Here’s a quick question for you: What’s the biggest single check you write out of your business account most months? I’m betting it’s often the one to the paint jobber from which you buy your liquid and allied products. I know in a recent month for us that check was for about $75,000.
But if your business is like mine, you’re probably not doing a lot to maintain a really good handle on that significant business expense. It’s the biggest check, yet it’s the least-controlled or well-managed portion of our business.
Think about all the systems you have in place regarding parts. We manage parts like crazy. We bring them in, mirror-match them, put them on racks in systematic ways, all this stuff to manage parts. But in so many shops, there’s nowhere near the same management of paint and supplies.
The painter, for example, decides he’s almost out of clear, so he calls the vendor and orders one. They send over a $350 can of clear, with no verification that we don’t have another one sitting on the shelf.
Or the jobber comes and looks at your paint mixing bank and decides you need these 10 toners and some sandpaper and whatever else. A couple hours later, a truck shows up and drops the boxes of stuff on the shop floor for someone to put away, quite possibly without even checking it against the jobber invoice.
Keep in mind that if that’s how things work in your shop, you’re hardly alone. I’ve only discovered a few shops managing all of this well. As a whole, I think our industry, including my business, is lacking in our paint materials management and organization.
My local jobber was bought out earlier this year by one of the largest paint distributors in the country. Their representatives came to meet with me and asked what I’d like to see from them. I told them: I just wrote a $75,000 check for materials last month, and I had zero control over it. I would love to be part of a process that helps make that system better.
I can think of other industries that handle such things better. I was in a parts manufacturing business, for example, that had a wall of vending machines. Depending on what component employees were putting together, they would punch their code into one of the machines, and it would spit out all the supplies they needed for that project.
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As I said, I know there are a few shops managing all this fairly well. I read about a California shop where all paint and shop supplies are bar-coded and controlled in a single, managed location; technicians request what they need much as they would at a store. Each technician’s “purchases” are tracked.
But even then, there’s probably a better way, and I don’t see a readily available system I can implement within my business. How large an operation do you have to have, for example, before you can save enough money on paint and materials to cover the full-time salary of someone, like that California shop has, who is managing it?
Keep in mind that I’m not looking for more control and management over this stuff with an eye for getting anybody in trouble. I’m not all that concerned about theft or if one technician is using more body shop filler than another. It’s more about the fact that we have this significant expense every month, and we all should be looking for ways to get the most out of it.
And as consolidation in the jobber industry reduces the options shops in many markets have for suppliers, we need to make sure these larger vendors really understand how they can develop a win-win relationship with us by helping us manage this more effectively.
