Accept average at your peril

The Professional: By Mike Monaghan

So, my first message of the year is this: when we apply average as acceptable to anything, we often lose more than we gain.

I’m a big fan of a chap called Simon Sinek, the author of the best-selling book Start With Why. His latest offering, The Infinite Game, has inspired me to write this month’s “The Professional” column.

In his new book Sinek talks about a “just cause” in that for an industry, a company or individual to progress beyond self-interest there must be something greater than profit or shareholder values considered. To advance a cause requires a certain type of mindset or attitude.

This is one our industry has lost. The cause or direction was lost when we went in search of average. In a multi-billion pound industry of claim costs and with the number of bodyshops in the 1980s standing at
more than 20,000, it was difficult to know what good actually looked like.

So, the industry started to ask its research body Thatcham Research to begin looking into repair times and methods – a solid idea, brilliant and necessary. This would help identify those who were capable and those who were not. The key issue with this was that we never discovered the true application or distinction of an hour.

The next race was to discover how efficient we could be, could we do the job in less than the time allocated or not? However, then and today, the hours can be manipulated – do the job right, with man, method, machine and materials, or cheat the system. With only pre-checks to identify costs or averages with no post-checks on integrity of repair applied – the default is the customer sign-off record. This means that the most inexperienced individual accepts the quality of the finished repair. “It’s shiny and looks okay.” How nuts is that?

The insurance industry’s search to establish the average cost of repair suddenly became flawed against those who chose to do it right and those who cheated the system. So, we end up with standards and times which no longer reflect those who continue to advance the cause of our industry – to be a world-class showcase of quality and investment in collision repair – against those still around today who manipulate the system on both sides.

The best still have to work at the rates of the worst, and this must be wrong in every conceivable way.

With the new challenges of resource, increasing cost of operations and investment in new technologies, now must be the time to switch from an average to leading a “just cause”.

There are some truly remarkable individuals in the insurance industry who not only see but want improvements in the balance to achieve the right outcomes and outputs for collision repair. However, too many at the most senior level concern themselves only with profits, dividends, cost savings and shareholder value.

This is both short-sighted and purely self-indulgent. It shows no leadership or responsible vision qualities. I believe this is a time where every voice in the industry should come together to make those in the insurance industry at the highest levels take note and see if the shift from a finite (short-sighted self) mindset to an infinite (just cause) mindset will ensure the industry recovers to a position where it is able to deliver a long-term sustainable future. Now that would be a just cause.