Here at FenderBender we try not to give information in terms of what shop owners should or shouldn’t do. I’ve learned a thing or two about collision repair, but the lot of you have forgotten more about this industry than I’ll ever know. I deal with words, not wrenches.
If you were able to be dropped into a shop across the country and find out what they were doing differently than you, you’d probably be happy to take in that info. But probably not all of that information would be relevant to your shop. That shop has its own unique market that might be radically different from yours. However, maybe there’s one little strategy you could pick up. Or maybe there’s one little strategy that doesn’t fit but that makes you think of something else. Carrying that information back to your shop instantly would be like magic.
At its best, I like to think of FenderBender as your teleportation device into those other shops. It’s a marketplace of ideas, some that may not apply but a majority that at least get you thinking. I think this issue is particularly geared toward that goal.
Every shop today is facing the same challenge and there is no singular solution. But shop owners are continuing to innovate and do what they can to do right by their customers and their employees. In this month’s feature story you’ll read about what shops are doing to cope with the technician shortage, but from a different perspective. They’re asking what can they do to be a place technicians want to work at in the first place.
We’re also looking at what shops can offer to a customer base that has changed rapidly. Customers today are used to instant results thanks to online retailers. Body shops will never offer instant door-to-door repairs, but there are some ways to bridge the gap of customer expectations.
Whether or not you adopt these strategies is up to you. We’ll be back next month with more windows into more shops. Thank you for your continued support of FenderBender.
