More body shops are starting intentional, internal training — beyond bottom-line, required-for-entry tech skills, and skewing relational — so owners and operators can craft staff based on their visions, creating a collision center they want, and that their people want to join them in.
They’re finding quantifiable, measurable results, often involving more money; from better service, often involving enhancements on those hard technical skills; interacting with customers, vendors, and partners relationally; and skillfully using tools at hand (e.g., video) or coming soon (AI).
Meanwhile, more companies are offering the training, including newer players like RockEd, foundational collision groups like I-CAR, known industry names such as Square One Systems, and others. Excellence consultants find value in these growing training options done well.
How to live well in a niche
Training is like U2 crooning “With or Without You” — you can have too little … and you can have too much. Some might argue you can never have too much training, but as early tech innovators learned, at some point you have to ship. Choices must be made, often several. Why might you make them here?
Differentiation and niche positioning matter to both B2C and B2B operations. What if your shop became the nicest in town: the cleanest, most personable, with the best “bedside manner” and phone skills, employees who liked each other and their jobs, all without sacrificing technology or technical excellence? What if workers could learn vendor standards through a training app; stand-out with dealership partners, who are going away from in-house collision centers; or be that regional family-owned dealership body shop.
You can tie soft skills tied to hard metrics where you see the center you want to create, the vibe, the dynamic. You can choose a training modality to help get you there and actually measure results. The vision is yours: what kind of front-office, estimating, painting, or even detailing staff do you want?
Delivery methods now match today’s workforce — by gamification, for instance, in short, daily modules, tested and role-played, on workers’ smartphones and online. If these programs build customer-facing skills while strengthening team cohesion, even better.
The technology behind many programs also introduces AI awareness almost incidentally. By interacting with AI tools embedded in training, which is increasingly present in vocational schools as well, staff become functionally able to interact with artificial intelligence. And if it can all add artisanry to the bottom-line basics of technician technique…
Maybe then.
Micro-lessons and mindset triggers
“I wanted the opportunity to make our group different,” said Bill Demaree, directing fixed operations for Indiana auto dealer Tom Wood Group. Neither slouch nor stranger to trying new tech, he aimed to encourage and engage workers, especially younger ones, by signing on with a gamification, smartphone app-based training called RockEd.
Training is daily dosing of about 10 minutes a day tops, said Dan Dionne, RockEd vice president of sales. “Two guides, short quiz, AI practice, then go do it.”
Dionne contrasted it with two-hour online learning or two-day seminar. Those learnings could have slots in the collision shop’s overall training push, depending on roles and budget, and are markedly different. He used sports analogies — football skills, pre-game preparation, improving one’s bench press — to emphasize the benefits of consistent daily learning followed by immediate application.
“If you have in-person training, don’t stop, I’m here to help.” And yet, “If I’m on the phone, I can’t refer to the conference packet on phone skills,” Dionne said. “You have to bring it, day-to-day.”
Demaree did this micro-learning to “build a toolkit of customer care essentials” like phone skills, complaints or questions, securing appointments for the work, how to talk with people, transparency, and enhancing trust. An EV or ADAS training in this context, for instance, isn’t discussing eye-glazing technical specs with customers but sharing about safety.
“In our industry, often they’re thrown into something with ‘just take care of the customer.’”
He calls the micro-lessons “mindset triggers” and the first “instant training” he’s seen in 40 years.
The training targets four areas: sales, fixed ops, F&I, and leadership. After a 90-day trial against a year’s worth of baseline, Demaree saw enough for a LinkedIn post showing hard-metrics measuring of so-called soft skills.
Metrics get measured, get done, get results
And for more: an all-in bet on 2026.
Daily work gathers into weekly goals for operational teams, and Demaree gets the report. Last year, employees did about 7,000 hours of training on some 206,000 learning units, for instance. Certain sales areas saw an 11% boost on the baseline numbers.
Dionne reports similar numbers, some better from the Hendrick dealer group in Charlotte. RockEd also works with vendors, including WrenchWay and Hunter Engineering, incorporating things like technician onboarding and product interfaces into the app.
Fort Lauderdale-based RockEd was founded by executive chairman Marco Schnabl, who previously founded sales and marketing service company automotiveMastermind, which also works with RockEd.
RockEd has raised around $20 million, a spokesperson said, mainly from FM Capital and JM Family Enterprises, whose affiliate companies include a big Lexus dealership and a Toyota distributor in south Florida. PitchBook adds Automotive Ventures to the investor list. Tracxn and Crunchbase peg RockEd at Series A on an investing timeframe. RockEd develops software through a sister company in India.
The app monitors module completion and suggests further work where employees need more attention.
Desire for training — the polite term for “help me be better” — always tops Tom Wood employee surveys (like in your shop, right?) and Demaree reports high engagement with the first-thing morning ritual. “Highest accepted rate of anything we’ve rolled out,” he said.
“I say, ‘Hey, we’re doing training’ [and] I lose the room,” Dionne said. But say “‘professional and personal development coaching to do better and make money,’” and he could win elections.
Teams are using the tool.
Auto sales touches more areas than straight collision repair, of course, but RockEd tells Autobody News it’s adding materials to its collision collection under curriculum developer Chris Craig.
Collision industry companies adding new trainings
Square One Systems plans to add new training on this growing model early this year. It’s known for managing 20 Groups of owners and operators collaborating on challenges and best practices. Vice president Erin Solis said the new training flowed from work with them.
“We were in a 20 Group meeting,” said Solis, who asked members if their staff’s non-tech skills were all good. “They said, ‘Oh yes, we have a process, we have word-tracking, we have solid, internal training’” on areas like walk-ins, phone calls, capture rates, and other customer service basics.
So in the meeting, “I called their shops live, and watched their faces.”
These secret-shopping “ghost calls” found “no mention of certifications, asking what kind of vehicle we had, or getting phone numbers,” she said, “usually first asking ‘Who’s your insurance company’ — 2000s-era stuff … they lacked empathy and the personal touch.”
Shop owners realized something was wrong, and they didn’t have a process, or oversight and measurement of one that might’ve been in place, she said. “There’s nowhere for a brand-new person to go for basic training on terminology,” she said, or the “continuous coaching, checking up, connecting with that person, and continuing to invest in them,” for longer-tenured staff.
Entry-level workers leave. Someone trained gets promoted. Other tasks draw attention. Old habits return.
“This was born from needs our members asked about,” Solis said. She expects the new live, virtual training to come online in about a month. Square One has hired Ryan Ross to develop and deliver training, alongside a current staffer, Kristen Henry, Solis said.
I-CAR gears non-technical teaching to leadership, mentoring and specific roles, a spokesperson emailed. And Bud Center, directing technical products and curriculum development, emailed via the spokesperson that it offers “optional training that helps shops strengthen … people skills, [and] build communication [and] leadership.”
The group is also starting to deliver its traditional technical teaching in new ways, with virtual reality courses on EV and ADAS. As shops hire guys like this with platinum standing in all nine I-CAR areas, prepare them to talk to people, too.
Training trainers, owners owning
Matthew Di Francesco offers succession planning to owners through Johnston, Pa.’s High Lift Financial. He meets monthly with owners and business counselors in personal development, marketing, and other areas, in a Zoom gathering called Collision Cocktail Hour.
He and the other hosts knew the concept of the Mastermind groups for business growth and formed this one in collision repair. “You go to the conferences, the break-outs,” he said, “but then you go the cocktail hour. That’s where a lot of the inspiration for improvement comes from.”
Thirty to 50 owners gather to talk “right-to-appraisal, labor rates, anything in a shop” — except financials — “we might bring in a guest. Then it’s an open forum, a discussion on issues in our business.”
Only shop owners are invited; new registrants are screened.
This means you can look at a posse like this (and why not start one yourself, in an iron-sharpens-iron mode) as how your vision gets attention so it can guide the intentional, relational training you’re considering. Namely why are you doing this.
And you should, said Anthony Barbosa, a collision repair consultant in Florida who, in 28 years of industry work, has seen the value of such training. He spent two-thirds of that time with the JM Family enterprise that has invested in RockEd and had long-believed in “spending money for all their associates to have the proper training and tools,” including local trainers and Dale Carnegie classes.
“Pretty blessed for being able to do that,” Barbosa said.
At JM, he started out answering phones, then moved to estimating and other learnings before leaving as senior director for collision. He then worked for two consolidators and another dealership. Barbosa is now working with indie shops developing things like standard operating procedures in several roles for one client.
At one point in the journey, he took a dealer collision shop from $235,000 to $700,000 in monthly gross profit while tripling the location and technician count in a market also struggling with tech shortages.
“You spend 10 minutes a day with each associate, talking about family, job, whatever,” Barbosa said, so “they knew they were part of something bigger.” This daily effort, like micro-learning, improved morale and results, where most shops likely don’t even have an employee satisfaction index (ESI).
And don’t schedule it, just roam randomly. Even with three locations, he drove to each every day.
“A lot of my training was around servant leadership,” Barbosa said. “A collision center is running properly if I can step away.”
Attention to local trainers and leadership courses he mentions, alongside in-house mentoring and the soft skills regimens, will grow in collision repair, and for good reason.
According to Barbosa, “While operational KPIs often get the spotlight, the revenue impact of non-technical training and ‘soft skills’ is the untold story of dealership profitability.”
Preparing Shops for an AI-Enabled Future
AI dominated industry conversation over the past year, but non-technical training is moving to the forefront — and may prove even more foundational.
One way to view it is as a precursor to AI use. AI tools can fill pipelines, capture leads, and improve efficiency, but trained staff must be in place first to deliver results. Soft skills are part of this, but only one part. Soft skills simply means your people will learn to talk with customers, to listen to both customers and to each other, to field customer questions, to receive and respond to objections, and to learn to share your shop’s services and supply them.
They’ll learn, or likely depart, leaving you with teammates who’ve learned and want to know more.
Paul Hughes