Implement structure in your administrative team

Aug. 1, 2017
One of the things I see varying most among collision repair businesses these days is how administrative staffs are structured.

One of the things I see varying most among collision repair businesses these days is how administrative staffs are structured. Some of that variation may be based on size – in a smaller business, the estimator might also be ordering parts and serving as the main point of contact for the customer, for example – but I see different models being used even among similar-sized companies.

We have a team system among our production employees, and we’ve gone that same route for our administrative staff as well. At our largest location, for example, we have two production teams. For each of those teams, we have a number of administrative staff that work ­primarily on a particular team’s jobs.

Out front in the office, for example, each team has a customer service representative (CSR) and an estimator. We fill these positions with staff who have great people skills. They are the team members who are primarily responsible for selling the customer on choosing our shop, and for interacting with those customers throughout the process.

With that in mind, the upfront estimators are more sales-oriented than technical. They are the people who “get the keys.” They can prepare a good estimate to hand the customer who wants or expect that. But their primary goal is to capture the job and communicate with the customer.

Once we have the car in the shop, we have what we call “technical” or “blueprint” estimators. They may or may not have the great people-skills of the upfront estimators, but they know how to fix a car, and they have the technical ability to identify everything that car will require, right down to every clip, bolt or other fastener. They are all about production. They don’t deal with customers at all.

Our goal is that they are only touching cars that generate revenue for us. They’re not writing estimates for the walk-in customer out price shopping. They’re generally not dealing with total losses; though that happens occasionally, our goal is to identify those vehicle before it gets to a technical estimator. We want them focused on vehicles that will be going through our production line.

Each technical estimator has a dedicated parts person. The technical estimators also tend to specialize by insurance company, in order to excel at learning how a particular company works.

Although the administrative staff may each tend to work primarily on the jobs for a particular production team, all of the administrative staff, across all of our shop locations, are combined into a single team. Starting about two years ago, the company’s single administrative team is all paid based on sales, gross profit and other factors within their control.

Some multi-location shops treat the administrative staff at each location as their own team. We’ve combined them into one team for a key reason. If admin staff at one location write the initial estimate and sells the job, for example, but we decide, for whatever reason, to move that car to another location for the actual repairs, we didn’t want the administrative staff at the original location to feel they aren’t seeing any of the commission and benefit of the work they did.

This single administrative team across all locations helps ensure that everyone’s goal is to do what’s best for the customer. I want my administrative staff fighting for just that – what’s best for the customer – not fighting to keep a job at their location, for example, because they see that as what’s best for their own paycheck. Now they don’t care where the car is fixed; they just care that our company fixes the car.

As I said, I see a lot of different systems out there right now for how shops structure their administrative staff. Our system is working well for us right now. Will it continue to do so? I don’t know. We may determine as we continue to grow that we need to adjust, just as we determined at one location that we needed to split into two production teams. But for now, our administrative structure is meeting the needs of our customers, the insurers we work with, and our company as a whole.

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