“We take a lot of pride in the names of our collision centers,” said Mike. The locations Elite Group has acquired had great reputations in their communities before being bought by Elite Group, so they maintained their original names and thus their prestigious reputations, merely adding the Group brand name as support.
The group is able to see about 1000 cars per month and grosses in excess of 25 million per year. They have about 165 employees across all locations that work on vehicles for several insurance companies through DRPs.
“There are very few Insurance Carriers we aren’t aligned with,” said Mike, referring to Direct Repair Relationships.
Following in the footsteps of the original Cone Collision location, all of the locations acquired are large locations.
Cone Collision has remained the hub of the group’s locations, where they have a full Korean and Hispanic marketing team in order to reach out to those communities near their locations. Mike’s daughter, Megan, runs the marketing department for the group.
Being a family-oriented business, Mike’s two sons also work at the Fullerton location; Travis has been the General Manager there for about 5 years and Michael “Cole” is a Service Advisor who handles the GEICO insurance account.
Tim also owns two Ford dealerships, one being Central Ford of Los Angeles. The dealership is a few blocks away from Firestone Auto Body, so the group decided to buy Firestone in January of 2012 to service this dealership.
“We wanted a location to service that dealership and because of Firestone’s reputation we decided to acquire it,” said Mike.
Elite Group will keep Firestone under the same name that it has always operated in order to keep their existing, faithful clientele.
The location is quite large, like all of the other locations Elite Group has acquired, and is able to do about $400,000 in work each month with 22 employees.
“We really take a lot of interest in our employees,” said Mike. When Elite acquires a locations, they usually keep most everything about the business the same, due to their acquisition of well-established locations. This includes most of the staff. According to Mike, a lot of the employees at Cone Collision have been there since he began there 17 years ago.
“We take a lot of pride in having some of the best techs in the industry,” said Mike.
Elite Group also sends a lot of their employees to training, mostly through Cerritos College, a local junior college.
According to Mike, Elite Group’s employees have been very successful in those classes and they have been able to create some really good, new employees. The Elite Group’s employees also maintain their I-CAR Gold and Platinum statuses.
The Elite Group of Collision Centers’ mission is to satisfy 100 percent of their customers, 100 percent of the time. According to Mike, they achieve this goal by having the best employees working together with a common purpose.
Cone Collision Center
600 W. Commonwealth Ave.
Fullerton, CA. 92832
(714) 871-2545
www.elitegroupcc.com
