In a previous column, I highlighted how adding truck and fleet repairs has helped Jason and Dee Mignogna grow their business, The Collision Shoppe in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. Even during the early days of the pandemic, when there were fewer cars on the road, trucks were still out there and needing repairs.
There are some challenges with that type of work, Jason acknowledged when we talked recently. For most passenger vehicles, most if not all the information a shop needs to prepare an estimate is readily available in the estimating systems. That’s not so with truck repair, he said. There’s more work up front, chasing down part numbers and pricing, for example.
“The legwork is more intensive,” he said.
But a well-run collision repair business also can bring a lot of the same efficient practices – such as painting parts off the vehicle – to truck repair.
“We capture more truck business because we’re getting it done faster [than other shops],” Jason said. “We did a $14,000 job on a truck recently with one-day turnaround. We pre-painted a whole bunch of parts after mirror matching them to make sure we had everything we needed. We got it in at 7 a.m. and had it out at 5 p.m. on what normally might have been a week-long job. They basically only had a driver off for one day. You think those guys are going to call me whenever they have another truck down? Yeah.”
The Mignognas followed a similar process in adding advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) calibrations as they did in adding truck repair. Jason said he couldn’t resist the SEMA discount pricing on alignment and calibration equipment in 2019, even though he lacked the room in his existing space to put it. So as with truck repairs, he initially leased a small building to set up that equipment and begin to keep alignment and calibration work in-house that had previously been sublet out.
“We wanted to better manage our turn-around time, but the biggest thing was we wanted to make certain we were getting the work completed correctly,” Jason said. “When we asked some questions to the dealers, for example, we found they were sometimes giving us prices that didn’t include alignment because they didn’t know that it was a required part of it.”
Jason initially was doing all ADAS calibrations himself, so he would be able to train a technician.
“I spent a lot of time down there the first three months of last year,” he said. “Once I knew enough, I thought I was capable of training someone. In the first 15 months, we only had to send out two or three cars that we weren’t capable of doing.”
That’s not bad for a business that’s repairing 35 to 40 cars a week.
Just as with truck repair, The Collision Shoppe started small in terms of space for the calibration center, but is now shifting that work into a larger facility the company is building.
“It’s about 10 minutes away from our main shop, which works out well since we have to road-test everything,” Jason said. “It’s a 60’ by 80’ building, but designed for just three bays, including a second alignment machine, with lots of open floor space for calibrations.”
The design of the new facility is benefitting from the company’s experience in the leased building.
“That building had some windows that we had to curtain,” Jason told me, noting that their new building includes dimmable lighting. “Here, all our alignment racks are going to be flush-mounted, so as soon as a vehicle is aligned, we can lower the rack and do 360-degree calibrations without moving the car.”
But truck and fleet work, alignments and ADAS calibrations aren’t the end of the road for The Collision Shoppe. In my next column, I’ll share what’s next for the Mignognas as they work to keep more collision repair dollars in-house.
