Page 46 - Australasian Paint & Panel Nov-Dec 2022

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20202 WJBUOIDNDGNYIESNRHGSOP AWARDS
PAINT&PANEL SNEOPVTEEMMBBEERR/ /DOECTEOMBEER22002222
INSANELY BUSY
NEVER IN 11 YEARS OF JUDGING HAVE WE SEEN SHOPS SO BUSY AND BULGING AT THE SEAMS WITH CARS. SAM STREET REPORTS ON MARKET CONDITIONS DURING THE JUDGING PROCESS.
an and New South Wales repairers after the long, Flong, lockdowns. Meanwhile lack of international travel, lots of do- mestic holidays, people out of their rou- tines with working from home plus a lot of rain seemed to have pushed the acci-
dent volumes up everywhere.
The consequence of this uptick in vol-
ume is that repairers have been able to be more choosy about who they work for and how much remuneration is acceptable. Anecdotally this has led to a fair amount of insurer ‘badges’ being handed back in favour of an insurer who offered a modi- cum of profit and of working with entities who offer a more frictionless experience.
While there’s no shortage of work, the cost of doing business has skyrocketed — energy costs; paint; consumables; parts; labour; you name it and it’s gone up. A lot of that has to do with the bro-
EAST AFTER FAMINE IT
ken global supply chain and the fact that Australia imports pretty much every- thing and then, on top of all that, we havegallopinginflation.
So when major insurers offer a meager 2% increase it’s understandable that re- pairers feel insulted. While insurers have undoubtedly suffered with all of the nat- ural peril costs, their car insurance arms have been doing very nicely, thank you. So for multibillion dollar companies to expect mum and dad independent busi- nesses or even MSOs to subsidise them by fixing cars for free, or even at a loss, well it quite simply beggars belief.
While we’ve had no lockdowns this year, the effects of COVID were still very much apparent affecting productivity with people’s workforces having to iso- late even if they weren’t sick.
Pretty much everyone we talked to needed more technicians and com- plained about losing techs to ‘drug mon- ey’ being paid elsewhere.
was, at least for the Victori-
WHAT’S NEW?
In terms of standards every year I won- der how much higher they can go. Our winning businesses have embraced dig- ital processes, standard operating proce- dures, they invest in training and devel- oping their teams and are invested in their local communities and almost all are training apprentices.
We’re seeing a continuing trend for di- versification or at least for bringing more in-house, especially mechanical work and even in-house recalibration. It seems that there has been more of a
I’m also going to stick
my neck out and say that it seems to be that
slowly but surely the number of women we are seeing working in collision repair businesses is increasing.