Level Up Your Shop: OE Certifications and Success with Dave Gruskos

Cole Strandberg: Anytime we can talk shop on the equipment side of the collision repair industry. I’m excited. Obviously, as we talked about in our little conversation, pre hitting record, that’s where I grew up. If you’re at all familiar with the collision repair equipment space, Reliable Automotive Equipment is a name you’re aware of. Could you introduce yourself and RAE in your own words?

Dave Gruskos: Sure, sure. My name is Dave Gruskus. I own RE. I’ve been in a business since 1987 and we’re. Our reputation is based around the OEM products and OEM products for certification. We’re known for being, you know, a all in one shop when it comes to training, installation support, advice, marital advice, whatever. We’ve Been here and we’ve been doing our best for a very long time, so love it.

Cole Strandberg: Absolutely. 87 mentioned. My family’s business started in 88, so I’m sure a lot of overlap here on the east coast and beyond. We had a series about OEM certifications, and that’s where your. Your name was sort of first circled to get you on here. So I’m happy we could connect on the equipment series. On. Let’s do spend some time up front talking about OEM certifications. When you’re debating pursuing an OEM certification, how do your equipment selections directly impact kind of getting those and what you’re able to get?

Dave Gruskos: It’s really important for the shop to be talking to the OEM professional. So, meaning the. It could be the car company direct, it could be the audit company. The. The certifications have their actual official list. And this is always a gray area because salesmen are running around the industry saying, oh, buy this, or this person says buy that. But there is an official list. You want to look at those products, you want to see how they’re going to crisscross through other certifications you may be looking at down the road, you could say, I’m not. But it always seems to come up in the near future. You end up going for something else so you don’t duplicate your purchases. In our case, you know, we work directly with the car companies. So if I’m working with a car company that’s in Europe, I’m on an airplane to Europe and I’m working with them, what’s going to get tested, what’s going to be built for the American market. Because they’re always concerned with global service. You know, the service could be great in New Jersey or great in Florida or great in California. They’re concerned with how’s the service going to be in Africa. And they want to know that whatever product they pick, it’s going to be globally taken care of.

Cole Strandberg: So very interesting. Yeah, you’re at the front end of those conversations. And I think for most of us in the collision repair industry, we don’t even know what’s happening up at the front end when those selections are being made from a trend perspective. And I know you work across the US and potentially beyond. How have you seen some of these OE requirements for equipment evolve, and how have you seen some of these OE certifications become more or less desirable from.

Dave Gruskos: A shop’s perspective, the equipment evolves because a lot of just say we’re working on some products right now that the industry Might not see for three or four years, but the design of the car is already, you know, the car is going to be designed, then they got to figure out how to crash test it. They got to figure all these facets out before the car is even introduced to the market. So this may take three, four years. Then the tooling is going to get tested. What products actually work, what a product is actually certified. A lot of times after all the testing, it’s rolled into a closet and that’s the way it stays. So a lot of people say, like, why does a welder, My welder looks old, that I’m selling, it’s because the certified way it’s supposed to look, the certified color, everything, that’s what it has to stay until the next round of testing, which might be 10 years in between, seven years in between. The problem always is getting the technicians to change. They’re, they’re old dogs that don’t like these new tricks constantly coming in their face. But there’s a method to the madness of why. So when people say, you know, welder has to put out 14,000amps or whatever the tip pressure, that’s because those two pieces of metal require that to stick together. It’s not that somebody’s just trying to make money on a piece of equipment. You know, at any given time, a car industry is testing upwards of a thousand different metals. It’s not like one or two or ten. I mean, it’s, it’s. So staying up with it. A lot of it is, is when you’re, whatever you’re purchasing, you got to make sure it’s going to be trained and your techs are going to be comfortable with it and there’s going to be follow through and follow through and because if they’re using it once a month, they’re going to forget. They have to be able to have, whether it’s going to be apps on their cell phones or whatever. We put all these thoughts into every product we’re touching.

Cole Strandberg: Makes total sense. And I want to dive a little bit deeper later into our conversation around that consultative approach. Right. You’re not just, here’s a new product, you have to buy it because we want to sell more product. There’s methods behind the madness and being around since 1987, the only way to do that and have that type of longevity is a consultative approach to your customer base. We talk about with OE certifications evolving, with collision repair getting more challenging with all these safety systems and cars are more difficult, more expensive to fix than ever, A part of that is the equipment and the tooling. You mentioned a five or seven or ten year cadence for new OE approvals on pieces of equipment. As cars are evolving much more quickly than ever. Do you see that process beginning to change as well in terms of that cadence and maybe increasing in speed?

Dave Gruskos: Yes, the. So you could take a car as simple as Mercedes Benz changing the outer wrapping into an aluminum wrapping basically. So the, the that just appears so now all of a sudden the guy working on the side of a car and it says, oh, it’s a steel car, but I’m sorry, you’re. The piece is wrapped in aluminum. So now he had to pull himself to that level. And maybe at the same time the welding device, because now it’s welling something so thin had to change and then the training had to change. So even though the product itself may not change, the manufacturer of that product is now pushed into a corner where he’s got to come up with a software update so that that piece of equipment is going to work in the proper time on whatever material they’re using to give you. So it’s not just like a software update on a spot welder, on a MIG welder. The riveting system. There may be an update on the valve body to, for the speed or the power of that, the rivet’s going to go with. So I just got done going to Europe watching testing on a valve body so that they can change updates in just this one little piece. To me it’s, you know, oh, it’s just a piece we’re going to change. And they’re like, no, you can change that piece. You know, this robot has to change that piece and it has to go through this whole series of calibration. So there’s a lot to it. And a lot is where do you get the information? You know, people are very fortunate that first I’m old that I stuck around this long and they can call me on my cell phone and I give them the answer. And now, you know, thank God my son’s in the industry that there’s somebody else to just carry on what we do. But that’s really, it’s hard. There’s a handful of people in the world to come up with this information. I mean, the riveting expert in the world, it’s one guy, you know, everybody’s like, where’s all this crazy stuff? It’s one genius sitting in a little laboratory in North Germany coming up with all this stuff for car companies.

Cole Strandberg: So all the stuff to Keep up with makes your head spin a little bit. I mean, there’s so much to know, so much change happening across the industry and beyond. Fascinating to me that, that that’s sort of what the landscape looks like. I want to get a little more gray granular at the shop level and then we’re going to zoom back out and talk bigger picture things. But when evaluating equipment, when evaluating OE certifications, kind of as a general rule of, of quality to repair today’s vehicles, what criteria should shop owners apply to make sure they’re aligning with the OE level standard of repair?

Dave Gruskos: First, the, the two, first key elements is the relationship between the shop and the oe, which is the dealer. This industry is built on relationships. If you don’t have a good relationship with your local dealer, whatever brand you want to be certified in, don’t bother trying to go after the certification because that that person is going to be either your partner or a big roadblock. And then deciding what to go for is you have to look at it from a financial investment. What’s the best economics for you? If you’re going to say, I want these 20 plaques on the wall and I’m the greatest, you’re in a race to the bottom. If you’re going to do a great job, it’s going to be for the one or two that you’re going to be a true partner in. There is a lot of training involved. There’s a lot of continuous training involved. The first year, you may lose your A tech for three weeks. The second year may lose your A tech for two weeks. You may lose your B tech for two weeks, you may lose someone in your office for various classes and estimating. And you, through all of this, you have to be a professional. So you have to run your business in a clean, professional way. It’s very similar to when people say they, when they want to sell their business, they think it’s worth a bazillion dollars. It’s only worth what your paper is, is if you run your office in a professional way, you run your certification in a professional way, all the other pieces will come together. But the key to all of this though, is what is in your market and what dealer are you going to be a true partner in that you could sit back and say, yeah, you know, I’m part of their family.

Cole Strandberg: It’s cool to check boxes and have certifications to put on the wall, just like it’s cool to go get a bunch of graduate degrees, for example. But if you don’t know how to implement them, what’s the point? And you’re speaking my language. I’m a big believer in specialization, especially as this industry continues to evolve. You can’t be all things to all people and you certainly can’t be the right solution to all things for all people. What kind of categories of equipment are kind of the biggest investment? Whereas all right, I’m evaluating potential dealer partners and OE certifications. Are there some easy buttons where you get this and this and this. You sort of keep your your options open as you continue to progress or is it all really custom tailored? Keep use certain OEs.

Dave Gruskos: So you know, I’m fortunate where we Lander and Chill, which is our partner, is the global name for the welding and riveting equipment. So I know that the a specific spot welder is going to be the one certified through most all the companies. So you’re going to buy one spot welder from me. But how you purchase that is also extremely important because if it’s going to be the same spot welder but going for VW, Porsche, Audi, Bentley, etc. It has to be a vast item. So it has to be purchased through the vast network for their licensing. The same thing goes for our MIG welders. The same thing goes for our rivet guns. Whether our rivet guns are being used on a Porsche, Audi, a Mercedes or a GM or Tesla or Rivian or so you know, we happen to be the right place for going for these products. On the frame machine end of it, you have to go through what is the right package. You know, is it going to be a complete car liner package or is it going to be a complete select package? But again, you got to kick in, am I going to be looking for the Volkswagen, the Porsche, the Audi? The vast name will come in and the color of the equipment will come into the picture. We try to like really help the shops purchase the right stuff the right way because again, the whole partnership goes back in. So if the car company has its own method for its licensing on its tooling that it has tested, then you want to make sure it’s purchased right. Because I’m sure if they have a financial piece of that purchase, it’s helping their testing. That’s what’s probably offsetting that cost. But they don’t. Just like a car company doesn’t just say, oh, we want this frame machine or we want again, everything’s gone through a ton of testing. And one thing you should everyone should have learned from the Todd Tracy lawsuit is make sure whatever you’re doing, you’re doing what the OE says because at the end of the day, I don’t care if you fix the car and you say I did everything right or the insurance company said, oh, you have to use these parts or use parts or aftermarket or whatever you’re in. You’re the one making the decision. You’re the surgeon with the scalpel in your hand when you touch that car. So taking your time and doing everything the way it says is very, very important.

Cole Strandberg: With very few exceptions out there, we are not engineers and we certainly were not the engineers that designed these vehicles. So to follow OE certification or OE guidelines at any given point is amazing advice. From my perspective. Sticking with the OE conversation, there’s really two key components to kind of pursuing and proceeding with these OE certifications. I want to start with number one and that is back to selecting the right OEM certification. You mentioned your market and different components that go into that decision. Where would you suggest people look for the research to kind of get a good sense of who should we pursue the.

Dave Gruskos: The first? They, I’m sure they have a pretty good feel for what’s around them. But a lot of people, you know, in, in cases now where vehicles are evolving so quick, like I’ll be at a shop and we’ll just chit chat in it. They’re like, what would you do? And I’ll say a specific brand or a Rivian or whatever. And they’re like, yeah, we don’t see any of them. I’m like, well, you probably haven’t looked hard enough. Yeah. And then this is just the way things, you have to see what’s in your market. You know, you could also, if you want, you could just go on any AI program and it’ll tell you number of vehicles registered, your market, and it’s pretty easy to figure out. And then you can always, you talk to your insurance partners. I’m sure you got people coming in from the big insurance companies and then once in a while they’ll see somebody from the high end insurance companies, whether it’s a pure or whether it’s whichever, a chub. And they could say, hey, by the way, do you have a lot of this or that in this market for customers? And they’ll tell them, so the guy who does his homework, it’s pretty easy to start checking boxes and see what scales best for his business and where the growth is going to be.

Cole Strandberg: So a lot of our listeners are involved with OE certified shops, no question. But many are not. And so this is a new concept. And so I want to go to the very, very basics. So we’ve checked that box. We’ve decided we’re going to pursue this manufacturer and this manufacturer from an equipment and tooling perspective. How clear do they make exactly what you need versus how much decision making is there once you do decide the OE cert you’re going to pursue?

Dave Gruskos: Most, most of them make it pretty clear they’ll the ones who go off of spec, meaning the that you have to meet a certain standards with your equipment. We’ll say the spot welder is very important and it has to meet X amount of power and pressure. The MIG welder, same exact thing. They’ll say the amount of amps it has to put out and maybe it has to have the capabilities having two guns on it so it does aluminum and make brazer big braze and steel or whatever. And very similarly to the rivet gun. The then you can say, all right, I know I need to purchase these items, but at that point you want to look and say, well, I’m going to go after whichever certification. And knowing that you’re hearing that once you’re certified with that vehicle, there’s restricted parts, so you’re kind of protected. You’re going to get these vehicles in because the average guy can’t buy the parts. So then you’ll see they have a. That same piece of equipment are more defined where they’ll say, now here’s your three choices of that mig welder and model. Or here’s your three choices of that spot welder. Because as you start getting audited for your certification, they’re going to go off the serial number on those welders and they’re going to track you by those serial numbers on those welders for the length of your certification. So when the guy coming in to do your audits once or twice a year, he’s expecting to see good maintenance, clean equipment. And the sad serial number, the same serial number that was used when you.

Cole Strandberg: Got certified, makes total sense. I imagine some shops have made some equipment decision mistakes, whether it’s misunderstandings or just moves that they’ve made that they wish they could take back. From your experience, any equipment purchasing missteps that that shops kind of suffer from more frequently than others.

Dave Gruskos: Well, I, I mean, I’m dealing with a shop right now that spent $175,000 on a frame machine that is not certified for any of the brands he’s looking at. He was told by his Salesman it was. And then I’m looking at another shop actually we’re dealing with this week where the spot welder, the MIG welder, the battery table for taking a battery out of an electric car. The. And the frame machine, unfortunately, were all non approved items. So when a car company is making or always making an approved list and going through all the testing, there’s liability involved. So they’re not going to let things slide. So unfortunately now these guys have spent a lot of money on whatever they purchased and it’s, you know, it’s used equipment that’s going to end up on Craigslist. Yeah. That. It’s bad equipment, but it’s not going to meet the certified standards.

Cole Strandberg: So Challenging. Yeah. Frustrating. I’m sure. I’m sure some of the VAs decisions have come into play as well. I have this exact welder. Well, yeah, but it’s. It’s the wrong color. I mean it gets.

Dave Gruskos: Everybody just takes it as the wrong color. But a lot of times it’s not the wrong color. It’s the wrong. The soft software inside the machine is different. The. Because a lot of. Also a lot of this certified equipment, we start walking into UL approved. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not a bunch of Chinese components thrown inside some box that somebody says is, you know, it’s again, you, you really, you need, you’re spending a lot of money. You need to know what you’re buying.

You’ll find a lot of guys put a lot more thought in buying a refrigerator for their house than they do buying the equipment for their body shot. Yeah.

Cole Strandberg: But measure twice, cut once. When it comes to pulling the trigger on acquiring equipment. Yeah. You want to make sure you’re doing it right. Talk to me a little bit about Rae and. And your offering. In addition to the equipment and tooling you offer, it’s trainings, it’s loaner programs, it’s consulting. Kind of give us an overview of what you guys have done for so many years.

Dave Gruskos: Okay. So I come from a family of machinists, manufacturers, boat builders, like, so I mean, you learn that’s everything. The right way to do something is service, service, service, and at the end of the day, give more service. But you know, in my personal dream was always like, oh, I’d love to have an expert to do this or that or training or whatever. We’re at a point now where we do have not only trainers, we probably have the. We have a very large amount of them. We have people that write curriculum. We have the training center. We have training center Our training centers are big enough where always are now trying to get into our training centers. So we offer the expertise of what to buy. We’re always. I always tell people call me because we’ll tell you. It’s like, it’s like the Christmas show where we tell people to buy from other companies. We do that all the time.

Because the more we keep the shop happy, it goes all the way back to the OE that they know I’m doing this or they know RA does this and in return they lean on us more for help. So we do service, we do consulting, we do training, we do. Of course we have loaners on everything. Any, any item can be out the same day for a loaner. I, I mean we do it right. It’s not like we have one loaner or something. We have 50 of that item for loaner and we also have loaning loaner items strategically placed throughout the country. So everything. Because the, the. That’s also what the OE is asking us to do. When you start getting involved with the devices that we do for the E suspensions and stuff on cars, you know, nobody wants to have a brand new 200000 car that they’re waiting on some tool to do a simple task. So you know, we put a lot of thought into how we could service people.

Cole Strandberg: Can you rattle off some of the brands you work most closely with on the equipment side and on the OE.

Dave Gruskos: Side for that matter, we work closely with, I mean we work closely on a daily basis with Volkswagen, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, Rivian, Lucid, Tesla, GM, Ford.

Cole Strandberg: I’m trying to think what the list goes on. Heck of an impressive list. So if you’re listening and any of those certifications on your radar, you know the guy to speak with there on the equipment side, you mentioned your welder. What else do you offer from that perspective?

Dave Gruskos: We do in. In a collision shop. If it’s going to be a certified shop, we basically do everything but the paint booth. And on the paint booth we only recommend, you know, we find out or try to help the shop on who’s going to service whatever they’re buying. Because that’s a huge challenge. It’s not even, you know, everybody their boxes with heat or whatever and fancier or whatever for their burner modulation. But at the end of the day who’s going to service them? That’s the key.

Cole Strandberg: That’s what it’s all about. Absolutely. So zooming back into kind of some, some takeaways at the shop level. Many of our Listeners are business owners or leaders within collision repair organizations. So I always like to start to wrap with some actionable insights. How can the right equipment investments elevate a body shop where there’s a pure ROI on what they’re buying?

Dave Gruskos: Okay, first the forget there’s no equipment in the shop. The shop should be right now where you walk in. It’s professional, it’s got professional waiting area. It’s got clean, professional bathrooms. When you walk into the shop to where the technicians are, the bathrooms again should be equally clean. A lot of car companies actually shops don’t realize they’ll send people into the bathroom of the shop. They judge how you treat your help, but how the bathroom is, you walk into a nice clean shop. The reason I keep saying clean is companies like BMW. If you’re not clean, organized and you’re and your tool mechanics have their toolboxes in all in order, that’s a no go to get certified. So now you got your aluminum bay where you’re supposed to be keeping your having a clean area. The aluminum bay is also a kind of a wow factor because it’s distinguishes. Yes, I have this professional area for the nicer cars. The when the welding equipment, everything’s properly taken care of and everything’s put back to where it belongs and maintained. You’re going to get a tremendous longevity out of all this. These items, they’re easily, it can easily be five, 10 years versus lower end stuff. We’re seeing stuff that’s 18 months old, that’s, you know, this, you got what you paid for.

So now you got the look, you got the equipment proper. Then you get into like say the proper riveting. Well, the proper riveting also has a lot of speed now built into it. So the newest riveting systems are putting a rivet in in a quarter of the time or a tenth of the time that it was a year ago. So all of a sudden the guy putting a panel on, everything’s going very quick. The reason behind that is not to develop speed. It was developed because a rivet needed to fly through a piece of metal. If you’re holding a rivet gun, it’s going or battery operated one, whatever that hammering motion is wiggling the rivet around. It’s not perfectly in the hole. So this is stuff we don’t see. But that tiny little deviation is going to affect the way that airbag deploys. And you know, any deviation we all know doesn’t go over well on the person’s face. So you know, it’s just they’ll see a return because by having the right stuff and having the right item and you get into the newest metals where they’re up to 2200 or so, that means if you took a drill bit that you were used to using five years ago, it won’t even scratch it. I mean, it will not even scratch the metal, let alone drill a hole in it.

Cole Strandberg: So different ball game today. And your point about cleanliness, to me is. Is fascinating when you think about OE certifications. It’s dealer relationships, it’s training and tooling and equipment. What else are OEs looking for in a shop when they’re evaluating whether or not to go ahead and give them approval for certification?

Dave Gruskos: Okay, so when I, for example, when I was doing the Mercedes Benz auditing, for example, the important part when you walked in was the waiting room, how you were greeted. How did it have a coffee bar? Was it clean? Then, as you went into the shop, was the shop clean? Was all the proper safety equipment easy to see? Did the shop have the proper fire extinguishers, the proper tags on and the proper lockout tagout kit, which most people don’t even know what it is, which is. And nowadays you also got to add to that fire blankets. And then how is the bathroom for the help? That was very key. And then you went into the cleanliness of the overall facility. And nowadays, the one thing that you don’t want to hear from anyone is because the car companies talk about this. When a consumer walks in and has a collision, the first sentence out of everybody’s mouth is, who’s your insurance company? You call them on the phone and say, I’ve been in an accident. Who’s your insurance company? Nobody wants to hear that term anymore. Yeah, they want to hear, are you okay? Is everybody all right? Is. We’re really sorry to hear this. You know, we’re here to help you all to the point of the, you know, whatever rental agency you’re using, you know, they’re here to help you. We could get them right over for you. And then you’re asked for your tax return because they want to know your professional business and you’re abiding by the law. You know, they don’t. Everybody’s like, I’m not showing them that. They don’t care about how much money you make. They want to know you’re abiding by the law. And that goes for your licensing, and that goes for your liability insurance, which most shops aren’t even close to having the proper amount of liability insurance. And then nowadays with all the fraud going on on these con artists shooting through your emails and stuff, you really have to take a moment and just be properly. I can’t even say you could get insured for that kind of stuff, but you have to be, you have to be very professional. Yeah. You know, that’s what’s enjoyable about going to Mike Anderson Spartan meetings. You always hear something new popping up. You walk out of them going, wow, I didn’t, I didn’t. I never knew that. But so that you know, our industry does have a quite a few people with good ideas that always you should take advantage of trying to be part.

Cole Strandberg: Of 100 Rising Tides lift all boats. And that is absolutely the case in this industry. I think everyone, yeah, everyone’s trying to get better. And, and these 20 grooves and, and the Spartan group certainly in and of itself is just an amazing tool for this open communication, best practices to make us better. As to that, in your role and in your time in industry, I’m quite positive you’ve been exposed to just a ton of the best shops out there and your certifications and your equipment lines. How do they view OEM certifications and the equipment investment necessary to get there? Do they have a plan? As they kind of look at all.

Dave Gruskos: Of this, the shops, you know, this, this is not acting like a sales guy. The shops that do the best always, they, they welcome, welcome. If one of my team come in and say it’s time to do this or that and it’s like, great. You never hear the fighting over prices or this or anything. It’s look, it’s a challenge because everybody’s, everybody’s really. The economics of the industry is difficult. But when you are certified and you are working on those cars with restricted parts and all, it’s, you know, it’s monetarily better for you because hopefully there’s a reward for all of this challenges you leap through to get to that point. But it, you know, you have your big years for updates. You know, last year was. Happened to be a big year for some changes. This year is starting out with some minor changes. There’s like a riveting change. There’s a change where now some of the companies are making these certified shops become more into the mechanical end of it. And shops have to be prepared for that with these EV cars because the, the, the cars that are selling them, they don’t have service departments, they don’t have, you know, your, you’re their arm, you’re their service arm. You look at the craziness going on in Europe with this BYD company, which is build your dream out of China. I mean, they’re selling, they’re selling their businesses up. 400 in one country, 800 in another country.

But people are buying a cheap car with no support, no background, no nothing. So, you know, this is where at the end of the day, the body shop becomes like extremely important.

Cole Strandberg: So no question, no question. So much change happening in our industry and that can represent challenges. It can also represent tremendous opportunity, which I believe it does, and a big part of that. And, and I think we’ve echoed Mr. Anderson a fair bit throughout our conversation, but I know how pro OE certifications he is. I certainly could not agree more. Dave, you’ve been very generous with your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Would love to start to wind down with kind of the primary question of for folks who are interested in what we talked about today, where can they learn more about RAE and the products you offer?

Dave Gruskos: If you go simply to our website, which is raeservice.com not only are all the products on, all the videos on how to use the products, you may have a product similar, there’ll actually be a video there, how to use it, how to set it up, how to make everything work and feel free. You can call me anytime. I’m a seven day a week guy and we’re here to help any way we can. And I appreciate having this podcast because the more information goes out, the better. The OEs know they need you. The always know they need body shops, they need to sell parts. They need to, they’re gonna, their goal is now more selling parts than it’s ever been. So the opportunities to grow with certifications are better now than I’ve seen them in 20 years.

Cole Strandberg: So a perfect way to wrap it up. Mike drop. Dave, thank you so much for joining us here on the Collision Vision. It’s been an absolute pleasure.