This summer’s Collision Industry Conference (CIC), held July 23 in Philadelphia, centered around the theme of total losses, as most of the committees presenting at the day-long meeting sought to address issues related to total losses from their specific angle.
The most passioned discussion of the day-long meeting, however, came during an afternoon open mic session and had nothing to do with total losses. One by one, about a dozen CIC attendees came to the microphone to challenge I-CAR’s leadership for what speakers said they perceive as the training organization’s failure to hear the voice of smaller independent collision repair businesses, including a lack of representation by single-shop businesses on the I-CAR Board of Directors.
Jill Tuggle.
Kansas shop owner Kena Dacus said she’d recently read that about 70% of U.S. shops are independent single-shop operators, so she was “super discouraged” when she learned recently not a single I-CAR board member owns or works for such a shop.
I-CAR reserves four seats on its 13-member board for collision repairers. One of the four was a single-location shop owner, who remains on the board, but his business was acquired by a larger chain earlier this year.
Jill Tuggle, executive director of the Auto Body Association of Texas, said as someone whose job is to represent independent shops and small MSOs, she disagreed with I-CAR’s decision that an association executive is not eligible to be nominated for a collision repairer seat on the board. That decision earlier this year — after the nomination of Aaron Schulenburg, executive director of the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS), was disqualified — led SCRS to send an open letter to the industry about its concerns about I-CAR’s governance.
California shop owner Todd Hesford and others, who said they were among more than 30 people who wrote a letter to I-CAR earlier this year about that topic, said they felt the “canned” response letter they received didn’t address their concerns.
Kyle Thompson, who became I-CAR CEO earlier this year, took responsibility for the response letter. He said he heard and appreciated the feedback CIC participants were voicing at the meeting, and he would take that back to the board.
Associations like SCRS, he said, usually have a variety of types of businesses as members, so there was concern that an executive director would be representing more than just collision repairers, when the I-CAR board already has prescribed representation from those other industry segments.
He also noted that I-CAR’s response letter invited alternative board nominations, but in the 30-day window for that, no single-shop owners were nominated.
“So I certainly understand that you want more representation, but you have to sign up to be represented,” Thompson said. “Nobody did.”
“On multiple occasions, I’ve made it very clear that I intended to run for the independent repair position as soon as I finished my term [as chairman of SCRS’ board] and the position became available,” Amber Alley of Barsotti’s Body & Fender in San Rafael, CA, said at CIC, after citing examples of her involvement with I-CAR over the years. “So when this seat came available and I was out of the country, I obviously feel very discouraged that I-CAR didn’t consider contacting me, and [after] receiving all of these letters, didn’t look to fill that seat with an independent repairer.”
A representative from a large MSO was the nominee for the board seat for which Schulenburg has been nominated.
“If you’re not getting any candidates [among] independent repairers, that should say more about the relationship that I-CAR has built with the independent repairers,” North Carolina shop owner Michael Bradshaw, chairman of SCRS’ Board of Directors, told Thompson.
Bradshaw said it was his signature on SCRS’ open letter to the industry, yet he did not even receive the response letter sent to others. He said he’s participated in I-CAR meetings in the past when I-CAR asked for feedback.
“’Why do we have the reputation that we have within the industry?’” Bradshaw said I-CAR representatives have asked at those meetings. “It's because you guys don’t listen. The fact that we sent that letter and nobody’s reached out to me should show everybody in the room how tone-deaf you guys have become to what the independent repairers need. And they do need you. They need you to be what you’re supposed to be, but you’re too busy catering to big money.”
Some of those raising concerns at CIC about I-CAR cited issues apart from the make-up of the Board of Directors, such as how it is prioritizing the work it does.
“The core mission of I-CAR is to educate people on how to fix cars properly, and I feel it’s been putting too much emphasis on all the peripheral stuff it’s been doing,” said Darrell Amberson, vice president of industry and OEM relations with Quality Collision Group. “As evidence of that, I would point out the fact that in recent years, I-CAR has added a lot of staff people, and virtually all of them are either admin or marketing people, and hardly anybody is technical. So I’d like to suggest I-CAR go through an exercise in reevaluating what it does, and reprioritizing its tasks.”
“I do greatly appreciate the feedback,” Thompson said at the conclusion of the discussion. “There’s clearly a sentiment that is very strong that we need to do better for the industry. That’ll be a focus. And we’ll come back with actions that we will take from the feedback that was provided through this process.”
John Yoswick