Shop Stack Breakdown: Cliff’s Body Repair in Scotia, N.Y.

Ben Bowman bought Cliff’s Body Repair about two years ago, taking over a shop that has been operating in Scotia, New York since the 1970s. He came into it from the dealership side of the industry, most recently spending around a decade as a collision director at a dealership before deciding to buy an independent shop of his own.

Bowman said the shop maintains a couple of DRP relationships, but the majority of its business is word-of-mouth and referral-based. Cliff’s Body Repair operates as a single location with 12 employees and holds certifications with General Motors, Genesis, and Infiniti, among others.

Bowman said those certifications have had little influence on his equipment decisions. He came from a background working with Mercedes, BMW, Tesla, and Lucid at his previous shop, and said that experience already set his equipment standards higher than what his current certifications require.

"The equipment that I wanted to purchase was already there. I just tweaked it, so to speak, to what I was looking to do," Bowman said. "It's more spec based than ... like an Audi program that has very specific disc welder, and the specs for the equipment I purchased was already exceeding or meeting that."

THE STACK

Estimating and Management

Nexsyis is the center of gravity for nearly everything at Cliff’s Body Repair. Customer communication, payments, accounting, and CRM all run through the platform.

"The idea behind it is that it helps simplify communication between systems when you have kind of one centralized area,” Bowman said.

Most parts orders also route through Nexsyis. Bowman said Collision Link comes into play specifically for price-matching, most often when an insurer pays for an aftermarket part and the shop works to secure the OEM part at a comparable cost.

"We really use Collision Link just to try to minimize customer out-of-pockets while still getting OEM parts," Bowman said.

Communications and workflow

Bowman said the shop has the ability to automate customer text updates through Nexsyis but has turned that feature off.

"We find that our selling feature, our competitive advantage, is a personal connection," Bowman said. "We want to use the technology to help speed up building that relationship, not necessarily replacing that relationship."

The shop previously split customer communication between Body Shop Booster and CCC before consolidating onto Nexsyis, a move Bowman said came out of frustration with tracking conversations across separate systems.

"It became a telephone game where if a customer stopped in or talked to someone, it was really hard to get on the same page of what we told the customer or how they communicated," Bowman said. "We just couldn't read that log as easily."

Internal communication runs without a dedicated platform. The shop holds two daily meetings with technicians to review production status and otherwise relies on phone extensions or walking the floor, something Bowman attributes to the shop's size.

Scheduling and capacity planning also run through Nexsyis, based on car count rather than the initial estimate, which Bowman said is too unreliable a number to schedule against.

Repair and production technology

Bowman said AirPro stood out from other mobile scanning providers on the basis of who the company was building for.

"The biggest thing with AirPro and why we went with them was we felt like they understood who their customer was more than every other mobile scanning solution," Bowman said. "They've been very responsive as far as turnaround times for their remote scanning, and they don't have a lot of holes in their coverage, so it just becomes more consistent."

That relationship extends into calibration work. Dynamic calibrations and programming are handled in-house through AirPro, while static calibrations requiring targets are sublet.

For measuring, Bowman chose Celette over other major systems in the category, largely for space reasons.

"Being a smaller shop, ... we need our bays to be able to serve multiple functions," Bowman said. "With Car-O-Liner and Chief, which are kind of the only other two major players, you really need a dedicated bench with that measuring system to make it work appropriately."

He said Celette's setup is easier to move in and out of storage than a fixed-bench alternative. "It's a little bit more user-friendly, in my opinion,” he said.

On paint, Bowman credited the shop's relationship with its local Sherwin-Williams jobber for the decision to stay with the brand.

"I think the local jobber is really fantastic and knows his stuff," Bowman said. "They have pretty good color match, and you know, various other things... They've been really good to us."

What technology could you not live without?

Bowman pointed to Nexsyis, saying the shop's quality control checklists and standard operating procedures are built directly around it.

Asked how he evaluates new technology before bringing it in, Bowman described a deliberately skeptical approach shaped by what he sees as an oversaturated market of tools promising to simplify shop operations.

"How do we incorporate this into our existing systems, will this actually improve our workflow, or just create another checklist we need to do? And what problem does it solve?" Bowman said. "We've been trying to really eliminate as much unneeded technology and kind of just focus on the ones we have and better utilizing them."

He said he remains open to being proven wrong about specific tools but stays wary of chasing new features for their own sake. "I'm trying not to buy the excitement of it all," he said.

Want to see your shop's setup featured in Shop Stack Breakdown? Every edition profiles a collision repair shop and the technology behind its operation. Fill out our intake form and we will be in touch.