Monday, April 6, 2009

Paintless Dent Repair Technologies for Building a Business

Managing and building a Paintless Dent Repair business is hard. Even if you are a very talented service technician yourself, how do you grow your business beyond your 24 hours in a day? It takes thinking about how to scale your business in advance of the need. There are a few things you can do to ensure your business can grow in the future.
  1. Document the processes for estimating a job
  2. Document the processes for scheduling work
  3. Document the list and brand of tools that should be used with vendor contact information and costs
  4. Document the processes for invoicing for work completed
  5. Document how you will collect payment
  6. Document hiring requirements
  7. Document a marketing plan for attracting new business - list all marketing strategies and efforts so each can be reviewed
  8. Learn from the large PDR franchises - how did they grow?
  9. Automate and mobilize as much of business processes as you can.
  10. Can work be dispatched to remote service technicians with a smartphone?
  11. Can completed work be synchronized via a smart phone back to the office?
  12. Can you complete your service orders on a smart phone and print on a mobile printer?
  13. Can all dispatches and completed service orders be sychronized directly to your accounting software?
  14. Can job estimates be completed on your smartphone?

These are just a few of the things you want to consider. Each help enable a business that can scale in size. I don't mean to suggest the above items are necessary to start a business on day one, but they will be quickly be needed if the business will grow profitably.

Let's spend a minute discussing the growth challenges. Soon after you begin hiring service technicians getting accurate and completed service orders back to the office in a timely manner will become a problem. Why? It just happens. Service technicians are not born administrators. Getting accurate and profitable job estimates out of your new estimator is also an issue.

Once paper work begins to stack-up in the office with incomplete fields, inaccurate information and missing job estimates you will begin to pull your hair out. Do you hire more managers? If you do - your profit disappears. What are your options? I would seriously encourage you to look for a mobile application designed specifically for Paintless Dent Repair businesses. One that will enable all the work to be completed accurately in the field and synchronized directly to your office accounting software.