Page 28 - Australasian Paint & Panel May-June 2021

PEOPLE MATTER
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PAINT&PANEL MAY / JUNE 2021
28 COUNTRY REPAIRER SPOTLIGHT • 32 BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
THIS YEAR PAINT & PANEL WILL BE SHINING THE SPOTLIGHT ON MTA COUNTRY REPAIRERS TO HIGHLIGHT SOME OF THE MANY EXCELLENT COLLISION REPAIR CENTRES IN REGIONAL AREAS. FIRST OFF THE BAT WAS GEOFF RICHARDS PANEL BEATING IN DUBBO. BY SAM STREET
CREAM OF THE COUNTRY
G EOFF RICHARDS PANEL Beating is a state of the art re- pair centre that boasts I-CAR Gold accreditation as well as Holden/GM and Tesla approv- als. It also has one of the happiest staff this reporter has come across. I did visit on a Friday afternoon but I’m reasonably certain that it was more than the weekend looming that put a smile of their faces. Apart from having a really great working environment it was clear talking with husband and wife business owners Todd and Tracey Richards how much they value and ap-
preciate their team.
Todd Richards grew up in the first shop
premises which his dad started when he was four back in 1974. It was in a little place in Beanie Street in West Dubbo with a staff of three. Todd’s earliest memories were of panel beating. At weekends while mum Rhonda and dad Geoff were catch- ing up on the invoicing: “Dad would throw me onto a total loss and say ‘have a go at that’ and I’d spend the day with a hammer and dolly and then came in say- ing “Dad look what I’ve done,” he recalls.
The business has grown along with the town, whose population has pretty much doubled since Todd was a lad. “Our business draws from an area of about 200,000 m2 around Dubbo with a population of around 125,000 people.
We try to accommodate everyone in terms of insurers. Even though we are a big business we keep the small family business mentality. It’s all about the cus- tomers - the legacy we carry and push forward is the legacy my parents built.
“You have to be able to have a rela- tionship with all the insurance compa- nies so that we are able service all of our clients. We have clients whose great grandchildren are coming to us to get their cars repaired - our client base is always growing.” he said.
With business booming, Todd and Tracey took the plunge and purpose built a new shop which they moved into four and a half years ago. Bunnings had opened up in a new business park on the other side of Dubbo. Todd reckoned that Bunnings have to be pretty good on re- search for population and demographics, so he bought a piece of land.
In the old shop they wasted a lot of time moving cars in and out, especially at the end of the day. Todd undertook a extensive research to ensure the new premises would have an efficient workflow and turned to his paint supplier PPG for some ideas.
“PPG were brilliant and took me to visit a number of high volume shops in Sydney so I could study the workflow. It really opened my eyes up to what’s out there.”
It was a huge step change. “We also didn’t anticipate the fast rate of growth
that we experienced. In the old shop we were repairing around 15 cars per week, here we repair around 40 cars per week.” Those jobs aren’t bumper kisses either, there are plenty of unwanted animal en- counters and the average repair cost is significantly higher than metro shops because of this. They moved from a shop that was 400m2 to the new premises that is 1450m2 and the team of 10 that they brought over has grown to 21.
Finding new technicians wasn’t a huge challenge. “We have worked hard to