When insurers ask what shops want from them, the answer is simple – collision repairers want to repair cars. They should stick to selling insurance. I don’t tell them how to do that. While some control may be necessary due to the lack of any universal collision repair guidelines, it is up to the OEMs in conjunction with the repairers to make those decisions. Allowing insurers to become involved is a conflict of interest.
    I can repair a vehicle faster, better and more cost effectively if they just let me do my job. Part of my contingency plan includes building relationships with those insurers that allow us the freedom to prove that we can run our shops better without them second guessing. These are the  insurers I recommend to my customers, and, at the same time, advising them on which companies to shy away from – turnabout is fair play.
    Insurers fail to recognize that they are part of the problem when they continue to throw more administrative tasks at us which adds to the cost of repairs. Just because there isn’t a line item for administration doesn’t mean that its free. We all need to find a way to charge for it or lose money. We waste hours reworking estimates to find profit.
    My shop had a DRP relationship with a company that sent me well over a million dollars a year in business, but in the end they never paid me. They always owed me between $85,000 and $120,000 past due by over ninety days. We would always get the run around every time we pressured them for payment. We would have to resend all of the files or look for an invoice from two months ago or they would try to negotiate the final bill two or three months down the road. When I finally added up the administrative hours and costs, the account was not worth having. After my concerns were brought to their attention and nothing changed, it was time to end the DRP relationship with them.
    This wasn’t my first departure from a DRP, so I knew better than to just call and announce that we were finished. First I determined the cost to maintain this particular account, ultimately deciding they were not worth keeping. Believe it or not, my business was better off without their one million dollars worth of gross sales.