Following up on his conversation with Israel Garcia of Merced Auto Body, Cole Strandberg convened a roundtable on The Collision Vision to dig further into quality and consistency in the refinish department. Joining him were regular panelists Sheryl Driggers of Collision Advice and Erin Solis of Square One Systems, along with Tony Larimer, senior inside sales and technical consultant at SATA USA Inc.
The conversation covered what actually drives consistency, where refinish problems typically originate, and how shops can start measuring and fixing variability starting the next morning.
Quality means repair correctness
Driggers opened by separating quality from subjectivity.
"So the first thing there is we have to define what we mean by quality, because that could be different definitions for different people, different collision centers," she said. "For me it starts with repair correctness. We're doing a safe and proper repair. Was the vehicle repaired according to the manufacturer guidelines every single time? That isn't subjective."
Key Takeaway: Shops chasing "quality" without a fixed definition are chasing a moving target. Repair correctness against OEM guidelines is a measurable standard; everything else is preference.
Consistency should not depend on star performers
Driggers argued shops shouldn't be built around a handful of exceptional technicians. "We shouldn't build organizations that depend on just exceptional individuals overcoming weak systems," she said. "We want exceptional technicians, but we want great processes in place so that we can execute consistently every single time."
Larimer agreed talent still matters, but only inside a working process: "As long as they have a process that's going to work, that wins."
Key Takeaway: A shop that can't survive one technician turning over is running on luck, not process. Systems need to be able to onboard new technicians and produce the same result.
Training only works if the whole team gets it
Solis pointed to a specific leadership habit at Merced worth replicating: spreading training access across the whole staff, not just ownership. "I love that not only are him and his partners taking the training, but they're allowing all of their employees access to the same training," she said. "If you have an owner that does all the training, the technicians lose out on it. But if you have just one technician that gets to do it all, all the other technicians lose out on it."
Driggers backed this with data from an industry training study that found 91% of technicians very satisfied with their training also reported being satisfied with their careers, compared to just 33% among technicians dissatisfied with their training.
Key Takeaway: Training that reaches one person in the shop, even the owner, doesn't build a culture. The data suggests training satisfaction and retention are directly linked.
Climate and mixing room conditions quietly wreck consistency
Larimer traced a large share of refinish variability back to shops that don't account for their own climate. "It can be as simple as shops that aren't set up for the climates they're in," he said, describing Minnesota's swings from "0% humidity and 30 below zero outside to 90% humid" seasonally. He gave a specific example involving viscosity: a mixing room that's cool in the morning and 95 degrees by afternoon after the booth has run all day, with painters still using the same reducer ratio regardless. "You don't need that solvent," he said.
Key Takeaway: A fixed mixing ratio is only correct at one temperature. Shops should check ambient conditions in the mixing room itself, not just the booth, before assuming the product is at fault.
Clean air is a shop-wide system, not a booth feature
Larimer said operators fixate on humidity in the airlines and overlook filtration. "What they completely forget is getting a filtration system that's going to eliminate all of the other contaminants, all the way down to vapor form with oil," he said.
He also flagged aging infrastructure as a hidden bottleneck: "Do we have black pipe that's been in a shop for 25 years and it's corroded inside to where it can't deliver enough air volume or clean air?"
Key Takeaway: Air quality problems don't stay contained to the booth. The same system feeds air tools throughout the shop, so a filtration or piping issue shows up as inconsistency in multiple departments at once.
Equipment pays off only when the team is trained on it
Larimer said the shops getting the most from their equipment are the ones using the training that comes with it. "We work a lot with shops through their distribution partners, and the ones that will attend the evening classes or daytime classes ... definitely have bigger success rates," he said. Shops that skip that step end up with expensive tools going unused: "It gets set aside on a shelf and they just spend a bunch of money on something they'll never use."
Key Takeaway: Before treating a piece of equipment as underperforming, confirm the team was actually trained on it. An untrained operator will get inconsistent results out of even top-tier equipment.
Rushing the process is where the hidden costs pile up
Larimer connected time pressure directly to failures: "That becomes when someone's just trying to hit 150 hours or 200 hours this week in the paint shop, and they take those shortcuts. They're going to see failures."
Driggers reframed the cost of getting it right the first time as a profitability question, not a competing priority: "I don't think quality and profitability really compete with each other. When we repair the vehicle correctly the first time, we eliminate waste, we reduce rework, we reduce interruptions and unnecessary decisions that are draining our team's energy."
Solis added data from a CIC post-repair inspection study she worked on: "The first thing that customers saw that made them bring it somewhere else was paint issues."
Key Takeaway: Paint issues are frequently the visible trigger that sends a customer to get a second opinion, which can turn into a total loss finding on rework. The hours saved by rushing rarely offset the cost of a redo.
Consistency needs accountability, not just culture
Asked whether leaders are to blame for inconsistency, Driggers rejected the framing but not the responsibility. "I don't necessarily love the word blame, but I believe it starts with leadership if we want to create consistency," she said.
She laid out the full sequence: right processes, a feedback loop, coaching, and then accountability. "Here's our processes, here's our standard, this is how we operate. There has to be that accountability. Otherwise, there's no standard."
Key Takeaway: Feedback loops and training get a shop most of the way there, but without an accountability step tied to a stated standard, consistency has no enforcement mechanism.
Start tomorrow morning
Asked what a shop should do first to improve consistency, the panel converged on the same answer: ask the technicians directly. "Tomorrow morning, go ask your technicians individually, one-on-one: what's one thing that creates inconsistency or frustration for you?" Driggers said. "And then go fix it."
Larimer's version of the same advice starts even simpler: "Keeping a clean atmosphere is probably the first thing that they could do... that's probably the easiest thing to do, but it's ignored so often."
Quality, across the conversation, kept coming back to the same idea: it isn't a single event or a fixed definition, but the accumulated result of process, training, environment, and leadership working together, and consistently checked.
