Refinish: Separating Your Body Shop from the Competition
How can we showcase our refinishing skills in a manner that separates us from other shops and drives business to our door?
Paint & Materials Management: Get the Habit Started
It’s no revelation that the paint labor hours directly affect the P&M reimbursement dollars on every estimate. When you think about that formula, you have to wonder how we got here.
Protecting Yourself in the Paint Booth
Dad died in 2006 from respiratory failure. My brothers and I say the collision industry killed him, but it was really ignorance that did him in.
How to Train an Auto Body Painter’s Helper
While it’s true the techniques are many and the fundamentals are few, I’m going to teach a new helper a specific technique within specific parameters, staying faithful to the fundamentals in order to achieve the desired outcome.
Automotive Refinish: Profitability in the Paint Shop
With tighter profit margins today, we need to track our paint and materials usage and a host of other numbers. After all, if you can’t measure it,
you can’t manage it.
Reader’s Choice: What’s the Best Way to Save Money on Paint and Materials?
What’s the best way to save money on the “small stuff” – filler, sandpaper, drill bits, etc.?
Perfect Auto Body Shop Paint Job: Achieve a ‘No-Buffer’
The holy grail of the paint shop is a dirt-free paint job – a no-buffer. And we don’t achieve it by hope and prayer.
Refinish: Avoiding Painter Burnout
It’s a pretty simple question: “What causes painter burnout?” The simple answer is: asking a painter to do too much, for too little, for too long.
Refinishing: Proper Paint Prep
You can never paint something a second time fast enough to be profitable. What’s worse than painting it twice? Painting it three times. So let’s be accurate, darnit.
Refinish: Habits of Efficiency
There are specific habits a painter can adopt to increase efficiency. And there are areas any shop can improve upon to increase overall efficiency.
Complex Automotive Refinishes of Today
Even though refinishes today are more complex than ever before, every generation of painter has experienced challenges. It really comes down to the painter’s mindset.
Refinish: The Painter’s Toolbox
A painter’s toolbox shouldn’t just include equipment but also intellectual resources as well as education and training to further their knowledge and development.