Here’s the scenario: Mr. Jones has his late model sedan towed to one of our locations after an accident. The estimated repair total is $18,000 – not an insignificant repair by any means
The job requires just about everything: unibody correction, weld-on parts, supplemental restraint work, suspension and other mechanical work including an alignment. A complete integral overhaul.
As the repair work winds down, we call Mr. Jones on Thursday afternoon and tell him his car will be completed by 4 p.m. the next afternoon.
“That’s great,” Mr. Jones says. “We’re leaving for the weekend tomorrow, and I didn’t really want to drive the rental car on vacation.”
So the next afternoon, Mr. Jones shows up and completes the paperwork, and he and his wife put their two young kids into the repaired vehicle. Out the shop’s driveway and a few turns later, the family heads up freeway on-ramp for I-95 and is soon driving at highway speeds ttoward South Carolina for their vacation.
I don’t know about you, but that whole scenario is something I think about every day. If you aren’t frightened when you think about the liability placed squarely on our shoulders as collision repairers – or if you aren’t thinking about it regularly – you probably should be. Every day, all of us are putting drivers and their passengers back into vehicles that they count on as having been repaired right. In the case of our company, that’s 1,300 vehicles every month, and many of those are the severe hits not unlike the one brought to us by Mr. Jones.
I think it’s important that we in the collision repair industry reguarly think about what that means for us. It’s a scenario I share with every new employee during our orientation, and explain that it’s a principle that must be applied to every repair.
Always thinking about our liability and the safety of that family forces us all to remember how important it is to do the right thing every single time. There’s no room for a margin of error. I use the analogy of the maternity ward at any hospital; is there some acceptable number of newborn babies the nurses or other hospital staff are allowed to drop? Of course not. The only acceptable outcome is zero defects.
For us that means if it takes 240 welds to put a side panel on properly, doing only 230 isn’t acceptable. That’s like leaving out multiple bolts. If fasteners need to be torqued, they need to be torqued; you can’t just use the airwrench and call it good. If something isn’t aligned properly, it needs to be fixed, not hidden through some adjustment of panels.
It’s essential to keep prompting your employees to consider how many of our customers are picking up their cars today and driving away toward home, work or a vacation, counting on that vehicle to drive, handle and respond as it was designed to do prior to the accident.
That thought is why we spend money on education and training. It’s why we invest in the technology and equipment and information services that ensure we can do things right. And it’s why we spend money on third-party verification that ensures we not only know what needs to be done, but are actually doing it.
If you’re reading this column, chance are good this is a topic you understand and think about regularly. But share it with your employees as a reminder that attention to every detail is important to the safety and well-being of your customers.
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