Virtually everything that touches consumers’ lives is assessed in dollar amounts. Your insurance policy is itemized in dollars (not pesos or chickens.) And you are billed in dollars for the services of your local plumber, gardener, mechanic, electrician, roofer, and every other service provider professional that you employ.
    

Even the insurance company’s own “re-inspector,” when critiquing his company’s insurer reps’ performance, figures it line by line in dollar figures, not in tenths of an hour!
    

The point is that professionals price their services in dollar figures: Could the reluctance of collision repairers to price their services in dollar figures therefore reflect a feeling deep down inside that collision repair “professionals” don’t really consider themselves “professional grade”? Or is the reluctance more a matter of being controlled by insurers, brainwashed into thinking they won’t be viewed as “partners’ with their so-called “insurer-partners”?
    

Interestingly, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, “Under the Uniform Partnership Act, a partnership is presumed to exist if the persons agree to share proportionally the business’s profits and losses (italics added).” Please do send me your DRP contracts with your insurer-partners that state that the insurer agrees to share proportionally in your business losses.

Inform customers and expect full payment   

Visualize actually being paid (and paid in full without resorting to fraudulent cost-shifting) for all your expenditures related to the true cost of repair - those costs that insurers typically refuse to pay - including hazardous waste disposal, full reasonable and necessary cost (plus markup) on towing and storage bills, crash parts, paint-related products, and materials needed in performing the repair, plus “time-out” storage charges accrued when insurers drag their feet on re-inspections, and many other such reasonable and necessary expenses related to the true costs of conducting the business of collision repair. We now (actually, once again) conduct our business in this manner. You can too.
     

In doing so, keep in mind that you must be totally honest and up-front with your customer in making them aware from the beginning of your negotiations with them that they (your customer, the vehicle owner) will be legally held responsible for any portion of their final bill for which their insurer refuses to reimburse them… prior to their taking possession of their vehicle.
    

To accomplish this, prior to our commencing repairs, our customers sign a form (tailored to legal requirements in our state), which states, among other things, that the vehicle owner understands that we will not release their vehicle until full and final payment is made to us.
    

If they want to collect the difference from the insurer for not fully indemnifying them according to the dictates of their policy, that’s between them and the insurer… and their state’s insurance commissioner, attorney general, Senators and Representatives, newspaper columnists, consumer interest programs like “60-Minutes” and “20-20”, and the like.
    

We’ve found that many customers actually relish chasing insurers for every penny due them (consumers are not stupid - they’re seeing through typical insurer scams, especially after we warn them what to beware of from their particular insurer and its reps.)
    

Others accept their out-of-pocket expenses of having a complete and safe repair as another cost for purchasing a cheap insurance policy, and/or a policy in which they have no local agent to hold accountable for recommending coverage that doesn’t fully make them “whole” again.

Dollar figures shouldn’t be a thing of the past

When we started our collision business over 30 years ago, all shops wrote their estimates in dollar figures. It was the logical way to estimate because shops knew from hands-on experience how long it actually took to repair or replace a quarter panel, fender, windshield, or whatever.
    

In many ways the advent of crash manuals has made the repair industry lazy, inordinately dependent on crash programs that have been incrementally manipulated to benefit insurer interests. You might consider it mind-boggling, but estimating and writing your final invoices in dollars is relatively simple.
    

You are the repair professional, and if you don’t presently have a solid grasp of how much money you need to be compensated to repair or replace, say, a certain fender, you, not the insurer’s college-bred buckaroo-with-laptop, have the means of coming up with the true cost of repair or replace that affords you enough wherewithal to actually remain in business. Of course, to determine this you’ll need to know your actual cost of repair per calendar hour that your shop doors are open.