Day 1

Module 1: Foundation & Market Positioning

The Problem Most Shop Owners Face

You cannot grow what you do not measure. The majority of collision repair shops operate without clear visibility into their true performance metrics. They know how much money came in last month, but they cannot tell you their capture rate, their true cycle time, or their revenue per square foot. Without this baseline, every growth decision becomes a guess.

Today's Learning Objective

By the end of today, you will have a complete financial and operational baseline for your shop. This becomes the foundation upon which all 90-day growth targets are built.

Section 1: The Financial Baseline

Begin with these critical numbers. Pull the data for the last 12 months:

Revenue Metrics:

• Total gross revenue (monthly average)
• Revenue by source (insurance DRP, insurance non-DRP, cash-pay, fleet, restoration)
• Revenue per repair order
• Revenue per square foot of shop space
• Revenue per technician

Cost Metrics:

• Total cost of goods sold (parts, paint, materials)
• Labor costs (technician wages, benefits, payroll taxes)
• Fixed overhead (rent, utilities, insurance, software)
• Marketing spend by channel
• Net profit margin

The calculation that matters most: If your net profit margin is below 10%, your first priority is not growth — it is fixing the fundamental economics of your business. A shop doing $2M in revenue at 8% margin has less real profit than a shop doing $1.5M at 15%.

Section 2: Operational KPIs

These metrics reveal the operational health of your shop:

Throughput Metrics:

• Average cycle time (keys-to-keys) by repair severity
• Cars per month per repair bay
• Technician efficiency and productivity rates
• Estimate-to-repair capture rate
• Supplement frequency and approval rate

Quality Metrics:

• Customer satisfaction index (CSI) score
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Rework rate (percentage of repairs requiring correction)
• Callback rate within 30 days

People Metrics:

• Technician turnover rate
• Average tenure of production staff
• Estimator close rate
• Administrative error rate

Section 3: Building Your Data Collection System

Most shops fail to track these metrics because the data lives in disconnected systems. Today's action item is to create a single "Shop Dashboard" that aggregates all key metrics.

The Weekly Dashboard Template:

Create a simple spreadsheet or use your shop management system's reporting function. Track these 8 numbers every Monday morning:

1. Cars delivered last week
2. Cars delivered month-to-date
3. Average cycle time (rolling 30 days)
4. Capture rate (estimates written vs. repairs started)
5. CSI score (rolling 30 days)
6. Revenue month-to-date vs. target
7. Gross profit margin (week)
8. Supplement dollars captured vs. written

Why weekly? Monthly reporting is too slow for corrective action. If your cycle time jumps in Week 1, you can fix it by Week 2. If you only look monthly, you have lost four weeks of profit.

Today's Action Items

1. Pull 12 months of financial statements and fill in the Financial Baseline worksheet
2. Extract 90 days of operational data from your shop management system
3. Calculate your current net profit margin — if below 10%, flag this as Priority Red
4. Create your Weekly Dashboard template
5. Schedule 15 minutes every Monday morning for dashboard review

Key Takeaway

The shops that scale fastest are not the ones with the best technicians or the best locations. They are the ones that measure the right things and act on what the data tells them. Your dashboard is the cockpit of your business. Flying blind guarantees you will crash into obstacles you never saw coming.

Tomorrow Preview

On Day 2, you will map your competitive landscape. You cannot own a market you do not understand.