Brad Green: You Come Second

What does it take to grow a single family shop into a 14-location MSO spanning two Canadian provinces in just seven years? According to Brad Green, Director of Operations at Raydar Collision Group — it starts with recognizing that as a leader, you come second.

In this episode, Brad sits down with Daniel Burkholder to unpack the people-first philosophy that's fueled Raydar's rapid expansion across British Columbia and Alberta. From his start washing cars in the rain at a small North Vancouver shop to overseeing operations across 14 locations, Brad shares the real mechanics behind scaling a collision repair business without losing your culture along the way.

You'll hear Brad's take on why accountability is really just communication, how to stop managing by gut feel and start using data without overcomplicating it, the biggest mistake shop owners make when scaling from one location to two or three, why he wrote a candid article on women in collision repair and what the response taught him, navigating the "Bermuda Triangle" between shops, insurers, and OEMs, why a safe repair isn't enough anymore — it has to be a safe AND profitable repair, and his advice to any shop owner who says "we can't find good people" — maybe look in the mirror first.

Whether you're running a single shop or building toward your next acquisition, Brad's approach to leadership, patience, and playing the long game on your people is a masterclass worth hearing.

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 often push back on operators that say, we can't find anyone or there's no good people. I say maybe look in the mirror first. If you're an old school guy and you kick and scream and you yell, you're probably scaring away a lot of great people just by the nature of the environment that you're giving them.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Welcome back to the Body Shop Leaders podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Burkholder, and today I'm excited to sit down with Brad Green, the Director of Operations and Performance Manager at Radar Collision Group. Brad oversees operations across 14 locations spanning British Columbia and Alberta, helping scale what started as a single family shop back in 1977 into one of Western Canada's standout MSOs. But Brad isn't just an operations guy. He's a thought leader who's not afraid to tackle the tough conversations from advocating for women in collision repair to challenging how shops, insurers, and OEMs work together. He's been on the stage at Car Star Rise, CCIF Calgary, and has published some must-read pieces in Collision Quarterly magazine. Brad, welcome to the Body Shop Leaders Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Thank you for having me. I appreciate you taking the time to have me on.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Absolutely my pleasure. We're gonna dive right in, Brad. I hope these questions that we go through help to draw out your story. And that's what we're gonna kind of go right back to. Give us your origin story. How did you end up in the collision repair world and what was the path that brought you to radar collision group?

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Okay, like most young men coming out of high school out of passion for vehicles. By mostly dumb luck, I ended up getting hired on as a detailer at a small MSO in North Vancouver. And I was very grateful at the time. I obviously uh was very passionate about cars and people at that time. So I joined this little shop washing cars in the rain, probably much like many of us do, starting out at the beginning of the journey there. I really had no idea uh where this would take me at that time. And then over the next three or four years, I did some on-the-vehicle repairs, work with a couple technicians, and I recognized that to be honest, I just wasn't very good at it. Um, I was much better with the people, and I was provided an opportunity at that point to join the administrative team. And and like I said, I'm very grateful I was mentored by some very bright people who I think at that point saw some things in me that perhaps I didn't see at the same time. And over the next 10 or 15 years, I ran some shops within the BC area and then ended up joining in the radar group after we'd initially purchased our first shop. That was back about seven years to the day now.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Amazing. Yeah, isn't that something how a lot of stories in the collision repair world they start in the wash bay or in the detail department? That's a lot of where these stories start. Absolutely. Tell us a little tell us a little bit about radar. So if I understand correctly, radar started as a single shop in Mission BC back in 1977. So now you're 14 locations across BC and Alberta. Walk us through that growth. What were the key inflection points where the business went from one shop to that true multi-shop operation?

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Bill Davidson, who's our president uh of the company, he's also very passionate about vehicles and about people. And he had left a distribution position and was looking to get back in into the body shop business. He was a technician by trade uh and was traveling a lot and wanted to find a way to stay a little closer to home. So he was familiar with Radar Autobody at the time. It was a standalone facility of mission. And he had a relationship with the owner. It was a legacy shop. It had obviously been around for quite a while. It was very well known, reputation was very high in that market. He approached that owner, this is going back seven-ish years ago, to see if there was some possibility to take that shop on. And thankfully, the owner at the time did recognize that perhaps it was the time it was right for him to exit stage left, as they would say. And and Bill was very committed to making sure that his people were taken care of, these legacy shops. The way that we treat people is obviously very important. And Bill Davidson is an outstanding guy, he's a people first person. That was the beginning, effectively, of our group. Uh, our finance director is the daughter of that original owner. She stuck with us, thankfully, uh, through all the changes, and we couldn't do it without her. She's wonderful. So we started out with that first shop. We knew there's a lot of potential in that market. We certainly brought some new energy and maybe some a little more progressive ideas. We began looking, we had a certain strategy at that time. We liked the legacy shops. We liked the ability to go in and say to uh a second or third generation owner, look, we recognize that at some point you're likely going to exit your business. We would like to provide an opportunity to make sure that your people are taken care of. So instead of necessarily negotiating strictly on price, our goal is always to continue that legacy to help people continue to feel to feel safe in their environment because we do believe that safety is the number one driver of growth. So, what we had done is we started to build a culture where people really did believe in what we were trying to do. I know that maybe sounds a bit corny, but our strategy did pay out the sense that effectively what happened is other operators that were potentially looking to move on started to approach us in smaller markets where perhaps they recognized that other MSOs might be interested in their business. However, they maybe the values didn't match or they were concerned that their legacy would be would be damaged at that point. The first two or three shops kind of just happened organically through some conversations with some other operators. I had joked when I joined Bill on this journey that I saw this going one of two ways. Either we were going to stop at three and just work hard and have three really well-run shops, or potentially it was going to blow bastard a dozen. And we often talk about that now because here we are at 14 locations in seven years. And sometimes you have to be very careful what you say of the universe because it can have a habit of coming true. We do maintain the same people-first attitude. We are very people focused. The values that we created, we still look to them, same values that we had when we had one or two or three shops, but we still carry those forward to 14 and ideally we'll continue to grow. Not growth for the sake of growth, but growth when it makes sense, not only for us, but also for the communities and for the people that are involved. Scaling a business from one to 14 in seven years is certainly been an interesting, sometimes messy endeavor, but very rewarding, very fulfilling in the sense that we've gone from seven or eight or ten employees all the way up well past 150. And we take that responsibility very seriously. Obviously, going through COVID, like many other operators, was a very challenging time. And I know that the philosophies that we had then, although challenging, they required some sacrifice, certainly on the part of ownership, they have paid out. We were able to keep all of our people, and we're very proud of that. And something that knock on wood, it will never again happen. But crisis sometimes does expose your true character. We did see that uh with some of our partners that perhaps we don't do business with anymore. But the reality is our people are our greatest resource. Uh and that goes really for any business, I would think, especially for small business. And we live and die by our people. Now we don't always get it right, and it can be challenging. There's a lot of strong personalities and whatnot. But the reality is if you do focus on people and you show them that's the true nature of what you're trying to achieve, often you can achieve some really cool things.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Amazing. Quite a story, Brad. And I like the common thread that I hear throughout it is that your people are so key to all of this and how important those people are to you. That's outstanding with the amount of exponential growth that you guys have gone through over the last seven years to maintain that kind of core value of maintaining your people. That is a job well done. Let's talk a little bit about your title. So, your title includes performance, management, accountability. Those are two big words in any shop. What does accountability look like day to day when you're managing 14 locations?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

This is a results-based business, much like effectively any other business. We have to work hard, we have to generate revenue. The intent is to continue to put that back in the business. When it comes to accountability, I think accountability can sometimes be a bit of a bad word and it can fall to people think reprimands and people think these very nuanced, difficult conversations and navigating multiple personalities. But really, what accountability is it's just communication. It's about communicating effectively what needs to get done either in the day or the month or the year. Are you being sympathetic to the fact that the reality is the people that we're asking to be getting these results are the people in the trenches that are doing the day-to-day? For us, we try to engage our people, especially the people that we feel are in leadership positions in their shops. And that doesn't necessarily just mean managers and system managers could be production staff, it could be technicians, it could be detailers, could be leaders as well. So we try to have a very strong dialogue and open communication with our teams. And the reality is that when you agree on what the goal is, those conversations are a lot easier to have when you feel like the people are participating in those conversations versus just being this one-direction communication. We've been able to achieve some outstanding results without necessarily having to lose our temper or to make people feel small. People really do want to be heard and seen. And so if you take the time to ask the right questions and to feel like you actually are engaging them, not only will they provide you outstanding answers to many of the problems that you're facing, but they'll also be much more inclined to take feedback proactively when it comes. So that's really what accountability is. Accountability is just communicating what is expected and having those honest conversations when things are going right.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

That is so true. We tend to give accountability a negative twist, but I think accountability can be a strong thing. And a lot of high performers want some type of accountability. They just want to be able to heard in that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

That is the key. When you hold people accountable, in the sense that you are honest with them about what's going wrong and where can we make some improvements. Top performers are very easy to identify if you communicate what are the expected results, how are we measuring our success, and what do you need from us? And then we effectively get out of their way. Top performers love that environment. They love to know what is the end game, what are you expecting for me? And they want to be able to have some autonomy to get those results. And we try to do our best to provide that. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Brad, you've spoken about data and technology, tools like Auto House to manage performance across your shops. So for a shop owner who's still running on gut feel and whiteboards, what's the case for going data driven? And where would you recommend they start?

SPEAKER_00 10:58

The volume of information grows. Being able to manage from a different level is obviously very critical because we just simply can't be everywhere all the time. And so what we've got is a situation where effectively we look to the data. We need it to be true. We need to be able to trust it, but you need to find one or two or three key metrics that you feel can really, instead of having that gut feeling, what is that gut feeling telling you? Is it a throughput issue? Is it production issue? Is it total revenue? Is it your run rate on billables, that sort of thing? I would suggest if you're an operator and you're judging your success by your gut, you're leaving yourself exposed for a few reasons. One is step away if you're the only one who knows you're on or off track. That's virtually impossible. The other challenge is you probably have people in your business right now that maybe actually be better at doing some things that you're doing. And what they need from you is they need some idea how to identify those and what's really important to the business. If you're a one-shop operator, that's where I would start. I would start by identify the two or three things that you lay in bed at night and you stare at the ceiling and you think, I wish I could just get one more car through a day, or I need to increase my hours, total hours produced, or we're having a challenge with communication with a customer and the feedback has been poor. To find one or two or three things and focus there. And effectively, what's going to happen is you're going to learn to manage your business in a different way. And then as you continue to add metrics, there's other ways that you can do this. You can have the daily dashboards, you can have ops meetings, whatever that is. But the intent is to be able to manage your company strictly based on numbers. And those numbers are up to you. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what's important in any other shop. We have things that we focus on, but that could be very different for other operators. First off, you need the data to be trustworthy. Numbers help no one. You need to know that your reporting is correct. And you need to find systems to get that information to the key people so they can make decisions in the moment. Where I would start. If I was an operator and I was running my business on a gut feeling, I would sit down and I would write out the two or three things that they're really bugging me that maybe I feel like I'm the only one who's paying attention to. And then I would sit down with your key players and I would let them know that those are the things you're going to focus on. That's what the drivers of success are going to be. That's how we're going to judge success. And then as a team, identify what the goal is and then play the long game. You have to understand that these things take a long time. Human nature dictates it when it's easy to sit in a boardroom and come up with some really progressive ideas, but we're counting on people in the trenches, in the guts of our business to actually implement and have the discipline to sustain these processes. The challenge often is that if you are removed from that, you have to remember that the whirlwind of their day urgency is probably slightly different than what you're trying to achieve from being somewhat removed. Give people the resources and the support and the patience to make sure that when you implement these things and you have goals, that it's not, hey, we missed it on the first month, and that's it was a bad goal. That doesn't mean it was a bad goal. Doesn't mean your system's a broken. It just means that maybe you're not giving yourself enough team time, though. Maybe you need to engage your team in a different way. But be very patient. These things, process improvement, cultural improvement, production improvement, general overall awareness, these things take a long time to offload. So if you are considering a change in the course of your management style, maybe you're a single shop operator or you have a couple shops and you're an owner operator. Start now, find ways to ease offload, delegate some of these things that you're doing. It will only make you better. It will allow you time to focus on other things that maybe could bring some value to your business, as well as buy you back some mental headspace, which can be challenging if you're an owner operator. You're kind of walking around with all these answers and all the burden. So you're certainly not alone. I suspect there's probably people in many businesses right now that could do more, could take on more, that are interested in trying things. You just need to engage them.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Love that answer. And the part that really stood out to me is be patient. Don't go back to your whiteboard. Don't go back to your gut feeling if you just are off by one month or you try it for a month. Oh, I hate it. Let's go back to the whiteboard. Give it some time, give people the space. That is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

We have to remember that these are people, right? They're not computers. So they have to take the time to make mistakes, to learn from those mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes actually can guide your decision making in a different direction. There's value in mistakes. This is a tough business. There are no perfect people, there are no perfect teams, there are no perfect body shops. But as a way to engage your people in a way that uh making mistakes becomes par for the course.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

I couldn't agree more with that. Brad, let's talk a little bit about the big picture webinar that you co-hosted with Dave Foster about turning a single shop into a profitable business. What's your biggest mistake that you see shop owners making when they're trying to scale from that one location to two or three?

SPEAKER_00 15:36

I think the biggest mistake, the thing that we certainly recognized as we went from one to two to three to five to seven is that growth will often expose your weaknesses. It will expose things that potentially you haven't really considered. So if you aren't really dialed in one specific metric or you have a lot of things on the peripheral perhaps that you're not paying attention to, those will only be reinforced as you grow. Once again, that's how you learn, that's how you scale a business, and that's how you learn to remove yourself from the day-to-day. But the challenge is sometimes you need to be also be able to act relatively quickly on those things. So be aware, growth is great, whether it's organic or through acquisitions. I hope all small business owners experience some growth. And it's a tough environment right now, obviously, economically. That is the biggest challenge is that if you are an owner operator and you're in the guts of your business and you are attempting to scale, then you're gonna have to recognize that all of your weaknesses will be exposed. But you're gonna have to think differently. You might have to proactively add some infrastructure, add some people before that acquisition or before that growth comes. Having an extra set of hands prior to the growth can feel like a bit of a challenge with overhead and costs and the pressions of margins and whatnot. But the reality is you're better off spending a little time and a little more money in the short to medium term to build the infrastructure, to have people at your back versus walking into a situation six, eight, 10 months out and recognizing that now you need to hire someone. You're not making your best decisions when you're stressed out like that. And you're not necessarily seeing the bigger picture.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

I feel like that takes us right into the next question I have, Brad. I believe you were on a panel at CCIF and Calgary discussing short-term profitability with long-term operations. And there's this tension that all shop owners live in. How do you think about investing in the future when today's margins feel tight and are tight?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

You need to adapt or die. That's the reality is that the complexity of what we do now, it's advancing at such a major pace that it's actually difficult to even try and keep up. That's why you have to engage your stakeholders, whether suppliers or distributors or other partners that can potentially provide you with some feedback, maybe some things on the peripheral that you're missing. But the reality is that claim is volume may be down, but complexity is up. So the volume will likely continue to grow at some point. But the reality is that everything we do is getting harder. You need to be reinvesting either it's in training for your people day-to-day or the tooling. I will say that it is a balance between recognizing where you're going to receive some value. I know that at least the way I see it, you have to be very cautious about too much too soon. So look at your potential shop, look at your market. Where is their opportunity? Is it a specific OEM certification? Is it a specific type of repair? Are you missing out on in-house uh operations that maybe you could add some infrastructure to? I do cautiously advise other owners that there's not always an on these pie in the sky ideas, and don't just blindly go in and agree to take on a dozen certifications or whatever that might look like. Be strategic and try to really understand that you're going to have to adapt. Find the things that make sense in your business, start there. It's not that complicated to really identify the top two or three things that you might be able to add as far as training or tooling if you really sit down and think about it. But go for the big shiny piece of equipment just because you saw your neighbor using it. That is not helpful. Often the feedback that we get, certainly from our technicians, is they really like some of the low-tech, easy stuff. Don't get caught up in in big shiny box stuff. Focus on things that will actually bring a return on investment and start small, pick away, don't do it all at once. That'll that'll just cause problems down the road.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Wow. Brad, I feel like you gave so much value there in that answer of being very strategic about thinking about our long-term investments, but being willing to make those moves then when they're right. And like you said, it doesn't have to be the big, shiny tool. It can be something simple that can really make a turning point in your shop.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

For sure. I know we go into sometimes after acquisitions, and we see sometimes it becomes a sense of apathy, right? You're you're in an environment, you just kind of it's like the frog in the pot of water as the temperature slowly goes up. Maybe you could bring in a second set of eyes, ask a shareholder to come in, look at your shop, tell you what they think that they see or don't see, engage your technicians, engage your estimators. Often that what people really need is just simple stuff, simple technology or simple training. Start there, right? You will get a better ROI on the simple stuff, often, especially in the short to midterm, that might get you that additional capital to invest into the more robust additions, but start with the small stuff because I guarantee there's things in businesses right now, specific to body shops, collision facilities, that there's small, simple things that you could do differently or at least add or change that would be a massive driver of success down the road. So don't confuse simple with lack of value. So that's certainly not the case.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Well said. Don't confuse simple with lack of value. I like that. Excellent. Let's pivot just a little bit, Brad, to you wrote a piece for collision quarterly about women in collision repair, and you acknowledged feeling hesitant about writing it as a man. Yes. What pushed you to publish it and what response did you get from the industry?

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah, so I was hesitant, obviously, because it's not my lived experience. Right. Um now, the reason I thought it was something that I should take a crack at. First off, I've been very lucky to work with some outstanding women in my career. And I say I would not be here without many of the women that have helped me to get here. I'm not lying, it's the truth. There's um outstanding women in like any other industry. Perhaps we sometimes we don't recognize that their experience potentially is very different than other people's experience. So, yes, I was very hesitant to speak on their behalf. Now, thankfully, like I said, we do have a very good culture, our company, and I was able to reach out to internal and external female colleagues or past colleagues and just ask for their input. My intent was to write it on their behalf, as if I was lobbying for essentially for their greater good. Because I know that the automotive industry potentially maybe came from an environment where it was a doggy dog world. It was very tough, it was a bit of a boys' club. I certainly experienced some things in the early stages of my career that would by no means would they be acceptable now. And so when I sat down to meet with some of my colleagues and get their feedback, it was incredibly discouraging to hear some of their experiences, whether it's the way that they were treated, the opportunities that maybe were passed up, their ideas not being taken seriously, whatever that might be, as well as the way that they were treated, as far as just there's a certain sense that unfortunately sometimes they might not be given the same amount of respect in this business. I certainly have witnessed it myself. And so I really wanted to take the time to say, look, I see you, I hear you, I recognize that I can't be the only male in this business that also understands it's incredibly difficult to navigate as a female, even to this day. Clearly, we've gotten better at it as an industry. The environment is improving, thankfully. But my intent was to walk the line between what I have seen and also to lobby on their behalf. I know it was a difficult undertaking. It did force me to perhaps recognize even some opportunities where I can improve the way that I've experienced things as well. It was a wonderful endeavor, and I feel very proud to speak on women's behalf. We still have a lot of work to do. The playing field is still not equal, unfortunately. It's not just men and women anymore. There's obviously a very diverse cultural landscape now. As an industry, much like other industries, we have to continue to adapt and evolve and recognize that for the greater good of our business, to promote inclusion and to promote success for all stakeholders, because we're very diverse and we need everyone on our team to recognize that they are as valuable as the next person. Hopefully that answers your question. I know it's maybe a got off topic there, but I was very proud and very honored to at least be provided with very honest feedback from my female colleagues and to try to at least acknowledge that their experience is very different than mine. Good for you. I'm sure that was a very challenging project.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Yeah. Yeah, it was challenging, but it was worthwhile. So, Brad, you mentioned earlier about being very people first in the way radar has been built from shop number one. So, in an industry where we're all kind of fighting over the same technicians, we're all trying to get the same talent. What does people first actually mean at radar? And maybe more importantly, how has it helped you recruit and retain this talent?

SPEAKER_00 24:21

People first, it sounds like this kind of generic uh answer for people first company, but the reality is that it has to start at the top. Like I said, Bill Davidson, his philosophy is we have to recognize our greatest resources, which is our people. We have to provide them with opportunities to be successful, support them, obviously continue to identify them. And then what we need to really do is get out of their way. So, people first, to me, the greatest thing you can do in your business is to take the time to understand your people's challenges, get to know them as people. And by doing that, you're going to create an environment where people are not only happy to come to work, we're not this isn't prison, they have to get up every day and they have to come to work engage and they have to do a job that's very complex and it's a high level of variables, and it's not easy what we do. We have a number of stakeholders, so there's no easy jobs, no easy roles in what we do. The ultimate team game is a collision shop. For us, when we say people first, what we mean is we look at obviously the greater good of the business. Do they match values? We live and die, we make our decisions by our certain set of values. Those same values that we had at one or two or three shops are the same ones that we've continued on now to 14, and they'd be the same ones that let that guide our decisions as we continue to grow. But the reality is if you aren't taking the time to sit with your people, to talk to your people, to ask them questions, you really don't know what's going on in your business. And you really can't, you certainly can't scale. If you don't have people that are trustworthy that you can count on to be honest with you, you don't need a bunch of yes men uh bobbleheads. What you need is people to challenge you, certainly when they're in their own environment. Like I said, I'm not in every shop every day. So I'm counting on people to tell us what to fix. I'm counting on them to be honest about things we're doing well, things we're not doing well. It's absolutely mission critical that we know what's on people's minds. And having some empathy, I think is a big part too. Empathy is one of our core values, and empathy can sound like this wishy-washy emotional concept. But really, what it is, it's you putting yourself in other people's shoes, recognizing that they have their own daily challenges, they have their going on. We've been very lucky that the philosophy we have on treating people is very genuine, but it's also coming from a place of deep concern that we want what's best for them. And then by doing that, reinforce what's best for the company and for their teammates. Play the long game on your people. People are going to make mistakes, they're going to let you down, they're going to disappoint you. That's normal. Give people a second chance, even a third chance if they're worthy of it. We have a number of situations in our group right now where people came to work for us and perhaps it was not a good fit at the time, or they just weren't ready for the role, or whatever that might be. And we said, Look, you're a good person. This isn't for you right now. We recommend you go off and try something else or get some more experience and come back and see us. And I'm grateful for the fact that a number of our top performers to this day are people that maybe didn't make that short list uh initially or didn't hit the mark, but they went out, they put the work in, maybe they changed their attitude, maybe they recognized where they could make some improvements and they came back to us. And obviously, we're very grateful for that. The reality is that our industry, much like many of these, I don't know how to frame it, kind of old school mentalities, but body shops kind of have this like mechanic shops and auto dealerships, kind of this boys' club. The real issue, unfortunately, is that, and I experienced this when I was a teenager, you know, the late 90s coming into a shop, and it was a difficult environment, right? There was, like I said, there were things done there, there was hazing, there was things that quite frankly would not be even close to being acceptable now. But we did a real disservice to ourselves, much like many trades did. I think we did it even worse than many, in the sense that we didn't provide an environment where young people felt they could come in and have a safe environment or an environment where they felt encouraged and supported. We created this massive black hole effectively throughout our industry where we just, and shame on us as an industry, we took it for granted. We thought there'd be this massive pipeline forever of all these young kids coming in who everyone loves cars. But the reality is if you're not providing a good environment where these young kids feel engaged and you're providing them a journey and they understand where their path is, they feel supported and seen and heard. If you're not doing that, then they're going to become plumbers or electricians or carpenters. And you were going to miss out on all those great things that one person may have been capable of doing, simply didn't want to live in the environment that we provided. So that has really become our greatest competitive advantage, really, over the last three or four years. We've recognized that our reputation as a company is getting out into the ethos. People are recognizing that we are a decent company to work for. And the reality is if you do the right things and you treat people well, this is a very tight-knit industry. The word travels. And I often push back on operators that say, we can't find anyone, or there's no good people. I say, maybe look in the mirror first. If you're an old school guy and you kick and scream and you yell, you're probably scaring away a lot of great people just by the nature of the environment that you're giving them. So maybe that's an opportunity for an operator to recognize it. Maybe they don't need to be the point person on hiring or firing or reprimands or whatever that might look like. We do believe very strongly that our reputation will continue to grow and that I really believe that providing opportunities for young people in our business is almost the most fulfilling thing that we can do. When I see young people come in, these young guys and girls who are wide-eyed, they have no idea what to experience, or they've come from an environment where potentially it wasn't an ideal, and they come to us and I see their progression, I see their growth, I see how much they enjoy coming to work. That is deeply rewarding as an operator to have people come up and say, I really like being here, or to see a shop that culturally may have had some challenges, perhaps. And then to see that you see them get through the storm and it starts with maybe one key person, and then the gravity pulls another one in, then you get another one. And the next thing you know, you turn around a year or two years later, and it's this well-oiled machine with really complimentary people who actually care about each other. They're all pulling in the same direction, they're highly independent, and you think back, wow, it was not like this two years ago. And those environments where young people feel like they can come into those environments and succeed, that is the key. You have to recognize that what we do is very hard. That's very urgent, it's very challenging. There's a lot of stress, but that five or six today could be a nine or ten tomorrow if you just engage them and put them on the right path.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

I love that. Just giving the young people that good environment to learn and to grow is amazing. Sure. Brad, we have kind of an interesting question coming up here about the Bermuda Triangle Panel. You were on the panel at Carstar Rise. And if I understand this correctly, it's this relationship between shops, insurers, and OEMs. And this is a triangle that causes a lot of frustration for shop owners. So, what's your take on how we move toward better alignment and what can the individual shop owner do right now to help improve those relationships in the Bermuda Triangle?

SPEAKER_00 31:31

The Bermuda Triangle, okay. First off, the reason we called the Bermuda Triangle was that we had the three major stakeholders from the industry. So we have the OEM providers, collision providers, and then the insurance providers as well. Clearly, three very different philosophies on how to manage their businesses. The challenge sometimes becomes that the collision industry, unfortunately, because we're so adept at managing change and just finding ways to be successful. We have an incredibly resilient amount of people that do outstanding things with very limited resources in our industry. We've become a victim of our own success in many ways that other stakeholders might offload their challenges to us and say, Well, hey, effectively, don't worry, the body shops uh they'll adapt and everything will work out, which can be true, but it's certainly not a fair way to run a multi-stakeholder truly engaged environment. So when we talk about our other stakeholders, obviously we're very aware of the challenges of our two other major players in the market. So we got the OEMs, and their major focus, obviously, is on making sure the car is fixed properly. That's not to say that's not other people's concern, but that's their, you know, is it fixed to OEM standards pre-accident conditions? It's very important to them. Brand protection, we also understand that on the collision side, that's part of what we do. And then we've got the insurance stakeholders who face very serious cost restraints. We are aware of that. And their environment is very challenging too. It's highly competitive. And brand protection. So it's often on the collision shops to kind of find a way to make all of these differing philosophies into one happy customer. We're almost often the only stakeholder in the repair process that actually looks our mutual customers right in the eye. We deal with them in real time, we take their phone calls in real time, we have relationships with them face to face, which may not necessarily be the case for other stakeholders. So for us as an industry, it's really important that the insurance providers and the OEM providers, manufacturers recognize that simply saying that our goal is a safe and proper repair, it's not enough anymore. It has to be a safe and profitable repair. There has to be a way for shop owners to continue to push back. The margin compression right now is a challenge. Fuel costs, obviously, are a challenge, which only puts more time and energy into other aspects of what we're trying to do. Cost compression on parts and materials. My hope is that as we continue to engage the insurers and the manufacturers, we can all get to the point where we need to recognize it's not enough to just have a safe repair, it has to be profitable as well, so that we can have a sustainable business model where we can continue to provide outstanding service and fix cars properly. And if shops aren't able to do that, the OEM manufacturers and the insurance partners will only continue to see the downside to that, a way to come to terms. The fact that we have to understand what the end result is. The end result is a safe and profitable repair, uh, that we work within the kind of the confines of the game that we're playing. Sometimes that's going to require some level of change, the philosophies of our stakeholders. It's not black and white anymore. It has to be some gray area, it has to be some outliers, there has to be some opportunity for some discussion case by case. It's not black and white. We need to be able to live in the real moment, which is if we, the provider, are unable to continue to reinvest in tooling and training and infrastructure, we can't provide those safe repairs to the OEM. And we certainly can't continue to provide a service to the insurers. And I think we all need each other perhaps even more than we would like to admit sometimes. But that's the goal is that personally, I would love to see industry continue to push back on this narrative that the body shops can just adapt and take on more of this challenge. It's really got to be three stakeholders all engaged, all recognizing we all face our own challenges. But the end result needs to be an insured or customer who feels the car was fixed properly and there's some brand protection there. We recognize that, but also that the shop is able to do it in a way that is sustainable for the business model.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

What a fascinating answer. I don't know that I had ever thought about that Bermuda triangle, but it's so true. You're juggling these different things.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

And Daniel, don't get me wrong here. The reality is that there are wonderful people across the spectrum of all those stakeholders. It's not but by no means am I saying that it's us against them. It's not that it is, it has to be almost mutually assured destruction. If we can't get to really identify how we all continue to pay our bills and to train our people and to fix cars properly and to work around the technological complexity of what we're trying to achieve every day, we all need to be an a really honest partner in this. There's great people in every part of the stakeholders. Sometimes we just need to recognize like, hey, it's not us against them, it's us against a damaged vehicle and not a happy insured or whatever that might be.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

Agreed. No, that's a great way to put that. Let's look forward a little bit. Looking at the next three to five years for the collision industry, what are you most excited about? And then the flip side of that, what keeps you up at night?

SPEAKER_00 36:49

I am very excited to see the new generation coming in to help us take our business to the next level. Certainly, artificial intelligence is a big word these days. Finding ways to make our people more efficient is the driver of that. AI has become perhaps a bit of a dirty word, uh, and we look at it as this kind of uh massive charging rhinoceros that's coming and nobody can get out of the way. The reality is there are things that can be done to make your people better using artificial intelligence. I would recommend that you either find ways to encourage your people to look into that or do it yourself. The intent is not to remove people from the process. I never talk about AI as in that's going to reduce our staff. The intent is that we have been forced as an industry to add people. The answer is not always adding people. Sometimes it's simplifying process, and sometimes it's finding ways to take a third or fourth year junior estimator and get him information and knowledge to bridge the gap to where that 20 or 30 year estimator repair planner might be. That's where I see a lot of this artificial intelligence being a huge benefit in manufacturing and remanufacturing collision industries. Um, find those high-value, low skill items that take a ton of time from your team and automate them as best you can. And let the people do the people stuff, which is customer service, decision making, production decisions, those sorts of things. AI is not a dirty word. It is evolving, it is a great tool for those people that recognize that it's like anything you get out of it what you generally put into it. That's where I'm most excited is to see how we can take how we can give our people back some of that opportunity in their day. Let them do the things that they're really good at. Obviously, technicians as well, there's a benefit to them: access to information, making sure we're fixing cars properly, real-time information in the moment, identifying uh operations so we're not missing anything. Those are the low-hanging fruits. But really, what I would like to see over the next three to five years is ways that we can fast track people so that they can be better at their jobs, more efficient at their jobs, without necessarily the burdens of some of the day-to-day tasks that quite frankly could be much better handled by computers in some cases. And then the second set, what keeps me up at night? I guess it depends on what night it is. But the the reality is for me, the pace at which we are evolving as an industry does keep me up at night, making sure that we have provided our people the right tools and training to that we are fixing these cars properly, and we believe we are, but it's a complex industry. It's challenging what we do year to year, model to model. There's great variation in what we do. I want to make sure that our people are able to fix these cars properly. The other thing I think is just generally the landscape of what we're trying to navigate now is much different than it was 10, 15, even five years ago. Are you making proactive relationships with people that will benefit your business? And I say this in the sense that people will still continue to do business with people that they like and that they feel have shared values. Commit to making strong relationships with people who selfishly, yes, you want to have strong relationships with dealers who can drive work, strong relationships with insurance companies who can drive work. But the reality is that if you have a better communication system with some of these stakeholders, a lot of the things that become major problems can be headed off when they're minor problems. And so that keeps me up at night thinking, are we doing, are we engaging with the people that are most involved with our business? Are we taking the time to build relationships before we go into a market, perhaps? Or just because your neighbor sees a lot of a certain type of vehicle doesn't mean you can't potentially also get a piece of that too. Sitting back and just waiting for cars to show up. That's not the way to do things. Keeping my shops full of cars keeps me up at night. Being responsible for the people that are doing the job keeps me up at night. Yeah, there's so many things in this business that can all the shower thoughts, right? You drive in your car and you're like, what am I gonna do about that? But mostly I think right now it's about making sure that we find ways to continue to increase volume or at least maintain volume. And a lot of that comes down to having strong relationships, and that does take some time and some effort.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Very thoughtful answer, Brad. We are in a very fast changing industry, the collision industry. It is something to be excited about and it's something to stay up at night about. Absolutely. There's always two sides to this. Brad, we have one closing question that we end the body shop leaders with, and it is this What does being a body shop leader mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Being a body shop leader means recognizing that you come second. You need to put your people first, you need to be hyper aware of the challenges that your people are facing, and it needs to be it means to you have to be humble enough to recognize if things aren't going well, you're gonna get all the blame and to protect your people from those challenges. And when things are going well, you get none of the recognition, rightfully, because uh it's the teams that are doing the work, staying humble in times of crisis and not getting too excited when things are going well. That's what being a body shop leader is.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

I love that answer. That is amazing. Remembering that you are second. Boy, that is an outstanding answer. That is something that all of us can live by, whether or not we're a body shop leader. I like that a lot. Brad, this has been an incredible conversation from scaling a family shop into 14 locations, spanning two provinces, championing diversity, navigating insurers, OEM relationships. You've given our listeners a master class in what it's like to lead a body shop. I thank you. Appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

I'm grateful for your time and it was a pleasure to be on with you. And like I said, I'm very passionate about this industry. I'm grateful for what it's provided me. It's very rewarding. It's obviously very challenging as well. But I'm thankful that you took the time to chat with me and I hope I brought some value.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

You 100% did. So, for everyone listening, if this episode brought you value, make sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and be sure to share this with a fellow shop owner who needs to hear this. Until next time, let's keep leading, keep growing, and we'll catch you on the next episode.