly where it is in the process just by looking at the visual notes that we've made. Most think of people think of waste as, well, it's just the used sandpaper laying and the tape balls on the floor, right? But there's actually eight forms of waste, and you have to know what they are and how to reduce them. There's waste in transportation. We know waste in inventory. That's what most people think about. Uh wasted motion. Another huge one is waiting times. Right. And managing our schedules and our processes and the way we do things to reduce the amount of waste. Because the average RO these days is in our facility 14 to 16 days. Probably has 25 hours on it, right? And if someone was close to 200 efficient 200% efficient, that's 12 hours. That's a day and a half, Daniel. But we have it for 16 days. Do you think there's any waste in waiting in there? There's overproduction, there's overprocessing, the defects, which is another one that's well known, and uh underutilized human potential. Right? So when we got a body tech taking out trash, or the managers detailing vehicles, things like that. That's underutilized human potential. There's standardization. There's standard work examples. What does a good weld look like? Right? What when we're mixing body filler, what does the my right mix ratio look like? What color should it be? So those are some examples of standardized work, so we make sure everybody's doing things the same way. Do we have a process for continuous improvement? People hate change. And if we're never changing, we're never getting better. There's an old saying, especially when it comes to lean, never let the best be the enemy of better. What do you think what that means, Dan?

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Well, I think it's basically having that closed mind that we're the best. We can't let that stand in our way because there's always something better we can be doing. That's what it means to me.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Yes. And we talked earlier about how rapidly this industry changes. That means that what was the best yesterday and last year may not and probably isn't the best today. So if we rest on our laurels, we're missing the opportunity to get better. Right. Okay. So we have to have some kind of a mechanism, whatever that looks like. Everybody thinks of the idea box, right? Well, whatever you want to call it, whether you have monthly meetings or weekly meetings or lunch and learns or whatever the mechanism is, we have to have a process where we're soliciting ideas from the people who are doing it. So that when we make changes, our goal should be to do it with them and not to them. Right? Because nobody likes that. There's total productive maintenance, and that's just more of having schedules. Right? Because we've all seen it, Daniel. We see the sheet of paper up on the booth. Hell, you can walk into a porta potty and there's a list on the wall of how often it's cleaned. And most of the time, it hasn't been cleaned recently. And the same is true with all the other lists that we see. So it's having a schedule and a program where not just we have a list, right? But we are proactive. We have regular conversations about it, whatever it looks like, whether it's at least monthly or bi-weekly or whatever it is, about what needs to be done. We make sure that it gets done. Do we need to do anything else to be proactive because it's making a strange sound? God knows we can't afford for the booth to go down. And then the one thing that everybody wants is continuous flow. So our processes should be focused on minimizing the waiting and the waste and achieving or getting as close to we can is that elusive concept of continuous flow, where it doesn't stop, or it doesn't stop very often. So that's that's a great way.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Those are my takeaways from that. I appreciate that, Jim. That's a great way to look at it, is all of these efforts, all of these things that we're doing is to keep that continuous flow going as smoothly as possible. Jim, you get to see a lot of different metrics and numbers. I'm wondering what are the best shops doing differently when it comes to these accountability performance metrics and like what numbers actually matter the most?

SPEAKER_00 30:38

First of all, you've got to have a mechanism so that you know what your numbers are. Are you looking at your PL every month? Are you looking at the reports that you get out of your management system? Right? Two, do you know how you arrived at those numbers? And third, the most important thing, do you have any clue on how to move those numbers? Improve them or make them decline if that's the direction that you want to go. So as far as the ones that matter most, that depends. Well, there are some core things that apply to everybody, but from one shop to the next, there are things that I'm good at that maybe you're not good at. And so from one shop to the other, we all have different things that we need to work on. And so those are be those kind of shoot up to the top of the list as some of the most important things that we can work on. But on a daily basis, there's a short list of things that are extremely important that everybody should be looking at. How much cash we got in the bank? And I'm not talking checkbook accounting, but on a daily basis, I am talking about our ability to pay our bills. Where are our sales at for the month? You know, I've got plenty of you ask questions about what are some of the better operators are doing. They typically have some side of a scorecard or a scoreboard in the shop that shows what sales have been for each day and what our month-to-date sales are versus goal. Awareness. Our accounts are savable are important, our accounts payables are important, work in process. We typically tend to call it work in production, and we focus on what is actually in production, not it's here, and we've repair planned it, and we're waiting for approval for the insurance company, or we're waiting for crucial parts and we can't start without them. Those aren't actually in production because we have a sweet spot there about how much money and whatever hours that we need to have in production, but we also have to know what's in pre-production because as things are ready for delivery, I've got to move more in. So we look at it as work in production versus strictly in process, because that can include what's on site. And where are we at, especially with gross profit? Are we hitting our gross profit margins for the month? We have a monthly PL profit expectations that we're trying to meet. And so we can usually tell that when we close out our ROs, it starts with our gross profit. And where's that at on each RO as we close those out? Cycle time. Always been an important number. As important as it is, it's been out of sight for the last four years because we've all been so busy, and we would have loved to have gotten those vehicles out of the shop sooner, but we had the supply chain issues with parts, etc., etc. So that's suffered a little bit of the same fate. But now, even though volume has dropped, and it's always been important to insurance companies, especially if you're on a DRP and we all know about the scorecards. Uh, but they have put a renewed emphasis on cycle time lately. And that's not a bad thing. Everybody wins with lower cycle time. So that should be something that's at the top of the list. Departmental gross profit margins in any shop should be important. But if I'm killing labor, is that the one that I should be focused on this month? Or is my parts gross profit margin or any of the other ones not where it needs to be? So what are the critical few here? I don't necessarily need to focus on every one of the departmental gross profit margins, unless, of course, they're all not doing well. Right. Then we do, right? Closing ratio, which we beat to death ad nauseum. If you're on a DRP, you need to be aware of what your scores are in your scorecard and trying to improve those so that I can get more volume into my facility. And then if you have any incentive plans for employees, front office is going to be different from my technicians in the back. And typically you're going to have key ratios that are involved with those performance incentive plans, numbers that you want them to move. And so we should be tracking and sharing those numbers. That is amazing. After that, it's whatever is going sideways in my operation. If my overhead is too high, obviously I need to be looking at that. Those are shop-by-shop examples.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Excellent, Jim. I think a couple things that I take away is that we have to have a system in place where at least we can track our numbers. Like, let's get to that. That's a the the lowest bar is to be tracking these numbers, and then we start tackling which ones are the most important. And I would say to any shop owner that's maybe struggling to determine what that is, is you need to get with somebody like Jim that can help you figure that out if you can't on your own. So, Jim, I think you've given us a very, very balanced picture of what a shop should be watching and looking for if they're looking to grow. Jim, I'd like to switch again to thinking a little bit about people. Obviously, we have a lot of people in our shops. What are leading shops doing now to train, retain, and develop strong team members in their shops?

SPEAKER_00 36:29

That is a great question. And this is something that a colleague of mine, Jeff Baker, and I tackled. And we actually wrote a class for Axe and Nobel and training, recruiting, and retaining employees. Nice. So there's a ton of information on this, obviously. I could talk about this all the class. And when I teach a class, I do. Nice. Let's start with a couple facts or some information. According to the Society for Human Resource Management and other polls, more than 50% of people in management positions, and this isn't just collision related, this is across country. Over 50% of people in management positions have had no training. Wow. And how to be a manager or a supervisor.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

That's insane.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

One that should scare you.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

That's insane.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

I know. But that's also the opportunity that we could really do a lot in this avenue of people. We're trying to career path people, which we should be doing, you know, from a recruiting and from a retention standpoint, we should be trying to career path people. Training needs to be a huge part of that. Which brings us to the second point. According to the same association and some of the other s organizations that do polls, and frequently we hear that the top reasons that people leave jobs, it's always money. One of the real reasons is they're not provided with the training that they want and they need to be successful in my current position or to move into another one. And when they don't get the training, they will move to another company. Okay. So what are people doing? That's a long list. I can't go through all of it, but I'll hit the high points. And what you're going to see is the thread that goes through everything, Daniel. And there always needs to be a process. That's what successful organizations do. They're organized enough that they always have a process to do whatever we're talking about. From training, that includes accurate job descriptions, right? Giving an idea, people an idea of what they're going to be doing. Some type of self-skill assessment. So as they're going through the training process, we have a list of things that we want them to learn how to do their job. And we want to tell them to tell us along the way, how are you doing? What do you need more help with? Work on the things that we said that you're going to be measured on, right? So they need to have some sort of a self-assessment tool to give us feedback so we can give them feedback. A training list. What are you going to be trained on? Uh, certainly there's a great deal of equipment, especially for the technicians and back. So we have equipment, we have safety processes, we have the materials that you're going to be using. Do you understand the work? Those types of things. And part of that comes from that self-assessment. There's going to be a long list of okay, these are all the things that you need to be doing. And so we want to, during the training, we want to help you understand those things. Do we assign them a mentor? Or even just somebody that's going to train them? Right? When I was in college, I was a ski instructor. And we would always used to joke about the quick training method where you would take the beginning skier up to the top of the steepest hill. And we never did this, it was just a joke. And we'd push them off and we'd say GLMF. And I'm not going to explain that because it's not Sunday friendly. So, but there are plenty of organizations that do that to their people when they bring them on board. They don't really do any orientation. Sometimes they don't even know where the bathroom is, and they have to find it themselves. Much less provide the training that I need to be successful in my new job. We've got to have all of these things, and a mentor certainly helps somebody that that trains you in and explains how to do this, and that has to be part of the process. And then a review process. The first company that I worked for when I came out of college, they had a training manual. And they had established points in there. Okay, we're going to meet once a month, then three months, and then six months. And these are the things that we're going to review. Setting the right expectation with people, Daniel, is huge. What are we going to do? When are you going to give me feedback? How do I know if I'm going in the right direction? There has to be a process there to provide that training and to set the expectation with people on what's going to happen. Retention. This is an even longer list. The goal should be that you want to be or become an employer of choice.

unknown 41:47

Right?

SPEAKER_00 41:47

Yes, sir. We all know about the tech shortage. We know how hard it is to find people. If you're an employer of choice, you're somebody that people want to work for. And especially if they're not from the industry, may be more willing to come work for you just because they heard how good you are as a company, how well you treat your people. And the list goes on and on all the way down. Starts with hiring and onboarding. How do we treat people in that process? How do we treat them in the hiring process? I even heard plenty of horror stories from people. You can go online, glass door, and hear plenty of stories about how horribly some people felt just interviewing. Treat them with some grace. You know, even if they don't work out, they're out there talking about you when you don't treat them well in the hiring process. Agreed. Hire slowly, make sure you hire the right people. Okay? A huge thing here is the employee experience. Experiences are really important to all of us. The experience that I just had going to Fort Myers, which I could tell you all about, doing my favorite hobbies and things I do after work. If you go on vacation, think about any vacations that you went on with your family or your friends, right? Those are memories that we keep for a long time. So if experiences are so important to us in our personal life, shouldn't our experience at work, where we spend over half our time, be important as well? The experience that people have working for us. Tools. Yes. If I was going to buy these things for myself at home, is that the kind of the same thing I'm providing for my employees at work? The tools that they need to be efficient and do their job well. And the third environment is cultural. And of all those three, if you're going to assign a percentage of which one, you know, how important each one is, culture is by far more than 50% of the total weight of all three of those environments. What kind of place am I working for? How do they treat me? How do they treat other people? Do they provide competitive pay and benefits? You don't have to be the most expensive in the market, and I have to have the highest pay, but you need to be competitive for people, there's people that obviously will leave you for somebody who is more competitive. Um communication. What's the communication process like with your employees? Coaching. Everybody wants to hear when they've done a good job. I don't need it every day, but it sure would be nice to hear it once in a while. Daniel? You know, feedback, regular training. We've talked about the importance of that. Having career path discussions and providing whatever additional training I need to try and move into another position in the company. A lot of the things that are part of retention are the things that you should market when you're recruiting. Right. These are all of the great things that we do. And there's so much more to it. There's really a lot to what we do to retain people, and then how we turn around and use that to recruit people into our business. Because recruiting is marketing. Just like we would market to get people to do business with my body shop. Um, when you're recruiting, you're selling yourself, you're marketing your business. And hopefully I'm an employer of choice. And so that's what people should be looking for.

SPEAKER_01 46:01

Excellent, Jim. I'm not even going to try to resay everything you said. There so much value once again. And I feel like such a pertinent subject that every shop ten pounds of sand and a five-pound bag. You got her, man. You got it. No, that's awesome. Thank you very much. Let's move on. I have a few more questions yet. Let's say we have an owner or manager listening to this episode, and they just feel stuck in the daily chaos. What are some leadership habits that you feel would create that biggest shift in shot performance for them?

SPEAKER_00 46:42

I think what one of the first things you have to do is figure out we can be our own worst enemy. And you can get so caught up in the whirlwind of the and the chaos of every day, right? That I'm working in the business and I'm not working on it. So this is a time management strategy where people need to carve out a little bit of time. And carving out a little bit at first is certainly a lot better than not carving any out at all. So you start that process of carving that time out and thinking about the business and what do I need to do and what should my action plans be? And then figure out again, okay, I'm gonna have to carve some time out to work on these action plans. So it is some self-analysis that you have to do. And you also have to look at what type of manager you are, um, because some people are micromanagers and they have a hard time letting go. And if that's the case, I can never leave. I can't go to a meeting because it's gotta be done this way, and I've got to have my finger on the pulse of what's going on. And so they have to actively work to train their people, so even if they're not doing things the exact same way, first of all, it shouldn't be whether they do things the exact same way that I do. Are you getting the same result? 100%. They have to train their people so that they can achieve the same result and let go of some of the things that they don't absolutely positively have to do. Prioritize them. What's at the bottom? Delegate some of those things. And what we also have to train managers from that respect is on the delegation front. Because we always I think everybody's heard it. I feel like a babysitter. I told them once to do it, I don't know why it didn't get done. The most important part of delegation is follow-up. Still on me as manager or leader to follow up with people and make sure that they did what they were supposed to do. So those are a couple key things, and from there, it goes on to taking advantage of the opportunities in our industry. There are so many organizations that provide training, other programs like the performance groups that my company does and other companies do, on-site consulting that we do, there's industry associations that provide training. These are all and we've talked about the importance of training a number of times during this podcast. There are so many things out there, Daniel, that shops can and uh should be involved with. I can tell you that our most successful customers, right? Here's a key nugget. Our most successful customers are involved with as many of our business services as they possibly can. Performance groups, classes, on-site consulting, other programs, right? Digital production board. That's not a coincidence, Daniel. Agreed. Agreed. Um, and then the last thing is just a reminder run your shop by the numbers.

SPEAKER_01 50:21

Yeah. Isn't that easy to forget? I love that, Jim. Yeah. What I heard you say is first of all, get out of your own way, and then get with people that can help you do this. Those basically two simple steps. Like just get out of your way, your own way, hire some people to help you, go talk to people like Jim, go talk to your paint vendors, go join your association and your state, just get into the right rooms and start learning. Great stuff, Jim. Can you share an example? This might be tough, Jim, but can you share an example of a process or mindset change that you've seen make a major difference in shop results?

SPEAKER_00 51:08

Okay, I've got a couple different things. I've got plenty of stories, trust me. I'm sure you do. Especially success stories that tie into things that we've already talked about. But I'll start with one of my first experiences, my first job out of college, and I worked for a company and I had we had a vice president that was based out of Atlanta, and he had a say that either you're a doer or you're bound to be done. And what he meant by that is the doers, this ties into what we were just talking about, all of the opportunities that are available to you and taking advantage of it. Those are the doers. Okay? And the ones that are bound to be done are the things that just let things happen to them. I'm not trying to get better, I'm not trying to be proactive, and things happen to you, and then it's woe is me, I'm not profitable, my business isn't growing, etc. Okay? And it's the old adage that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. True. So that is the first mindset that you have to have is that I am gonna take advantage of these things. I'm not gonna be a victim, I'm not gonna be railroaded by the industry that's changing, the insurance companies, whatever. Okay, I'm gonna take responsibility for my own direction here in my own path, and I'm gonna do something about it. Okay, so that would be the first thing. And I think the other one that is really important, and it's funny because of the feedback that I get when I'm teaching classes on this, is that is repair planning and blueprinting. And we have a number of different classes on the topic: cycle time, process, reduction, optimizing cycle time, improving the process, etc. And when we go through everything that should be done up front that we're not doing, right? It's surprising how often that we'll get response from people that say, we're already doing those things. You're not doing them up front, because if you were, your cycle time wouldn't be as bad as it is, and you wouldn't be taking a cycle time improvement class. And it's just the it's a discipline thing. Because if we were to do the cycle time process and the repair planning process, we would find everything that we could have or should have found at the beginning of the process. I can now plan for it, and at a certain point I can predict how much longer that vehicle is going to be in my shop. When it gets down to body filler drying time, the refinished process, and the various drying times that we need and booth time and things like that. If we do a great job up front, we do a complete disassembly, including all subassemblies. We, if we're gonna use a salvage door, we take it apart the first day that it comes in, so anything that we're gonna break or anything that's missing, we find these things. These are all things we can plan for. And this is something that it's not rocket science. It takes discipline. You need to have checklists and audit forms about your process. You need to hold people accountable to make sure that things get done. And there's a lot of people that a lot of body shops that just don't do this very well and they hurt themselves. We were talking about an average cycle time of 14 to 16 days. A lot of times we can find problems in the repair planning process that led to those longer cycle times. So I think that's something that's not rocket science, but it's revolutionary, and that yeah, another piece of feedback I get it's gonna take more time. You're already doing these steps multiple times because we didn't do them up front. You're doing them multiple times throughout the repair process, and it's taking you 16 days, right? So if I spent a little more time up front, the rest of the process would go a lot smoother. And so that is probably one of the most important things that I think benefits everybody that's not doing that well.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

Amazing. That is great advice, Jim. When you look ahead, what do you think body shop owners and managers need to prepare now if they want to stay competitive over the next few years?

SPEAKER_00 55:54

I don't think there's any shockers here. We always have changing insurance industry requirements, and that's been a big point of emphasis over the last six months about additional pressure put on body shops. And then certainly, if you're on a DRP, how those program requirements change. ADOS has been rapidly developing. We need to have processes for that, as well as making sure we've got the right software. So if we are gonna do calibrations, that we do those properly, and that's the next point. Um, with calibrations, we've got to have the documentation, uh, we got to make sure that the quality's there, that it's done right. And of course, in our industry, if we're gonna do the work and invest in the equipment and the training, we need to be able to negotiate to get reimbursed for what we do. Quality and safety, it's again rapidly changing industry as things change. There's always gonna be changing safety requirements, we need to stay up on those. Tech shortage, employee shortages, still gonna be an issue, right? That's not gonna go away. OE certifications and compliance. That's been up and down, and by what I can tell, that's gonna become more demanding. And just how much of a role are the OEs gonna take? So that's gotta be on our radar. Uh a lot of the OEs backed off of electric vehicles, EVs in the last year, right? And are gonna fix folk focus more on hybrids. So, what does that look like going forward? And are there gonna be things that of course there's gonna be technology on the newer hybrids that we need to be aware of and stay on top of? And how's that gonna change? Do we need to put in E B charges in the future, especially if we're gonna expand our shop or build a new one? How many do I need? These are all considerations that we have to think about. Our supply, what about supply chain issues? If there still are some, it's not, no, it's not as bad as it was. There still are some. Is that gonna get better? Is that gonna get worse? That obviously affects our cycle time. Right now, certainly, the cost of all of our products and materials is an issue. How much is everything gonna go up? And am I gonna be able to market up to what I need to get reimbursed and make a reasonable profit on it? Cost is a huge consideration. The impact of AI, it's already impacted, estimating and the adjusting process, and certainly there'll be more consolidation. So, what does that look like going forward? It's a long list, Daniel.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

It's ever changing, like you said, very rapidly changing, and I think being as much prepared as we can is is why Jim, I have one final question that I ask here on the Body Shop Leaders. What does being a body shop leader mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 59:14

I have to answer this through my own lens. Yes, please. Uh because I view my responsibility and what I do is my job is to help other people be more successful. Our customers be more successful, right? That means a lot of things. I teach classes, I have to know the material well. I do help develop classes, so I have to develop the best material I can. A lot of our material and a lot of what we do is based on best practices. So I've got to be aware of those best practices. Uh, I hear about them in performance groups. I do a lot of on-site consulting, and so I see the good, the bad, and the ugly. I can share that with my customers and all of the various services that we provide. I have to stay up on the latest trends, which we were just talking about. I have to know what's going on outside the trends in the industry at any moment. Did you hear that ABC insurance company is doing this? And this is what we're starting to hear. I have to stay up on that and stay in touch with my other customers to find out if other people are experiencing it. I do have a lot of ongoing training for myself. The Rev 8OS did a six-hour training session through ASP Minnesota a couple of months ago, and I sat through that. Joel Adcock was our instructor, so that I'm staying up on what's going on. And I have and I know of instructors or people that I can have come into my performance groups and share some of the cutting-edge things with them. I have to teach the best class that I can. I usually create a lot of handouts. So there are takeaways for people that leave my classes that pertain to the material that we talked about. So I want them to get as much value. They took time out of their schedule to come to a four or six-hour class. Performance groups are more time. They can be anywhere from a day and a half to at our national performance group meetings, they're over three days. So if someone comes to one of these performance groups, I've got to hit it out of the park. If you're going to take that much time out of your schedule, my standards are extremely high. I set the bar very high for myself because that's what my customers expect from me. Uh I always have to keep in mind that everything I do, that I'm always focused on the integrity of what I do, how I treat other people, always giving 100%. And my favorite saying is underpromise, overdeliver. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:10

That's how I roll, Daniel. Love it. That is that's a great saying to live by.