April 23 seems like a distant memory to me now. Rain and cold has gratefully given way to the steamy hot kettle cooker of summer. Still, I was excited to go to Naperville, Ill., and watch one of the best trainers in the collision repair industry, Mark Clark, hold court in front of 20 or so jobber store managers as part of the PPG Platinum Distributor Accelerated Distributor Development Series.

Mark has been doing this for a long time, and he has written more articles for BodyShop Business than anyone. The man knows his stuff when it comes to collision and paint.

I had never sat in on one of his classes, and what I was most impressed with was his ability to speak from a real-world perspective of owning a PBE store. When appropriate, he explained to the class how he handled certain situations, but by no means was he saying it was the only way. In fact, I quickly realized that one of the most valuable things the class had to offer was each person offering their own perspective of running a PBE store in their own market.

While some of them could say, “Well, that would never work in my market” or “My customer demographic is different,” it was nonetheless interesting to hear about each store’s delivery and accounts receivable policies and how technology has helped them.

The folks in this class represented the créme de la créme in the jobber world, and so it was neat to see their aggregated sales revenue and other data for comparison sake. But numbers aside, the class also dealt with inventory, employees, human resources, marketing and more. Mark led off each part by saying what he used to do in his store, asking the students what they do, and then coming up with action steps to implement once they got home in order to improve.

I learned a whole lot, and for that I say: “Thanks, Mark and PPG!”