Six Steps To Growth
The owners of two rapidly growing repair centers share the philosophies and strategies that helped them build their businesses.
Launching an entirely new independent repair center under a new brand and building it into a $3 million-a-year shop is no easy task in today’s competitive market.
It would take many shop operators years to achieve that kind of production from a 10,000-square-foot shop. But sisters Lauren Angie and Jill Strauss, a couple of collision repair veterans who opened LJI Collision Center in Orange Village, Ohio, are projected to earn $3 million in annual revenue after just six months in business.
As the daughters of collision center expert Michael Giarrizzo Sr.
—founder of JSI Collision Centers, which became Sterling Autobody Centers in 1999—Strauss and Angie come from a family with six decades of experience in the trade. Their brother, Michael Giarrizzo Jr., founded DCR Systems, which offers outsourced turnkey repair centers focused on efficient production. So it’s no surprise that Angie and Strauss are now blazing their own trail in the industry.
“We don’t even know our capabilities yet,” Angie says. “But we’re set up for nothing less than success in production.”
CLEAN AND LEAN: Sisters Jill Strauss, left, and Lauren Angie emphasize their shop’s cleanliness, organization, and dedication to standardized, efficient processes. Ian Holmes
About a thousand miles southwest of LJI, another shop team, husband and wife Dan and Wendy Ott, are finalizing expansion plans for their own rapidly growing business. Since Dan Ott sold his chain of four small repair centers in 2006 and focused solely on Auto Body Concepts in Gainesville, Texas, the shop has rocketed from $10,000 a month in revenue to $125,000 a month.
Dan Ott, who developed his own brand and grew into a successful multi-shop operator before he was 30, found he was stretched too thin and was still a little too green to run multiple locations. But now that he has concentrated on one business for several years, he’s gearing up to grow again after having learned quite a few lessons.
“If [I’d written] them down, I could have written a book on them,” Dan Ott says.
If not a book, then an article, at least! We asked these two dynamic duos to share their business-building methods. They break it down for us in six key categories: finance and operations, leadership, education and training, human resources, sales and marketing, and customer service…READ MORE OF THE ARTICLE CLICK HERE.