By John Yoswick
Ask any shop owner to name his or her three biggest challenges, and almost assuredly one of the three will revolve around maintaining an adequate labor force. Attracting and retaining qualified production employees has long been a challenge in this industry. More than 25 years ago, I-CAR created a foundation (now called the Collision Repair Education Foundation) with the sole purpose of addressing the technician shortage that was evident even back then, and few would say the situation has improved markedly over the past few decades.
Not many collision repair businesses have fully solved the situation, but some have found successful ways of better attracting, creating or retaining the staff they need. Here is what seven West Coast shops say they are doing.
Growing your own
To avoid being yet another collision-repair shop owner bemoaning the difficultly of finding qualified technicians, Troy Lindquist built a system within his shop to develop the technicians he needs.
“I’m not saying it’s perfected,” Lindquist of Premier Auto Body in Redmond, Ore., said of his version of an apprenticeship program. “There’s been many other things I’ve tried over the years that didn’t work. This one I’m pretty pleased with. And the guys are loving it.”
As a graduate of the Wyoming Tech collision-repair training program, Lindquist said he “loves the trade schools.” But he also now sees recent graduates coming out of such programs with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt.
“And then when you start off in a shop, you’re still at entry-level wages,” Lindquist said. “You’re making [a student loan payment that’s equivalent to] a mortgage payment every month, but you’re making $10 an hour. Here, with our program, you spend the time you would have been in school instead getting paid $10 an hour to learn a trade. As you become more productive, you actually will get raises over the course of that time.”
To create the program, Lindquist organized his employees into two body teams and one paint team, each led by one of his long-time technicians. Each team leader has a number of entry-level or mid-level employees working under his guidance. In all, the shop has 20 employees.
The team leaders each get paid based on the hours his team produces, and they help decide how the members of their team are compensated. The team leaders are responsible for training along with ensuring consistent output and quality for their team.
“We tell those apprentices it’s like they are going to college,” Lindquist said. “Some will finish in four years; some people will take five years. But they are being paid as they learn, and after that period of time, they will be at a level that they’re going to be able to make a good living at it.”
Lindquist said the program is a must because, like his own long-term employees, technicians don’t tend to leave other shops in his area.
“That doesn’t happen because all the shops here are good,” he said.
Hiring one of those experienced technician also carries the risk he or she won’t fit in with the culture of his shop, Lindquist said. So instead, he looks for potential apprentices among those who may have little or no experience in the industry but who arrive with the right attitude and work ethic.
“We find these awesome people at the gym, at the coffee stand, at Home Depot, wherever,” he said. “You can tell there’s something special about them.”
Lindquist said one such apprentice is well on his way to eventually becoming the leader of a third body team at the company. A paint-shop apprentice has progressed into becoming a second painter for the shop. Others, he said, have left the company after the training but have been able to move on to good jobs.
“It’s exciting,” Lindquist said. “You always hear the same thing from other shop owners: ‘We can’t find people.’ Well, they are right in front of you. You’re just not seeing them.”
The shop has similarly hired much of its office staff from customer service roles at local retailers.
“They know what it’s like to take care of a customer,” he said. “That’s the one thing that you can’t teach. And when they deal with an insurance company, they don’t think, ‘Oh, we’re not going to get paid for that.’ They don’t know that. They just know that we’re doing something, so why can’t we bill for it.”
One team, not ‘a league’
Byron Davis also has used a team-pay approach to help attract, grow and retain the technicians his shop needs, but he chose to place all production employees, in both the body and paint departments, on a single team.
“If we had two teams, we’d be a league,” Davis said. “We’re all on the same team here. Multiple teams just creates conflict.”
Davis, owner of Auto Body Specialties in Springfield, Ore., said the problem with commission pay plans is that they often dis-incentivize the most talented technicians.
“They get stuck with those giant hits — that you can’t make money on — just because they are the most skilled, while lower-skilled people are just whizzing through the boxsides and gravy jobs,” Davis said. “That’s never made sense to me.”
Instead, his shop of 20 employees pools all the labor hours the shop completes, and technicians are paid from that based on their skill set and clock hours worked.
“It helps stabilized everybody’s pay,” Davis said. “We’re always at about 160 percent efficiency. So while that one tech is working on a big hit, he’s benefitting from the other guys working on the lighter hits. It’s also not uncommon to see two or three people working on the same vehicle. That job with 40 or 50 labor hours can be in the paint shop in a day instead of sitting in one guy’s stall for three days.”
That’s also improved the shop’s cycle time, Davis said. Word about the benefits of the shop’s pay structure has become known in his market, he said.
“We actually have people wanting to work here as soon as we have an opening,” he said.
Touting the benefits
In just four years since Bret Bothwell bought his first body shop in Portland, Ore., he’s added five more, growing Central Auto Body to more than 75 employees.
“When we open a new location, we usually fill the shop up with people pretty fast,” Bothwell said. “I regularly hear from people who say, ‘When you have a job opening, I want to be there.’”
How has he accomplished that? Social media has been one key.
“We post videos on Facebook and YouTube listing reasons why you want to work for Central Auto Body,” Bothwell said.
He also hosts Saturday classes that give young people a chance to check out what the autobody trade is like.
“The biggest issue this industry has is the fact that kids today are more apt to get into computer stuff or the medical field,” Bothwell said. “There’s fewer and fewer wanting to do this type of work, that’s hands-on. One or two things have to happen to change that. The labor rate has to increase so we can offer more money to interest more people. But also I can’t be the only shop on Facebook saying I’m going to host a class on Saturday to try to get kids interested.”
Another piece of the solution Bothwell says he has found is making sure his company retains the good workers that it has attracted, taking employees (as well as key customers) to sporting events, for example.
“We also have pretty nice parties at Christmas and other times,” he said. “We try to keep morale up and keep them excited about the company’s growth. People really like being on a team that’s growing. They want to be somewhere things are happening.”
Starting from ground-up
Tom Fleming of Fleming’s Body & Paint in Salem, Ore., said he’s given up trying to hire experienced technicians.
“It’s hard to find them because so many of the full-blown experienced guys are retiring because they are tired of the trade,” Fleming said. “Also, when you hire someone with a lot of experience, you’re dealing with an ego battle, and I’m just not into that.”
Instead, he hires entry-level workers who start off washing cars so Fleming can see how they interact with the company’s eight employees.
“I tell them the most important thing at this shop is getting along,” Fleming said. “We’re a team. We’re a family here. And I want no arguing whatsoever. So if someone new fits in, he can learn the rest of the stuff. We’re taking guys from the ground-up and teaching them.”
That method helps build camaraderie among his employees, Fleming said, noting that they all participate in activities together outside of work, such as excursions to the sand dunes.
One of his employees has a friend who is an autobody instructor at a nearby community college, and Fleming said he is considering bringing some of the students in to work at the shop for several months while in school.
“We’ll help teach them, and we’ll have the pick of the litter,” Fleming said.
Building a culture
Like Fleming, Ben Ford is a believer in countering the technician shortage by creating a workplace culture that leads to less employee turn-over.
Ford manages the Vancouver Auto Group’s body shop in Washington state. Several of the shop’s technicians have been with the company for more than 25 years, and Ford, who himself first joined the company in 2001, said he’s only had to hire two new full-time employees in the first six years he spent as shop manager.
“We try to create an atmosphere that generally makes it enjoyable to be at work,” Ford said. “We all spend most of our lives at work. So I don’t want to be confrontational at work. I don’t want people yelling at each other. When we bring someone in to hire, we take more into account than just their abilities. I have all my guys talk to that person before they are hired. Then I ask them afterwards: Do you think that person is a good fit?”
He said he also instituted a rule a technician suggested when he became manager.
“In the morning, the first thing you say to someone is ‘Good morning,’” Ford said. “If you don’t, the person is going to call you on it. The point is to start the day with something other than, ‘I need you to do this,’ and immediately go right to work. Just take three seconds to say ‘good morning’ and ask about their weekend. I think that’s helped us create a better atmosphere.”
Offer use of the shop
Josh White of Priola Body Shop in California’s San Francisco Bay area said he’s particularly struck by the shortage of young, skilled workers in the industry because even fewer have any of the fabrication skills often needed at his shop, which does restoration work in addition to collision repair. That’s why even when he doesn’t have a job opening at his shop, he works to keep in touch with technicians he has come across with talent.
“I’ll let them come in and use the shop on the weekend, because a lot of shops won’t let these guys work on their own cars or anything like that,” he said. “I’ll do anything I can do to help anyone that’s good, who cares, who takes pride.”
Understanding personalities
Aaron Lofrano is a member of the third generation working in his family’s autobody business, F. Lofrano and Son in San Francisco. Part of his role at the business has been employee development.
Colorful charts on one wall of the company’s corporate offices show the results of personality testing all of his company’s employees undergo. Lofrano tries to balance each of the company’s five locations with the right mix of those who are dominant, analytical, multi-tasking, problem-solvers and detail-oriented. He said the process helps employees understand how best to lead or interact with one another based on each person’s strengths and personality type.
“We have a lot of extremely dedicated employees who have worked for us for a long time,” Lofrano said. “I think my average tenure is about eight years right now. And some of them travel a pretty good distance to get here. They know they’re not going to get sent home because we ran out of work. And our benefits package is pretty competitive in the market, and even competitive, from what I’ve researched, outside our industry.” •
John Yoswick, a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore., who has been writing about the automotive industry since 1988, is also the editor of the weekly CRASH Network (www.CrashNetwork.com). He can be contacted by email at john@CrashNetwork.com.
