How to build a sustainable shop of the future

Aug. 9, 2018

ATLANTA — “Success in business is multi-faceted, but it begins with a strong foundation to build upon. If you ignore building a portion of the foundation, chaos will reign,” Bruce King, founder of King Collision Centers in Massachusetts and Mentor for Elite Body Shop Solutions, shared in the opening of his course this morning, “Building the Sustainable Shop of the Future,” at the 2018 NACE Automechanika Show, the largest U.S. trade show dedicated to high-end technical and management-related training for automotive collision and service repair shops, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

Every successful collision repair shop has a solid foundation on which they model their processes in order to sustain and grow their business. If any cornerstone of that foundation is ignored or compromised, the whole business is at risk of collapsing. With over 45 years of collision repair experience, including shop ownership and succession planning, King helped attendees better understand the core pillars of their business.

King taught attendees the nuts and bolts of how to survive and prosper in the collision repair business now and into the future. In his engaging style, he showed attendees how to use Elite Body Shop Solution’s “5 Pillars of Success” that keeps shop leaders working on the things that truly matter for continued success. King explained the five pillars, which include:

Financial health — Keep an eye on the KPIs that matter for your business
Cultural health — Build a winning team with millennial employees
Customer sustainability — The customer experience may be today’s biggest opportunity—make sure your shop is
Process stability — How working on the business is often more important than working in it
Risk — The actions that are required to perform safe repairs and keep your business out of trouble