Imagine all the management issues in your own shop multiplied by eight and divide by yourself times a few, and you might have a sense of what Tom Holmes and his managers have to deal with on a daily basis. The Holmes management group might even relate to the title of the old TV show “Eight is enough,” but right now they’re making it work at their eight Southern California locations. They do so through tight management and well-structured proprietary electronic tools which give the shops adequate local autonomy but always provide potential for close oversight from the head office.

Company wide, Holmes fixes about 1,500 cars a month, of which 80% come through DRP relationships with 21st-century, Allstate, Autoclub, Farmers, Mercury, USAA, Allied/Nationwide and others. Together the shops gross $28 million and generally manage their own workloads, with an average repair invoice of $1,800. (Contrast this with the numbers from FOX Collision centers which grossed approximately the same amount from 18 shops.)

Holmes is based out of its flagship Pasadena store, a former truck dealership with a large showroom now converted to offices. At thirty thousand square feet, it’s one of the four or five largest shops in Southern California in terms of volume.

The eight shop enterprise began in a smaller Pasadena location in 1974, followed by relocation to the larger location at E. Colorado Blvd and expansion to Duarte (1989), Alhambra (currently doing about 80 cars a month, in a former small new car dealearship), Canoga Park (added in 1998, originally part of a Porsche-Audi dealership and remaining as a preferred provider for Audi and some Porsche), Santa Monica (about 120 cars a month), Riverside (BMW certified technicians, about 150 cars a month), El Segundo (70 cars a month), and Westlake Village (80 or 90 cars a month). Some of the acquired shops were functioning body shops, so Holmes acquired the existing equipment  as well.

With the exception of its Riverside location, which has BMW certified technicians, each Holmes shop carries its own load and manages its own customers. Occasionally, with the customer’s permission, a 5 or 6-series BMW with an aluminum front end will be transferred to the Riverside location for repair to take advantage of special tools, training, and higher end frame-repair technology, but generally shops manage their workload without transferring cars between shops.

Each shop has its own location manager and an office manager/file closer. They are accountable for the day-to-day operations of the shop, handling production and processing from start to finish. Estimating is all done locally.

Says Steve Morris Sr., the senior VP and COO for Holmes’ shops, “we do give the local location managers a lot of autonomy to the extent that they continue to work and operate within our guidelines and our process controls. We have some pretty stringent ways of doing business. We audit the processes and make sure they’re in compliance with those. We also have a proprietary management system created over a number of years. It helps us dial in to the shops to see what’s going on financially and with productivity.”

“Every activity from checking in a car to where it is in the shop is updated locally but someone at the corporate level can see at a moment’s notice what’s going on. We only have a small corporate shop, and to get around to all the shops, in LA traffic, would take a lot of time.

“Systems we use are primarily CCC and Mitchell, and ADP is required by one of the DRPs.”