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As a participant in many forums, I have occasionally had my controversial postings deleted. While it did upset me at the time, I’ve learned that there is a certain protocol to follow so that your opinions will be heard. Hopefully my postings in this forum will be food for thought and not offensive to anyone.

I have been in the glass repair/replacement business for 15 years and have never found complaining or competitor bashing to do any good what so ever. I built my business, not by bashing the competition, but by offering my customers higher quality repairs and a more professional level of service. There will always be people that do inferior work and it will tarnish the image of industry.

The key to dealing with this problem is for the rest of us to make sure that every repair we do, is done to the absolute best of our ability. If you aren’t using the best equipment you can buy, buy new equipment. If your repairs are not as good as the guy across town’s repairs, call your supplier and get some help. If you can’t get help from your supplier, find a new one. If you need to spend a few bucks on training, do it! Your reputation and the future of our industry depend on it. Those that don’t do these things are not likely to succeed.

As the former owner of a non-related franchise, I can tell you that there are good and bad points to paying the seemingly absorbent fees. I can also tell you that although you typically receive better than average training, there are still people that do very good work and people that do very poor work. Consider McDonalds, Midas or Jiffy Lube. Some give great service and value; others give lousy service and value. I don’t think it’s fair to judge a company by what any one independent operator does.

Nor do I feel that it is fair to judge a technician by a single repair. I had a competitor that followed me around, waiting for me to do a repair that didn’t turn out as well as expected. Let’s be honest, we’ve all done repairs that we aren’t too proud of. It didn’t matter that I didn’t charge for the repair, he went to the fleet manager and pointed out one bad repair (out of dozens) that I had done. He then showed the fleet manager a piece of glass that he had done a relatively good repair on. While this worked for my competitor in one instance, eventually he was caught billing the company for repairs that I had done in the past. Guess who got the account back?

Value is also a matter of opinion. I had a car lot that dumped me for a competitor who did the worst repairs I have ever seen. Why? He charged $20.00 per repair and I charged $45.00 (this was several years ago). That car lot owner didn’t care about quality. But rather than lower my price or the quality of my repairs, I found other customers that did care about quality. It wasn’t too long before the low-ball guy was out of business and the car lot was once again calling me.

I have trained some of the best repair technicians (my opinion) in the country. I have also had some that I could not train. It’s not that they didn’t learn proper techniques; they just didn’t care about the results. You can have the best equipment in the business and still do poor repairs, if you don’t care about the results. Some of those that I felt were not trainable started their own business and are doing just fine, despite the fact that they do not do very good repairs.

As much as I would like to see the entire industry raise the repair standards, I have to admit that I like knowing that I do better repairs than my competition. If everyone did excellent repairs, I would lose my advantage. I’m also glad that some repair technicians limit their work to insurance, others limit their work to car lots, and still others limit their work to cash. This really makes me look good when I offer all forms of payment, including credit cards. Again, this is a competitive advantage for me.




</p>Edited by: <A HREF=http://pub144.ezboard.com/bwindshieldrepairprofessionals.showUserPublicProfi le?gid=deltakits>deltakits</A> at: 10/25/02 7:41:27 am