Some exciting things have been going on here at BodyShop Business lately. For over 25 years, we’ve been dedicated to making body shop owners and managers’ lives a little easier and more profitable, and that singular purpose continues on even more today.

So many exciting things are going on in the collision repair industry at present. Vehicles are becoming more sophisticated and thus more challenging to repair, shops are exploring new business models designed around efficiency, new environmental laws and regulations are pushing manufacturers to offer new products, shops are trying to adapt to those new products, and repairers are trying more than ever to establish a level playing field with insurers in the game of business. And we here at BodyShop Business are trying to keep up with it all and deliver it to you more often in more easily digestible formats.

Take our Web site, for instance. We totally revamped it with you in mind. We knew that bringing you the latest breaking news every day would allow you to more easily keep up with all that’s happening in the industry today. We knew that providing you with a community to comment on various issues would give you a voice that might someday meld into one with your peers. We knew that providing you with a more easy-to-search and comprehensive archive of past articles would more readily satiate your desire for our content old and new. We knew that chronicling our staff’s industry networking via videos, photos and stories would be one other way of keeping you abreast of industry goings-on and show you that we’re more than just desk jockeys. We knew that providing you with a way to share photos of the custom work you take so much pride in would provide yet another opportunity to bond with your fellow craftsmen. And we knew that putting all of the many resources BodyShop Business offers (industry statistics, State of the Industry report, supplier Web directory, etc.) at your fingertips would give you that many more tools to help you navigate the sometimes perilously choppy waters of business today.

Despite all these efforts, we’re not done searching out ways to help you even more. And that’s why we’ll be launching an e-newsletter in the very near future. Every week, the BodyShop NEWS e-newsletter will deliver breaking news straight to the in-boxes of nearly 20,000 body shop owners and managers to keep them informed and up-to-date about the things that impact their businesses. Whether we’re reporting on new legislation, updates on vehicle technology, changes in insurance company business practices, executive interviews, conference coverage or even links to feature articles in BodyShop Business, this e-newsletter will provide yet another way for us to make sure we’re helping you to keep your bottom lines safe and sound.

We think all of these changes are good for you, and we think we’re on the right path, but we’ll never truly know without your feedback. We could be right on track, or we could be missing the mark. That’s where you come in.  With all of these new product offerings, I ask that you contact me and tell me what’s working and what’s not. We know times are tough right now and we feel your pain. We’re not just cranking out articles every day but constantly thinking about how we might better serve you. If there’s one medium perfect for uniting what sometimes seems a fragmented industry, it’s a national trade publication like ours which wields the “power of the press,” as one repairer wrote recently. We allow repairers from California to Texas to North Dakota to Maine to connect, and we realize the vast power in that.

We get no greater pleasure than responding to letters and e-mails from repairers who are enduring some kind of strife in their business lives and helping them in some way, so keep it coming. Let us know if these tools are truly accomplishing what we envisioned.