Every once in a while I find myself dwelling on the years I spent teaching at Kent State University. Sometimes an issue in the collision industry actually will remind me of an experience I had with some of my students. In this issue of ABRN we examine the factors that have created the current state of the industry – one where shops remain fractured and unwilling to work together while insurers remain resolute and united (despite their differences). How we got to this state reminds me of some of the life choices made by one particular student of mine whom I'll call Rich.
Rich showed up at my office door at the beginning of the fall 1994 semester. The reason for his visit: He was seeking some extra help due to a medical problem he suffered a year earlier. He was the victim of a freak accident on campus that left him in a long-term coma with some short-term memory issues. He had a serious problem retaining information, so he knew he'd struggle with the daily quizzes based on my reading assignments. He wondered if he could, instead, focus on the writing assignments. Since writing accounted for 90 percent of the grade, I agreed (the quizzes were mainly meant to ensure that students actually completed the course reading).
For the next four months Rich worked as hard as any student I'd ever encountered. He put in hours of extra time, worked with tutors at the end of the semester, passed the course with one of the relatively few A's I handed out.
He'll do fine at the university, I thought. I had complete confidence he'd finish his degree and probably accomplish anything else he set his mind to.
Two years later I ran into Rich at a baseball game. He said he had dropped out of college and gotten a job at the post office where his parents worked. He justified the decision by telling me, "What I make at the post office is as much as I'd ever make with my degree, so it was time to move on."
His reasoning was something I encounter every day. Many people, perhaps most, think of an education as simply a means to get a job. That thinking gets applied just as often to work. A job is simply a way to make a living – to buy a house, pay bills and raise a family. In both cases, I firmly believe, we cheat ourselves and those around us.
Getting an education is about far more than job training. It means experiencing new ideas and challenges; being the best, most fully rounded people we can. We should take the same approach to our jobs. Working should mean more than clocking in for a shift, then clocking out. We should be engaged with our industry, continually working to manage it ourselves.
When not enough of us do that, we end up with an industry like the one we have now – one we don't control, where just making a decent living becomes practically impossible. Because so many shops have adopted the short-term view of simply managing their own affairs, we've turned our industry (our lives and livelihoods) over to others, to insurers who did adopt a long-term approach involving unity.
Let's be honest and accept the fact that insurers didn't simply steal the industry from us. We ceded it to them by signing DRP contracts without fully understanding their economic impact on individual shops and the industry; by not working together to create a training model and standard operating procedures the industry could aspire and adhere to; by becoming more engaged in infighting than excellence, and/or simply succumbing to apathy and the hope that someone else would save us.
While none of these acts were wilfully negligent, together we helped create a situation where more than 30,000 shops and 100,000 repairers and other shop employees work in an industry run largely by a few hundred people in insurance industry boardrooms – people in suits doing their jobs, which amounts to crunching numbers and raising profits, acting on what's best for them, not us.
Taking back this industry won't happen overnight. What course should we take? Probably the obvious – training, working together, striving to be the best to take back the customer. While that may seem impossible, consider the alternative if we don't do something.
The post office probably can't hire us all.
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