ABRA Auto Body & Glass

Hey, t We are at Industry Week in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Broly Benjamin has joined me from Abra Auto Body and Glass. And I'm very excited about t And I was, I'm so excited that you're going to take some time to kind of expand on that with us a little bit. So just give us kind of an overview. What's, what's exciting? What's going on at Abra Auto Body and Glass right now? Well, Kristen, I would say that, And when I say internal focus, we have a big initiative is operational excellence. So we made a conscious decision to slow down our growth because it was pretty aggressive in the 2000 to 2005 period. And we focused very strongly on operational excellence, w And that made great progress in that area. And all our metrics have improved. And the key metric in an operational excellence initiative is, is improving cycle time and also having your customer satisfaction metrics move in the right direction. So at this point in time, our information systems, our processes, our performance, and now on a go forward basis, we're looking at growth, more aggressive growth. I've had the opportunity to work across the country and, And It seemed Kudos to what you got. I can imagine improving that process. It was a big challenge. We say it's a journey. So we're still on the journey, but we've made good progress. Never, never over. Now, one of the t And we all seem to talk about it, but very few companies But ABRA has some interns Talk a little bit about ABRA's commitment to the student because it's, it's kind of overwhelming. Well, I t So for a n So we really believe bringing in good people from the vocational technical schools and having a mentorship program for them where we mentor, have a master technician, mentor them for a period of time, measure, And so we're very engaged in that. Right. It's a great program. And it's one of the hardest t And you look at the talent of some of these, these students as they were working on the vendors or doing the b I know that 10, 15 years in the business not doing that quality of work, but how do we keep these kids and getting their foot in the door seems to be the hardest. And I heard at some point where it's the, no matter what school I'm in, whether there's maybe an ABRA store close to me or not, I can still apply and ABRA helps kind of place these students if they're willing to relocate. Oh, absolutely. Sure. I mean, we'll recruit at UTI and Houston, YLTEC and Wyoming and they can go to Colorado, they can go to Minnesota, they can, So we don't just limit it to the home market where we have collision repair shops. That's how we're going to improve the industry is getting some of those kids in with their new ideas and their talent. Absolutely. I don't get opportunities to sit down with a lot of executives very often. And when I do, I What are some of the t Anyt Well, I mean, from our perspective, we've got good moment We've had five, six years of improved profitability year after year. So very excited about the performance of the company. I think there's an opportunity to take market share because, But there's an opportunity for the good operators that are investing in systems and processes and people and investing in those sorts of t And we've got a lot of moment And one other thing I wanted to say about, When you start getting those they get in the parts timely. They fix the cars more quickly. They're making more money. It's a great opportunity if you're working in an efficient operation as a technician. So that's a great point. If I can turn five cars by Friday versus three cars by Friday. Yeah. And it's the front office that holds them up. So if you don't have your processes dialed in, it's a big negative for the technician. But conversely, it's a huge positive if you do for those people. If you get all that fixed. Well, we're just excited. I there's t I feel it's almost It's kind of the time to grab hold and move forward. We've built that work too. Well, I appreciate your time. I know you've got so much to do. Thanks, Chris. And again, thank you. Just the commitment to students blows us away. And that's our future. And we're only going to get better. It's the insurance company for the customer or the shop for repairing for their customer with these students. So thank you for that. Thank you for skills. And we'll look forward to catc And I t So stay tuned. We're going to wrap up the industry week tomorrow. We've got the golf tournament with the Closure Repair Education Foundation. We're going to learn a little bit more about some of the opportunities for students and scholars Thanks.