Dick Strom

From across the country, collision repair professionals gathered for two intense days of real-life enlightenment, causing many to re-analyze the way they conduct business. The quality of information presented - and the enthusiasm of those presenting and receiving it - prompted requests for more of these seminars to be held at key locations across the country, to expand participation across the country.

The general consensus expressed that a very narrow window of opportunity, possibly as little as 18 months, remains for shops to take appropriate action to take back this industry from insurance company control before it is forever too late. Thanks to never-ending money-grabbing by certain insurers of shops' rightful profits, an ever- increasing number of shops are seeking means of shedding their ties to insurers and their one-sided DRP contracts, and returning to profitable independence. Open also to non-CCRE collision shop owners and managers, more joined the group at the seminar once they saw CCRE in action and understood its mission.

History review

"How Did We Get Here And Where Are We Going?" was the topic of CCRE president Tony Lombardozzi's seminar. Reasoning that collision repairers need to understand how this industry arrived at its present state before we can find our way out, Lombardozzi laid out the mostly forgotten, misunderstood, or not previously realized past of collision repair. Speaking from personal understanding of the means in which the past of the collision business was typically transacted before the advent of "estimating guides" and computers (often merely "lumping" of services together with a dollar figure at the bottom), Lombardozzi expressed how repairers knew how many dollars they needed to make a certain repair profitably, and so that's how they represented it to customers and insurers.

Then Glenn Mitchell, a 1950s Chrysler parts manager, desiring a better method of identifying specific parts numbers needed by the shops he served, came up with what was known as the Mitchell Manual. Initially, this manual only listed part numbers, to which labor times and other canned information was later added as insurers and repairers pushed for more information.

Though insurers had been meddling in repairer issues for years previously, many believe that insurer pressure and input over what is included and excluded in such crash manuals has played a major part in shops' losing control to insurers.

As repairers know, few repair/replacement time studies are actually being performed today (crash manual publishers admitting this fact by terming their product "only a guide"), and so the authenticity of most of their published times is, at best, questionable.

According to one person who knows firsthand how times in the early manuals were determined, if the phone wasn't ringing off the hook with angry repairers they considered their work a success. It would seem things haven't changed much.

In discussion it was mentioned that insurers were surprised at how readily many shops gave insurers internal documentation of their personal business affairs to curry insurer favor, opening the door to more and varied forms of insurer intrusion into shops' internal affairs, under the guise of "cost-containment." As this insurer intrusion compounded, a Consent Decree was imposed in 1963 by then Attorney General Robert Kennedy to strictly limit insurer activities against consumers and shops. But this was soon forgotten by shops and ignored by insurers as things quickly returned to insurer business-as-usual.

Shops able to remain in business in the future will be those which meet their obligations and the expectations of their true customer - the vehicle owners. The importance of proper documentation was heavily stressed, along with effective wording of useful forms each shop should have to establish the shop as the repair professional.