Page 80 - Australian Paint & Panel Nov-Dec 2020

40
BEST MEDIUM SHOP – QUEENSLAND
PAINT&PANEL NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2020
DRIVE ACCIDENT SOLUTIONS
WE’VE VISITED THIS AMAZING FACILITY BEFORE, WHEN THEY HAD NEWLY SET UP, IT’S GREAT TO SEE THE VISION COMING TO FRUITION.
D
RIVE ACCIDENT SOLUTION IS
a huge family owned business
that is beautifully presented. Chris and Anthony Manteit are second generation repairers. New life began at 40 for the business, which was formerly know as Toowong Milton Body Repairs. The team moved into their newly purpose-built shop back in October 2017 in Pinkenba. With the move came the renaming and branding of the shop, to
Drive Accident Solutions.
There was a certain element of ‘build
it and they will come’ and it has taken a while to generate enough volume so that the business can reach its capacity po- tential, but all the hard work has paid off. The team now repairs around 70-80 vehicles per week.
It was a big move from the outskirts of the city to an industrial site near the air-
port. However husband and wife team Chris and Angie Manteit reckoned on two things – one picking up a lot of fleet work from their surroundings and two picking up some OEM approvals in the dealer standard facility they had built. Tick and tick.
Another cunning ‘honey trap’ has been the cafe Espresso@Drive which was built into the new shop plans from the start. Apart from it always being An- gela’s dream to own a coffee shop, there is precious little competition around the area. “We’ve actually gained a reasona- ble volume of work just through the cof- feeshop association. We’ve got a regular customer base. It sounds funny, but it’s probably one of our strongest marketing investments, and the place where we picked up most of our new customers,” Chris says.
“In the last three years, we’ve really focused on not having all our eggs in one basket – we’ve been burnt by that before. We’ve focused heavily on good relationships with fleets, and with that comes the connection with the insurers. And on top of that, we try to procure work wherever we can,” Chris says.
”We do a lot of private work too. We’re close to the airport, so there’s a lot of business that I don’t think were being serviced very well until we got here.
“There are also a lot of self-insured companies and companies with $15,000 or $20,000 excesses coming in. We’ve tried different forms of marketing since we’ve been here to get our names out there. We did a fair bit of Facebook Ad- vertising, which worked out to be pretty effective and inexpensive. Word of mouth has also helped us.”