Bill Park is a former multi-shop owner and founder of Crunchit Financial Services, a company dedicated to helping collision repair businesses gain the financial insights they need to succeed. He learned firsthand how a lack of good financial data can hold an operator back.
Park appeared on a recent episode of The Collision Vision podcast, driven by Autobody News and hosted by Cole Strandberg, to explain why better financial visibility is the foundation for smarter operations, sustainable growth, and better decision making.
Park founded his first shop after graduating from college. Over 30 years, he owned a total of 13 shops, selling four separate times. His last sale was two shops in Colorado in November 2024.
In the early years of ownership, Park said he struggled to keep up with paperwork, but he felt like he couldn’t afford to hire someone else to handle that for him. He realized that every month, “I was just leaving money on the table.”
Then he sold a boat to a CPA who asked Park to teach him how to use the boat. In return, the CPA taught Park about accounting.
Even so, Park continued to struggle. “Maybe it's the hard headedness,” he said. “Maybe it's that I want to control a lot of things and do it myself, save money. But at the end of the day, I really wasn't saving much money.”
Finally, his business grew to the point he had no choice but to hire people to handle the financials.
“That's when I really started to realize that if we have a system for fixing cars, we need to have a financial system,” Park said. “I started working on developing that financial system, and it's paid off over the last couple of decades.”
He founded Crunchit Financial Services about a year before selling his last shops, in October 2023.
Crunchit Financial Services
Park said Crunchit’s customers come to him because they’re frustrated with tax preparations, or want to join a Twenty Group that requires clean financials to join.
Park said his company provides “a runway for perfect financials,” with full-service bookkeeping, tax advisory and CFO-level services specifically for body shops.
Crunchit also offers “a la carte” solutions so shop owners can clean up their financials at their own pace.
“This is a journey to get there. It's work, it's a real change of behavior. It's a mindset change,” Park said. “You have to equally be as good at your financial system as you are at fixing cars.”
Park gave an example of the benefits of integrating Crunchit’s services to gain greater oversight of a body shop’s financials.
When he still owned the Colorado shops, there was a large hailstorm. One of the shop’s contracted fleet customers had 155 Ram pickups that needed new hoods. Park said Crunchit was able to run the numbers to see how buying all those hoods would affect the shop’s cash flow over the next six months. When they knew they were in a position to do so, he bought the hoods and had all of the customer’s trucks fixed in six weeks.
“If I didn't have that intelligence around the finances, I could have really put my company at risk,” Park said. “I could have taken a gamble, which most entrepreneurs do. And I've done that many times before, and I've been sitting there wondering, how am I going to pay my bills?
“We don't wonder anymore. We don't make decisions that we can't afford to make because we know exactly how that's going to happen,” he said.
Private equity firms run the same way, he said, allowing them to map out five- to seven-year runways.
“If you don't have that level of financial forecasting in auditing and management, good luck with that,” Park said.
Improving Operational Efficiency
“It goes down to modeling,” Park said, and not just for potential growth, like figuring out if the finances are in place to open a second shop, but also for day-to-day operations.
A shop owner who has CCC ONE and QuickBooks synced should do daily transaction reviews to make sure the numbers are going in the right accounting charts.
“Your credit memos, your receipts, your invoices are all related, non-related, reoccurring, everything is reconciled daily,” he said. “That's the key.”
Waiting to do so every three weeks, for instance, just creates stress for staff, Park said. “I don't remember what I did three weeks ago. I know we got the part. I can't find the invoice. I’ve got to call the vendor. The vendor doesn't call me back. You try to email somebody, it's five days to get some piece of document. That is a huge disruption in the business.”
Modeling is also helpful in setting goals — and figuring out how to achieve them.
A shop owner could set a goal to increase gross profit from 39% to 43%. Modeling would help lay out the steps to get there, one quarter at a time, by analyzing factors like parts and paint material profitability, labor or subletting services versus bringing them in-house.
“I think every shop out there could do a 4% increase in gross profit, if they just did that,” Park said.
Park said he doesn’t think MSOs are “thoughtful enough around what their people can actually control at the center level, and then giving them the tools and training to actually be effective at it.”
Owners of one to five shops have an advantage in that regard, he said. The most shops he owned at once was five, and he was able to track and concentrate on what the general managers could control.
“If they couldn't control it, I didn't measure it,” Park said.
Preparing Your Financials for Growth
Shop owners looking to expand “need to have perfect financials,” Park said — meaning at year-end, they should be able to close their books within 30 days, and have plans in place for taxes and the coming year’s capital allocations.
“If they're not at that level, then they're not ready to grow,” Park said.
Then they should use their financials to model that projected growth, to look at downside risk and if they would be able to weather a 25% to 30% drawdown, which requires cash reserves or a credit line.
KPIs Worth Monitoring
Work in progress (WIP) is “probably the most important thing,” Park said, because WIP drives scheduling, which drives speed.
“When you go into a restaurant and you sit down, what do you want to happen? What’s the first thing that you're looking for?” Park said.
“Someone to come help you,” Strandberg said.
“Yeah, and then to probably bring you a glass of water or something. Or you want a drink,” Park said. “So if you sit there and you haven't been asked that question or brought a glass of water within probably a minute, what is your level of service you feel you're going to get moving forward?”
In a body shop, that speed of service is dependent on scheduling properly based on WIP.
Financially, shop owners should keep a close eye on gross profit by revenue category, Park said, and make sure they understand their pay structures and incentives.
Park said a lot of owners get incentives wrong. Employees need to have a “clear line of sight through an incentive.”
For instance, flat rate technicians know if they do ‘X’ amount of work, they get ‘X’ amount of pay.
“It's very clear,” Park said, adding that flat rate is not necessarily always the best pay structure. “There's no cloudiness in there whatsoever.”
But an estimator might be on a compensation plan that depends on Customer Service Index (CSI) numbers that they can’t control, and “that's a deflator,” Park said.
“There needs to be a re-engineering of our roles in our industry, what they do, how we train them and how we pay them,” Park said.
First Steps Toward Understanding Your Financials
Crunchit helps shop owners “blueprint their financial system” the same way a car in need of repair is blueprinted, Park said. “End to end, do first principles review on how paper flows in their business, who does what, and then find out the gaps. Build that repair plan for your financial system.”
Crunchit does a comprehensive assessment of a shop’s financials, then aligns what the owner wants to track and how much control they have over those factors, he said. It then gives the owner a “road map” of how to reach their goals, and options to do so.
“If it takes you a year to implement it, no problem. And a year from now, you're going to be better,” Park said.
Shops already have the tools to start tracking KPIs, Park said, stressing the importance of syncing their estimating management system with their bookkeeping software. After that, it’s important to have an employee or manager in the shop “paying attention to every transaction, every day, and making sure it's put in the right place,” he said.
When those KPIs are being properly tracked, they can be used to improve the business, but most shop owners need somebody to help them with that, Park said.
Since most collision repair businesses aren’t large enough to warrant hiring a CFO to map out a strategy, it’s important to find an outside financial expert who has experience in the industry, Park said, who can “mentor them and be that sort of pseudo-CFO.”
“My advice to shop owners is stop thinking like you can't afford to do this, because you can't afford not to do this,” Park said.
Good business practices, clean financials and turning a profit should be the goal.
“You don't have to hide your money. The tax code favors profit,” Park said. “If you’re making over 250K profit, the likelihood of you having to pay any substantial taxes almost goes to zero, because there's so many strategies out there to keep your money.
“Now, you may not be able to actually use it right today, and that's another problem — we all want it today,” Park said. “Well, fine. If you want your cash today, then you're going to pay taxes on that. But if you can keep your lifestyle in check and you can plan 10, 20, 30 years out, you're going to be sitting really nicely and you're going to be thanking yourself and patting yourself on the back.”
Abby Andrews