Nice (?) to see things haven't changed much. I sold my body shop 4 years ago and much of the industry had the same complaints "back when" just like you guys today. Last figure I saw for the automotive repair industry said 35,000 new techs were needed per year to keep the industry going. BTW, it's not just the auto tech fields...............Bill Gates has some of the same complaints about finding good help. What we see is the "trickle down" effect of an attitude of entitlement that permeates our society......................too many people think they should be paid, or given benefits, or whatever to sustain them just because they exist. But that's another discussion that's way too big for here.

Back to the topic at hand. The insurance industry does what comes natural. They try to minimize their costs and maximize their profits. How they do it can easily be called into question, but the bottom line is the shop owners and vehicle owners are the ones that let them get away with it. Interestingly (to me anyway) is that the collision repair business is following the same failing model as the healthcare industry. Simple reason for this. Most medical institutions, like most body shops, are run by technicians (yeah, though educated in a different way the Doc really is a tech), and not by business minded people. There are exceptions, but it's not the norm. A while back here we had another thread going back and forth about body shop vs insurance wherein one guy made the comment "you can't make money with a pencil". This is a technicians point of view, and if you prefer being hands on with the car it makes sense. But how I made my money WAS with the pencil............well, in more recent years a computer really. Managing the business side of the deal is critical, and was a full time job. If you don't lean that way it may be hard to fathom, but that gets back to my point that technicians understand and do what they know best. Running a business has a different skillset and attitude than just owning your job. To wrap up this point, if body shop operators ran their deal like a business, they would all tell the insurance guys "enough!!", and charge a fair and reasonable rate to make a profit. If nobody repaired cars for a couple weeks across an entire market area the insurance guys would get the message in a hurry. But they know, as do we, that ain't gonna happen, so they enjoy their power that's been handed to them by the shop owners.

Now, listen to yourselves. You value your skills and work ethic. What makes you think you're unique? There are other guys out there your age that are just like you. And guess what? Many of them are complaining that they can't find a good place to work. They're tired of working for some slug who doesn't appreaciate them (at least that's what they think). They don't like the working facility, conditions, whatever. The old saw has always been to complain about not being paid enough, but in reality that's more of an excuse. While everyone would like to make more money at any given time, it's been demonstrated time after time for many years, that in an employee value hierarchy working conditions usually hold the first 3-4 positions before you get to pay rate.

Finding good employees is a job. Depending on your situation it could be a part time job, or a full time job. If you want to be successful in getting good employees you need to be looking all the time. How hard you look will depend on how big you are (or want to become), how smart the other guys looking for talent are, and what size talent pool is in your area. Here's the mistake most people make. They don't start looking for workers until they have a hole to fill, and then they wonder why they can't find anyone. If you're always keeping in touch with the market, you'll always be talking to someone about their employment situation. What happens is, you may not hire them today, it may be a year from now before situations change to where a person is available, but it will happen. That's how I built my team's top performers. Then I worked for the future by staying in touch with the votechs and competed for the best students. We'd do the half day OJT thing. That way I got a guy I could mold to my system and had the chance to earn his loyalty from an early age. Between the two methods I always had a good crew (once I figured out what to do to be successful). Sure, there was always someone at the bottom of the totem pole, and it was my job to determine if they were trainable up, or needed to be replaced out. That's part of molding a team. BTW, some probably think that's hard hearted, but in reality, the rest of the guys (especially if they're high quality techs) don't want a slug on their team either. They want to work with like minded people who perform as they do (hint; that's where you often get good techs, they leave other situations where the "boss" didn't surround them with good team members). And yeah, a team can be as small as two people. If that sounds like too much work then keep doing what you've been doing (you do know what they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result don't you?)

As time goes by the battle gets tougher for sure. Attitudes evolve and mythology can take root. A couple years before I left the industry a nearby high school was rebuilt. In the plans and in the final construction were some automotive training bays. When the school re-opened there weren't any classes scheduled, so the bays were used for storage. I went to one of the administrators (don't get me started on the money wasted on bloated school administrations) and asked why they weren't contributing to our industry need for techs. In a nutshell the answer was that kids didn't want to be prepped for a job in an industry where they got dirty and didn't make any money. (Of course if that's what they believe, that's what they teach the kids tp believe.............it's called a self fulfilling prophecy) We had a moderately long discussion, but the main thing I hit him with was what my top production people earned just to get his attention. The look on his face when I told him that these "undereducated, car working neanderthals" (the incorrect image they base their thinking on) were making between $60-70K per year, was priceless. I would imagine he wasn't making that. Did that encounter change anything? Not really. There's a whole belief system in place that would take much more than just me to change. As a result, while I'd like to see the business unite and make a concerted effort to improve it's lot, I realize that that is very unlikely.................shop owners are too busy fixing cars instead of running their businesses, so they become "victims"........but they're victims of themselves.

Finding good employees is like mining for gold. First you have to go where the gold is, then, don't expect to find it the first time you swing the pick into the ground.