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When William Penn gave Philadelphia its motto as the City of Brotherly Love, he wasn’t thinking about auto body shops. It was 1682 after all. But I don’t know of any other business in Philly that has embraced that motto to the degree that Nigro’s Auto Body has. Located at 939 Washington Ave, Nigro’s Auto Body has always felt the importance of giving back and fostering the community that surrounds them.

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This shop continuously proves its dedication to community by donating time, money and energy to improve the daily lives of their customers, neighbors and the city in general.

Aniello Nigro founded Nigro’s Auto Body in 1983 after working at several local shops and deciding to provide customers with the quality workmanship he had learned while an apprentice at his uncle’s shop in Florence, Italy. He adopted his own motto: “Old World Craftsmanship, New World Technology.” Aniello had an auto body shop at a smaller location for about six months before moving to his current location on Washington Avenue. His son and co-owner of the shop, Domenico Nigro, tries to follow the same code of standards and ethics as his father. His goal is not only to make his customers happy but also to provide them with knowledge about their automotive repairs, including a lifetime guarantee on the work done at his shop.

The other day I overheard a woman talking on her cell phone. I couldn’t help it. She was upset and yelling.

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“Try me, buddy,” she screamed into the phone. “I will Yelp you right out of business!”

Wow, I thought. ‘Yelp’ is now a verb (like ‘Google’), and obviously a part of some people’s daily language.

If you don’t know about Yelp, it’s a nationwide review site where people post comments about their experiences with particular businesses. It promotes itself with the tagline: Real People. Real Reviews. It’s easy to find at Yelp.com.

For many companies, including body shops, Yelp can boost a business with great reviews or damage their bottom lines with snarky comments and low ratings from unhappy customers. The problem is that those ‘unhappy customers’ might really be jealous competitors, terminated former employees, or a disgruntled ex-spouse or two.

Yelp is currently getting unfavorable reviews from a lot of body shops throughout the country due to their policies on editing the reviews that are posted. Some shops are suing the San Francisco startup or considering doing so. They allege that the website manipulates customer reviews while the company claims that their system is done by computers, not people with an agenda, such as Yelp advertising salespeople, for example.

Cross Island Collision, established in 1976 in Floral Park, New York, is a family-run business centrally located at the border between Queens and Nassau, making it convenient for customers to come and go with public transportation.

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George Haggerty, the father of current owner Brian Haggerty, founded Cross Island Collision which has now been in the same location for thirty-five years. George Haggerty owned several gas stations before he decided to go into the auto body business, and he opened his shop with only three employees.

What is most striking about Cross Island Collision is the longevity of the employees, which they credit to being treated like family. The  employee tenure ranges between ten and twenty years.

In addition to a respectful attitude to his workers, Haggerty believes strongly in the rententive power of training. Some shop owners seem to feel that there’s a danger in training people too well, thinking that’s leverage for the employee to seek another job. What if they leave? But Haggerty knows that’s the wrong attitude. What if you don’t train them, and they stay?

At the Laser World of Photonics 2011 trade fair held in Munich, Germany, May 23–26, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft scientists presented some amazing new applications for lasers and related automotive technologies.

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As any self-respecting tech geek knows, LASER stands for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” but only the geekiest know that self-lighting lasers are really optical oscillators, rather than amplifiers, and therefore the acronym should have been LOSER, for “light oscillation by stimulated emission of radiation.” It’s too late to change now.

Regardless, lasers have long since eclipsed the Buck Rogers image that brought them into the general consciousness in the late fifties. In a former life, I edited a well-known laser science textbook, so I have some familiarity with the concepts, but I was taken with the following discussion from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany on how indispensible laser technology has become in automotive manufacturing. It’s about to get more so.

What’s not so clear is how this now proven but still pending technology, which has just caught the eye of the OEMs, will affect car designs and repairability for shops in the future.

Earlier this year (Autobody News, February, 2011) I wrote a shop savings article (Credit Card Processing Fees—Dings, Dents, and Crashes at Your Bottom Line) for ABN readers warning about credit card host processing fees which could significantly ding their bottom lines. My February article pointed out that these fees can be very substantial for body shops.

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If you missed the article, you can read it along with my other columns in my column section www.autobodynews.com/columnists/danalevich-walter.html.

Now I would like to re-emphasize the importance of taking extreme caution with authorizing Credit Card hosting agreements and specifically their cancellation fees. A body shop owner contacted me to share his story involving a nightmarish experience pertaining to a cancellation fee he got sucked into compliments of his prior Merchant Credit Card processing Host.

This body shop owner read my ABN article and phoned me to express his frustration during the past five months as a result of his shop cancelling a merchant credit card host service. His shop had recently signed a service agreement, based on the credit card host’s friendly telemarketing sales pitch: “we will give you the lowest credit card processing fee rates on Earth.” Here’s what happened.

The shop’s bookkeeper was continuously aggravated by the credit card host’s customer service department. When she called with questions they were consistently tossed back and forth between service reps. None could provide adequate explanations of the reason for transaction fee deductions from their business checking account.

Pan American is a family-owned and operated independent collision repair facility with four locations throughout the Southern San Francisco Bay Area. President and owner Luis Alonso recently accepted Farmers Insurance Shop of the Year honors. They have been in operation since 1981, specializing in all types of collision repair and insurance work. They are also a Certified Mercedes Benz and Audi Repair Facility.

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Pan American believes in giving back to the community, and as an extension of that model the repair facility enlisted my help to provide extrication training for the local Fire Department.

Today’s vehicles are more complex than ever, and the fire departments are faced with difficult challenges when they respond to emergency calls involving trapped occupants resulting from a vehicle collision. Our goal is to help them be better prepared to deal with these challenges by providing hands on training. We teach safety and stabilization, hybrid vehicle precautions, how to deal with late model ultra-high strength steel, as well as six different extrication techniques. I’m proud to be part of this effort and I applaud Pan American for putting this event together.

In the Middle Ages, civilians didn’t have computers, television, radio, Pong, or even ping-pong. So what did they do for entertainment? One tradition was story-telling. The great thing about telling such tales was that you were forced to use your imagination. Although it’s important to note that you weren’t expected to believe everything that was being said.

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Fairy tales often have a happy ending and tell us about a world where anything is possible. The tale I’m about to tell you is about the “neutral information provider.”

This tale begins in the 1980s, around the time of the first electronic estimating system. For decades prior to the advent of electronic estimating, shop and insurers slaved away preparing handwritten estimates. Along came a brilliant man named Maximillion. He believed that there was a faster and more accurate way to prepare an estimate. He thought he could equally help body shops and insurance companies through the use of technology. Because this new idea would benefit both parties, he thought he would be able to sell this new product to two different customers. In fact, he could charge the same amount to each. It was the beginning of the now over-used term “win-win.” All he had to do was find a way to take the data from printed estimating books and put it in an electronic format.

APATHY – absence of passion, emotion, or excitement.

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I hate to say this, but this word seems best to describe the attitude of many parts managers I have spoken to. It’s not their fault, just their response to their daily input of negative information. Every day they get another dose of pressure, criticism, and doom. They worry about the dealership’s future, loss of customers, rising costs and falling profits. All this on top of the daily stress of filling orders, creates the natural response, “please just let me survive.” They exist on a short term basis, hour by hour, day by day, and month by month. This is how it has been for over three years, since the start of the last economic crash.

We have lost 15% of our dealerships. The weak have perished, and the strong have survived. Here is the good news… things seem to be getting better. According to the L.A. Times, we’ve had a 20% increase in auto sales so far this year! This is the start of a new growth cycle. Smart survivors are taking this opportunity to shed their fears and expand their operations. I say smart because this is the best time to get aggressive and go after new business. The survivors have less competition, and should see steadily increasing sales.

Sometimes I wonder if the things I find wrong with some cars are there for me to find out how ridiculous some people can be. I’ve got to question the thought process and not-so- brilliant ideas that some people have, just before total stupidity takes over. I gotta ask … “What were you thinking?”

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The other day I had a late 90’s GM in the shop. The owner had recently bought it from a small car lot, and had no idea of the history of the vehicle. It was one of those “great deals” that he couldn’t pass up. Why is it these great deals always have some sort of catch to them? Maybe it would be a good idea to have it checked out before you buy it. After looking at it, I might tell you to “pass it up.” Honestly, I’ll never understand why someone will buy a used car when they know nothing about it, or decide after they buy it to finally have it checked out … but they do.

This particular creation had some strange problems. It had a strange battery drain. At first glance all the instrument cluster warning lights, interior lights, and all the electrical functions seemed to be working correctly, but there was a drain strong enough to drain the battery in a day or so. Finding the solution was going to lead to an even bigger problem.

In my neighborhood, several shops are saying they’re having a “summer slump.” Maybe it’s the economy. Maybe people have gone on vacation ignoring needed repairs. With gas prices sky high people are driving less and having less accidents. Whatever the case, it can come down to less business for the moment. What can a shop owner do to survive this down time?

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Perhaps one bright spot is all of this is the fact that with less jobs to do, you may have more time to improve marketing and sales and maybe squeeze more profits out of the jobs you do get. This could be an ideal time to take a closer look at previous estimates (and estimators) to see if revenue and profits were slipping through the cracks. Today we have computer software to go through an estimate to find missed opportunities for revenue, but not every shop uses it, or takes the time to use it even if it’s available. Periodically a wise manager will review a few estimates to see how his or her estimators are doing. A summer slump can be a perfect time to get this done.