Grow Your Collision Repair MSO or Independent Shop by Increasing Efficiency with Accudraft LIVE
Caliber Collision, The Boyd Group, Crash Champions—we’ve all heard of the big three. But these are simply the outliers. The reality is there are over 800 MSOs across the United States, ranging from 2-9+ shops owned independently. In such a competitive industry, growth is crucial to survival. Shops can find success in one of two ways: continue to grow independently by focusing on under-served markets or repair niches; find a private equity (PE) firm to invest in and help scale your business.
Private Equity Backings or Stay Independent?
Of course, there are pros and cons to both roads to growth. Private equity investments come with great risks if growth fails, as they tend to walk away with a majority of their investment, while the company suffers asset loss. However, PEs can help to navigate consolidation, acquisition, and recapitalization, all leading to viable growth and expansion. Growing independently also comes with great risks, as shops and owners sometimes need to put up personal assets as collateral for loans. Although, remaining independent means having total control over decisions and expansion opportunities.
No matter which way your shop decides to take in its adventure to becoming an MSO, there is one common factor to success: strong leadership and management. Whether becoming backed by a PE or looking to secure a business loan, a solid bottom line, cash flow, and margins will need to be evaluated. Especially when it comes to expansion past 2-3 locations, these fundamentals will help to guide decision making to ensure the maximum amount of profitability.
How to Ensure Multiple Shop Success
While the collision industry is a traditional one, the days of bookkeeping by pen and paper are over. There are dozens of management software options out there that manage workflow, repair orders, inventory, repair programs, accounting, employee scheduling, and more. However, up until now there has been significant data missing from the big picture. For example, shop management software typically includes performance by RO, such as how long a type of job took from when the vehicle entered the shop to exited. But what about everything that happened during the actual job itself?
As the leading paint booth manufacturer, we are always looking for ways to support collision repair shops in their continued efforts for success. We saw this gap in body shop reporting and developed LIVE, the industry’s first real-time paint booth data software. Accudraft LIVE was built for multi-store owners and independent body shop owners, with the option to create a customized dashboard to report on only the metrics that are important to each individual shop.
How Does LIVE Scale MSOs?
Being a multi-store owner (MSO), looking at the bottom line and P&Ls is extremely important to success. Cost efficiencies from gas to electric to even the amount of paint being mixed per job can be the difference from opening another location or closing one up. Before LIVE, shop owners were only able to see the big picture. Now, they have access to how many times the booth is cycled, how many repair orders (ROs) have been completed, the length of a job from start to finish, and more—all broken down by location, employee, or paint booth. Not to mention the cost transparencies within every job to reveal the exact part in the job that’s running up a bill.
While LIVE does provide the nitty-gritty details, its customizable dashboard also helps to quickly look at the big picture. For example, how the shop in City A is performing compared to City B. And we don’t just mean how many jobs each shop is turning out—but the reason why. Is it one employee taking twice the amount of time than everyone else? Is the bake cycle in City A’s second booth costing way more in electric than its first booth? Whatever discrepancy is occurring, LIVE can help figure it out.
With this data, shop owners can make more informed decisions to help grow their MSO and continue to scale their business model. It all starts with LIVE—ask your local Accudraft representative about starting a subscription, or contact us directly online.