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ANONYMOUS ESTIMATION
THE FUTURE IS NOW How this estimator shoulders disruption
BY ‘FORTY’, A PROGRESSIVE ESTIMATOR
You will be challenged — how the changes are accepted depends solely on your professionalism in this conversation
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hances are if you are reading this article you are experiencing daily struggles in three main areas of collision shop management. A lack of skilled staff, a lack of labour rate increase and the resistance to change from insurance ‘partners’ is slowly destroying this industry one retired tech at a time. I’ve been in this industry for my entire life and have always heard from my peers that, “someday there will be nobody skilled enough to fix the cars, what will the insurance companies do then?” paired with, “well if they don’t start paying higher rates, there will be no techs to hire and no shops to send their cars to.” Are these the problems of the future? I think the ‘future’ we have all been talking about isn’t the future anymore, I think it is here and now. The changes that need to be made are up to us, wouldn’t you agree? Challenge yourself with these questions and see if you disagree. 1. Are you having difficulty hiring technicians? 2. Are you having an issue getting paid for the operations that you need, paired with an
unwilling attitude to accept change from your insurance ‘partners?’ 3. Cost of doing business, OEM Certifications, OEM Repair Information. Are these costing the same as they have in the past, or are they all going up at exponential rates? 4. Are the increased costs of sustaining your business being fairly compensated by your insurance partners? Let’s be honest—we are all in the same industry and I most likely already know your answers to each one of the questions. We are each suffering the consequences of a tech shortage. We all struggle to get paid for the correct operations that we need to fix the car properly. I can’t count how many times someone has told me, “they just aren’t going to pay for that.” What can we do about it? The facts are that we are experiencing extreme changes in our industry and we all need to work diligently to solve the so-called ‘future’ problems that haunt us today. With the increased cost of purchasing a product follows with a respective inflation in cost. What happens now that you
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invest in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair cars to the certified level only to be told, “no, we do not pay for that.” Simply put, Progressive Estimating is the answer. Stop thinking that you will only be told “no.” Start asking for the operations required to fix the car. Start asking for ‘OEM Safe Repair Lookup.’ Start being the change that you want to see in the industry. Remember, you lose 100 percent of the dollars you don’t add to your estimate. Most importantly, progressively improve your craft.
Dollars left on the table I was recently told by an insurance partner that “some shops just want to be paid to turn the lights on” and “I can’t pay you to move the car to the next bay—some things are just included in the repairs.” This was his response after I proved an operation as not included by Audatex, but required to complete the repair. What was that operation? Setting up a welder to perform the repair. I couldn’t believe that Audatex does not include setting up your
