World-class Technicians & Career Growth with David Dart

In this episode of the Collision Vision driven by Auto Body News, Cole Strandberg talk to David Dart, Chief People Officer at Caliber Collision. With over 1,700 locations nationwide, Caliber has developed some of the most comprehensive and innovative workforce development programs in the industry. We’ll explore how Caliber attracts new talent, builds world-class technicians, and creates career growth opportunities that keep employees engaged. We’ll also discuss the broader industry implications of workforce development and what independent shop owners can learn from Caliber’s approach to building a skilled and sustainable workforce.

Cole Strandberg: Looking forward to an awesome conversation. You are the second Caliber alum we have here on the Collision Vision. And I always say kind of as Caliber historically has gone, the industry has gone. So looking forward to getting your thoughts and ideas and insights on, in my opinion, the most important challenge we face as an industry and that is the talent shortage. So I’ll kind of just dive right in. I know Caliber has multiple talent development programs and methodologies. Talk to me about what the key elements to those are.

David Dart: Well, well, there’s a couple of really important elements that we’re driving here at Caliber Number one, our technician apprentice program. We all know in this industry that there are not enough body technicians in the industry. We have taken it upon ourselves certainly to contribute to the talent pool here by launching our technician apprentice program, which covers kind of goals being well over 1500 apprentices at any one time. And they’re contributing right now, the graduates of that program over the course of the last three years, the graduates now are contributing nearly 15% of our repair hours. So that’s a really critically important talent development function that we have. Secondly is also an initiative we call the Caliber Way, and that’s really focused on improving the quality of performance across service advisors and general managers. At scale, we’ve gotten so large that we needed to do something differently with respect to how we actually deliver training and make sure that we’re moving towards our pillar of helping every teammate reach their full potential. And if our GMs and service advisors do, we know that we can actually reach the full potential of the centers across 1800 locations. So those are the two big ones. And happy to go deep into, you know, one or the other, whatever, wherever you want to take it.

Cole Strandberg: Let’s do both. And let’s start with the TAP program. I think that’s one that the industry has heard of, but I’d like to kind of dissect that a little bit and learn exactly how we go about it.

David Dart: Yeah, I think it was pretty. It was certainly insightful when the company late 2021 said, hey, listen, we got to get after this. There’s just not enough body technicians. The pandemic had forced a lot of people either into retirement or maybe out of the industry as we had this kind of reset on demand across the country. And a lot of these, the levers, the people, the body technicians that maybe went into H Vac, they’re not coming back. Right. So it was an opportunity for us to say, hey, listen, we have to double down on building our own because we can’t just acquire, we still should focus on acquiring talent. There’s no question retaining our talent, our body technician talent, but every time an experienced body technician walks out the door, you’re looking at a significant hit to the efficiency and effectiveness of that center. They’re just so incredibly valuable and filling those bays. So we realized that we had to build our own. So we put a big, hairy, audacious goal on the table in early 2022 to say we’re going to, we’re going to hire 2,000 apprentices and we’re going to have, and we’re going to build that program to be 2000 strong at any one time to drive more graduates and more repair hours for Caliber. And ultimately it ends up helping the industry as well. So we have that program. We typically see that it takes somewhere between 12 and 18 months for an apprentice to graduate. We have two different types of programs. We have what we call the one on one mentorship program. So that will be in a single center where a mentor, one mentor will take one apprentice. Highly effective. And so we want to make sure that the inhibitor of that program isn’t supply of mentors. So, you know, we do our best to make sure. That we’re teaching our mentors how to, how to be a mentor, how to explain that kind of the first 30 days to an apprentice when they come in. So apprentice onboarding was important to build. And then we also have what we call a hub mentor. And this is where we have an experienced body technician who has a desire to actually teach maybe four or five apprentices at once. And so that would be a hub center. So you have to have enough scale in that center to be large enough to have five apprentices in the center. But they really do that full time. They no longer flag hours like the, like the mentors do on the one, on one situation. And so they’re, they are there to make sure that we’re moving those apprentices through directing work, teaching them, transferring knowledge. And then those graduates move into other centers in the, in the region in which they’re. They’re hired to, to be apprentices. So both, both have their pros and cons, but both effective ultimately in the broader goal of bringing more repair hours to caliber and more capacity.

Cole Strandberg: And I don’t want to zoom past that estimator and GM program as well, because we talked about it on our pre show call. I think that’s insanely important. But going down this tap program rabbit hole a little bit, it seems taking a technician from entry level off the street and turning them into a skilled technician capable of repairing these vehicles would be a tremendous challenge, I guess. What do you look for in that slate? Who is the perfect target to join an apprentice program with Caliber?

David Dart: Yeah, great question. Because there is wide variation in the quality of apprentice hiring. If you’re not focused on what, what is the best qualified candidate, the best candidates, because you can walk straight off the street. And we do, we don’t have a problem with people applying to apprentice roles. So. So we get, we get the significant number. Every time we open up an apprentice role, we get a significant number of applicants. So, so that’s not the issue. Right. So you want to improve the funnel, so to speak. So 15 people apply to the job. You want to make sure you’re hiring the one or two or three best out of that talent pool. One is have they been around a shop in the past? So either are they coming out of a trade school or have they been. Are they working at a auto service center, you know, changing tires or are they in a, you know, a Jiffy Lube oil, you know, quick change. Those are like. So at least they’ve been around a shop. They have a passion for vehicles. This is such an incredible opportunity to build a lifelong career in, in, in the body technician space. They’re truly artisan. So those are also good candidates. We also have, you know, obviously interview process, but it includes a, an aptitude, mechanical aptitude, a validated pre screen that our candidates take on their way in so that we can kind of narrow the funnel to make sure that, okay, these people are scoring pretty high on the mechanical aptitude you, so they’re more likely to be good candidates. And then we really wanna make sure that the mentor has an opportunity in most cases to interview the apprentice to make sure that there’s a fit for the two of them to come together. Because this is a very strong relationship. They’re gonna spend the next 12 to 18 months together working side by side five to six days a week. And you gotta make sure they have the work ethic that they’re wanting to come to work on time and stay through the job being done. And so that’s an important test. The mentor making sure that they have some, some skin in the game. In the selection process, which we see a higher rate of, of success when, when mentors are involved in the selection.

Cole Strandberg: Makes total sense. Give them some ownership in this apprentice and this mentee for them and they’re gonna, they’re gonna have incentive and a mental personal attachment to this potential new technician. Makes total sense to me. How do you ensure with these mentors, right, you need the right blank slate, you also need the right artist to help paint this picture and have it all come together. How do you ensure these programs and these apprentices are up to date with the latest industry standards and technology trends? That’s something I think even the most skilled technicians are having a challenge and keeping up with today with all the changes.

David Dart: Yeah, you know, it’s a, it’s a great point talking to some, some people within the industry not long ago, a couple months ago, about how the complexity of the industry and how, you know, advanced materials, the, the fact that, you know, the EV explosion and you can’t just have anyone working on an ev. You have to have the standards in place to make sure that we’re up to date in the most important qualifications that we have. So our quality technical coaches out in the field ensure that, you know, we understand who has the qualifications to do the repairs that are funneling into the center to make sure that they’re on the cutting edge. So our QTCs are, is what we call them, are really critical across the country. There’s three different groups of them that make sure. That they’re in the center on a regular basis working directly with mentors and body technicians on complex repairs and they’ll know all the cutting edge activities that are going on. So we make sure that we don’t send a vehicle that we’re not qualified to repair into that center. So whether it be an aluminum or if it’s Ford certified or Toyota certified or you know, all those things, we have all those certifications that are understood and we have the appropriate number of body technicians or mentors in those centers to make sure that that happens. But you’re right, I think the QTCs are actually the thing that’s probably most important in our system to make sure that our teammates are on the cutting edge of the changes that are happening in the industry so rapidly.

Cole Strandberg: Now. Talk to me about the Caliber way and these estimator programs. In general manager programs. I think obviously Caliber has scaled to a level that no collision business has done before. To do that, I think if you were to rewind 10, 15 years, one of the biggest challenges would be managerial talent. Talk to me about that program and how that’s come together.

David Dart: Sure. I think. Well, I’ve only been here a little over two years, so I’ve been here two years and a couple months. But one of the first things, I’m kind of a multi unit HR person basically. So making sure that we understand training at scale, variability at scale, how do you eliminate waste, those sorts of things? It’s big company stuff and we have grown so rapidly that it was hard for us to replicate some of our training programs. While there was pockets of excellence across the country when I first got here, where they were training service advisors incredibly well and where they had good GM training programs, new enrolled training programs, it was obvious that we weren’t doing it as well as we possibly could across. You know, when I first got here we were about 1,550 or something centers an hour.

Cole Strandberg: Just a growing company at that point.

David Dart: It’s growing pretty fast. So how do you get ahead of that? How do you make sure that that happen? And one of the things I started asking about when I first got here is what drives body technician turnover? So I’ve been taught that, okay, well we don’t have enough body technicians who are building the apprentices. Why do they, why are they leaving? Like why, what are, what’s the most likelihood of leaving? And this is probably going to be obvious to a lot of the industry people who have been, who’ve been in centers for decades. It’s really Two roles drive body sector turnover more than any other role. So the first one is a general manager. And there’s two reasons why the general manager drives turnover. Number one is their leadership ability. It is the environment that they create, the culture at the center level, which is why Caliber has always emphasized our culture as being a differentiator in the industry. And number two, it’s the ability to manage shop flow. Body technicians want their hands on cars. It’s their productivity. If you’re sitting on a bucket, you’re not getting vehicles, you know, so you’re, you’re managing demand, but it’s also, are you doing everything you can to make sure that the, the shop has this harmonious system where you’re moving vehicles through quickly? So everyone’s benefiting from managing that. And there’s a lot of complexity there when you grow this fast, you know, a little. Almost two thirds of our general managers have been enrolled less than, less than two years. So there’s a. That was obvious that, look, we need to do a better job making sure that we’re creating great leaders and that we’re helping them make sure that they’re managing the P and L, the production and the culture and how to do that. So teaching them how to do a production meeting, teaching them how to do the engagement meetings that we have, and making sure they understand the full picture. So that training, how do we do that at scale, that was one of the problems that we needed to solve. And then back to the service advisor. There’s two reasons a service advisor drives body technician turnover. Number one is their relationship with the body technician. You can actually teach that if someone doesn’t understand that the body technician’s success is the service advisor success, like, you know, it’s a symbiotic relationship. And to emphasize how you communicate with the body technician, to make sure that they’re up to date on exactly what’s going on with the vehicle as they project, manage it through the system, you can teach that. And so we felt that there was an opportunity there. But secondly, it is about the accuracy of the estimate. It drives profitability at the center level. If you write an inaccurate estimate, there’s problems that happen afterwards. You get change rate requests and you’re not capturing the full value of the differentiated offering. And the body technician feels like, oh, you missed this, you missed that. And then we’re not writing as effectively to make sure that we’re writing to the direct repair program, the DRP programs, requirements for all of our carriers. So our carriers are upset, you know, we might get taken off of the of an approved center list for one of our important carriers. And then now all of a sudden, volume drops and the body technicians like, I, you know, I need work. I gotta have hands on cars. So what we did, we started the initiative the Caliber way. And we took those pockets of excellence across the company and built a onboarding learning journey for our service advisors at scale because we should be, you know, between 4 and 5,000 of them across the country writing estimates every day. We wanted to not only make sure that when we promote somebody or hire someone into the into caliber, that we’re teaching them the caliber way of doing it. We also wanted to make sure that those that weren’t performing well had an opportunity to improve their performance. And the visibility because we’re so big wasn’t really clear. So you didn’t even know that you were maybe in the bottom quintile, the bottom 20% performers in the company. But we have the data that can actually help us understand who is in the bottom 20% of performance. And many of them didn’t know when we, when we showed them where they were. But then we had to provide them with up training and reskilling to make sure that they can improve. And when you do that, you move the fifth quintile to the fourth and the fourth to the third, and the whole operation changes its performance. So that was a big initiative that we really went to scale at the end of 2024. Early returns are very good because our teammates feel taken care of. They can reach their full potential. No one wakes up in the morning, says, you know what, you know, I want to do a crappy job at work today. And so it was, I think it’s been really well received a lot of polls on specific training that we can do for our teammates at scale, virtual instructor led. But the onboarding is really three weeks of virtual instructor led and virtual training and then three weeks in person, which is a challenge to do when you have 1800 locations. But we’re really thrilled with the early returns from our program on the service advisor side as well as on the general manager side.

Cole Strandberg: From a talent perspective, how does caliber view who makes a good potential general manager, whether that’s inside the organization or from outside?

David Dart: Well, I think if you can, it is pretty complicated role. So having again, being kind of an industry outsider and trying to learn it myself, there’s, you know, no accidents, the same, there’s a wide variety of different OEMs that run through the door. You got to deal with people, personnel, Carriers. Each carrier wants things done differently. So pretty, pretty complex. That’s why it’s best to hire internally. If you can have a pipeline, you know, I think it’s, it’s interesting. My perspective would be one good pathway and we have a, we’ve implemented a career framework here in 2024 so that we have an understanding of how you, how you grow in an organization our size so that, that you can see the opportunities to manage your career here. It’s called the career framework. But from my perspective it’d be like you start in parts. Now you have to have good training around that at scale. To teach someone how to be a parts coordinator or parts manager and then they’re familiar with the different types of vehicles and different types of parts ordering process. And then service advisor is a natural step there. There’s a lot of service advisors who order their own parts. But like if you have that parts coordinator to service advisor and then the service advisor because they have great. Well, you know, hopefully you’re teaching that well that great customer service skills. Which also helps with, with the, with that move to the general manager role. It’s great to get them to move into the GM role sometime between kind of two and three years, no longer than that. Because once you’re writing for about five years, you’re, you’re, you’re making pretty good money. And so sometimes it’s that hard to transition into a GM role that maybe don’t pay early on as much. But we have progressions from the size of our centers. You can be a GM1, a GM2 or a GM3 at our company. And you can see where that growth is. The GM3 is being the most senior largest centers, most complex. So we can reward them with what the market would pay them based on their contributions as they grow in the organization, which leads to then going into those regional manager roles as well. So you know, we have a pipeline and we feel pretty good about where we are with the career framework is going to help continue to grow our own here at Caliber.

Cole Strandberg: Now you sound like an old industry professional at this point, but you mentioned you’re not a collision repair lifer. I find it interesting that Caliber and other organizations who are attempting to achieve some of the scale that Caliber has is starting to look at hiring outside the industry in executive roles. Give us a quick background on yourself if you could. And I think that multi unit scaled company background is of particular interest.

David Dart: Sure, Cole. Well, I actually started my career working for the world’s greatest multi unit distributed service. Actually the one the world’s ever known as the US military. So I was in the, in the Navy for seven years and that truly is a, an incredible multi unit organization. And the reason that US military is so incredibly successful and is the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen is, is because we do have great training programs, we have great communication. No matter where you are in the organization, you are highly trained on your role and you have full autonomy within that role. You have parameters. You have a control limits, upper control limit, lower control limit and you have full autonomy within that. Whether you’re an E1 or an 06 or an admiral or a general, you know the parameters of your role and you’re highly trained to be able to do that. And that was a lesson that you kind of bring in to a multi unit organization. And I didn’t intend to be an HR really like you don’t grow up usually saying I’m going to be a human resources professional. But I got to business school, I wanted to be a, but probably a CEO after the Navy. But they don’t hire, they don’t hire general managers really out of business school. I didn’t know that I was in the 80s so I had no idea. But I kept hearing people are the only true competitive advantage. Kept hearing that at business school. And when I really thought about why I love my last job in the Navy where I had multiple employment groups and got them to work together as a high performing team, I realized it really was all about people. And so I ended up in hr. And I’ve been in different industries which has been great because I have a different viewpoint of how to handle things like manufacturing is different than multi unit, is different than consumer goods. So all of them have a little bit different. So I don’t really have a playbook. But I do know that actually enabling the front line, particularly in this model, they are the generator of shareholder value of the business. It’s the front line, it’s the teammates, the service advisors and the body technicians are truly the value creators in the organization and making sure that the key skills and abilities that require them to perform well are highly trained. I mean that’s really the best thing. If you’re an HR person, you’d want to be in that because it’s really all about human capital. So a couple of experience I had was at Ecolab which is a fantastic multi unit global organization and then Terminix Pest Management. Incredible business. That was my last experience and we took on some, some of the similar challenges that we have here. At Caliber and created a lot of value there. So it’s, it’s not coming with a playbook. I don’t really have one. We have great operators. I, I’m just here to help them think about scale, to think about eliminating variability as much as we possibly can. Upskilling up training, making sure that we’re hiring and selecting for, you know, critical criteria that makes us better. But it’s also been over the course of my tenure here the last couple years, we have brought in some outside talent who had the experiences within other functional areas that help us improve. While we’re leaning on those operators that are just incredible, right, they’ll run through the wall. They just are resilient, incredibly resilient. But we need to make their jobs a little bit easier. The bigger we get, the harder it is to do some of those jobs at scale. And so we have to give them some tools that actually makes their lives easier to manage. And those of us who come from large multi unit environments are able to bring some of that to the operators and we’re seeing a quick uptake. Caliber Way is a great example. We’ve greatly improved our customer success call center team over the course of the last year. It’s been pretty remarkable. So there’s areas of significant improvement by just bringing in some of that scale capability and talent to supplement the awesome operators that we have in the organization. That’s been the change. And you know, you can learn those best practices from either auto adjacent or, or other multi unit that really, that’s really cracking the code on, on how we actually do this. As big as we’ve gotten.

Cole Strandberg: No doubt. I appreciate that rundown of your background. I think it’s incredibly helpful in understanding where you’re coming from and the different perspective you’re bringing not only to Caliber, but I think to the industry. I would bet that you heard the term talent shortage within your first 30 minutes at Caliber HQ on day one on the job. And obviously that’s an industry wide challenge that we’re all addressing together. But from your perspective, how significant is the talent shortage for Caliber and how have you seen that evolve even since you’re first joining the industry and the organization?

David Dart: Well, I would say it changed. It has changed even since I got here. Right. So apparently that’s another thing about this industry. Hang on. It’s going to be totally different in a year from now. But we had done a long range plan and had kind of really felt that demand would far exceed supply for a significant period of time. For the foreseeable future. But what the industry hadn’t really seen yet, or we hadn’t really caught up to us as much as perhaps it had from some of us smaller independents. But the inflationary pressure that happened between starting in 2021 through 2022 had really put people’s pocketbooks at risk. And so insurance premiums have gone up 59% since 2021. And then you have inflation and then interest rates go up, and people are still kind of spending habits are still back when they had a lot of cash after the pandemic flood of cash that came into the. Into the US and now they have credit card debt because they’re continuing to spend, because they ran out of cash. So they keep spending. Their interest rates on the credit cards went from 14% to 28%. So now they’re looking at their insurance or they’re at the kitchen table. How am I going to make ends meet? Put food on the table? So a lot of them said, look at my insurance premium has gotten so high, I’ll go to a $2,000 deductible instead of a $500 deductible, lower my premium, and then I’ll be okay. Well, at the same time, used car prices have plummeted and all these factors that are going into things like the number of total losses and those sorts of things. So we had the kind of the perfect storm happen. And so demand started to wane for all of us in the industry. And, you know, fortunately we shifted our focus and priority. But for me, when I first got here, it was like, hire as many body technicians as you can. But in 2024, we did a. We had to shift because we said, hey, look, hire where we have demand and then slow hiring, or decide where we’re going to put apprentices where we don’t have as much demand. Make sure we’re capturing keys, make sure that we’re getting additional demand opportunities from our carrier partners to make sure that we’re doing that. So it was a pretty big shift. But hiring still remains one of the critical elements of whether or not we’re going to reach our full potential as a company and meet our goals that we’ve committed to with the owners of the company because it’s still very difficult to hire. These technicians are just so valuable to their owners. Whether you’re a small independent or you’re a large mso, body technicians are critical. So there’s still a shortage. We don’t have enough. That’s why we’re going to focus on building our own but we have to make ourselves very attractive. We want to be an employer of choice. So there are things that we’re doing there to actually ensure that we’re at the forefront. You know, we are the industry leader. We can change things in the industry by leading. And so there are things that we’re providing that we think will be differentiating. And I think the industry will come along with some of those things.

Cole Strandberg: I want to talk about some of those differentiators and I know we’ve touched on it, but I think it’s a good kind of moment to put a bow on that. And essentially your pitch for hiring at caliber. But beyond that as in industry, why do you think we’re having such a challenge in, in getting this talent into the industry that maybe historically was interested, but we’re missing out on some of these good young people coming in.

David Dart: Well, frankly this is. You’re getting a little bit of Dave Darts opinion here, Mike, but I love it. That’s what we want. Well, you know, my dad retired from gm. You know, long career at gm, started as an electrician apprentice, became an electrician, then became an elevator apprentice and then was in elevator repairs. His career at General Motors. They had great apprentice programs at General Motors. Incredible. Over the course of decades when we offshored a lot of the manufacturing in the US and we changed also there was a stigma associated with some of the trade schools and as there was a lot of marketing to oh, go get a four year degree, go get a four. Four year degrees aren’t for everybody. Like we really over indexed on that. I have a lot of personal friends who wandered around, wasted money for five, six years and ended up in a trade and, and found their way. But like it’s. There was a stigma in the U.S. you know, over the course of the last 15, 20 years is starting to finally change. So I think you’re seeing a lot of people acknowledge that these trade schools are critically important apprentice programs. We want to have the best, not just in this industry, but one of the best apprentice programs in the country. So we’re setting our bar high. We’re not there yet. There’s improvements every year that we’re doing. We’re taking on projects to improve our apprentice program every year. But that stigma is starting to go away. And I think it’s really started the last two or three years where people have said the cost of education has gotten completely out of control. There are other options where you can go earn immediately or earn very shortly. So here’s an opportunity for you to join an industry that is pretty quite remarkable. We need to do a better job of marketing as a whole, and we are starting to do that too. The candidate value proposition is an industry value proposition proposition. And we believe that the work that we’re going to continue to do and with our large MSO partners, we’ll be able to market effectively to people who don’t even know who we are. Like they might not even have thought about, maybe I could go into the collision industry and how much do those jobs pay eventually? So instead of just hoping that people who are interested in cars knock on our door, educating people that could be interested in a career can find their way to Caliber. That’s what we have to do through better candidate and industry value proposition marketing.

Cole Strandberg: Now talk about Caliber’s differentiators from your perspective as well.

David Dart: Well, I do think culture remains a big differentiator for us. There’s, there’s no question about that. But part of the initiatives that we’re putting forth is to make sure we had great training when we were smaller because it was easier to do. But then we got really big, really fast. And so we had to bring in other methods of training in order to do that at scale. So great training, you’re going to receive great training if you’re in the apprentice program. We have, you know, great training not only for, for you, but for the mentor and also, you know, some, some additional toolbox stipends, some things to get you started. We have outstanding benefits, so we’re continuing to improve those. We want them not just outstanding, but also affordable. So we offer, you know, health, health care on day one. We have the 401k match is 3%. So every, you know, when you put in and contribute, we put in as part of that for you. We have also retirement planners through our 401k administrator. So we’ll help you set up what retirement’s going to look like in the future. So get you involved in that early on. We have on the healthcare side, continuing with that, we have a lot of programs that we put in recently that have paid transparency tools and we have concierge service to help you navigate the complexity of the US health care system. We have other voluntary benefits that are fantastic for our teammates, but ultimately they want a great environment. When we look at why technicians and service advisors leave the organization, certainly compensation. So we want to have competitive comp programs, but it really is about the work environment. Those centers get really, really close and connected and tight. And we want to make sure we’re teaching that we’re emphasizing that we’re driving engagement with our teammates because we know that’s the second most likely scenario where they might depart the company. And those two roles are the big revenue generating ones. We got to make sure that we have great opportunities there. But if you are interested in also growing in the organization, because we’re large, we do have a lot of management and leadership opportunities. Regional manager, regional vice president, vice president. Those are all pathways out of the center into management at a pretty large scale. 50, 60, 100 centers, you know, and for our RVPs and VPs. So, you know, if someone’s interested in a management career, you can find it here. And a degree is not required. Right. I mean this, this industry is fantastic for building our own and you know, this is a great, great place to start.

Cole Strandberg: I think that’s incredibly helpful on multiple fronts. Number one, prospective employees, if you’re listening, there you go. Number two, business owners in the industry. That is where the industry is headed. And I think all of us and this kind of transparency is incredibly helpful in knowing we’re not even competing with each other for talent. We’re competing with other industries for talent. So to all come together, row the boat in the same direction and have an understanding of what is required to hire the best of the best, I think is incredibly helpful and impactful and actionable. Some partnerships that caliber has as well that I understand plays a role in, in retention and training and all of that stuff. Anybody or any partnerships you’d like to call out?

David Dart: Well, I think, you know, the, it really goes really hand in hand with our suppliers like Exalta and, and Sherwin Williams and, and 3M. I mean the, the, they’ve been so open. 3M has been incredibly open to me where, you know, where they have great training programs for this industry. Right. They want the whole industry to succeed. So they have incredible training and development programs for us to kind of get a bird’s eye view in and say, hey look, are there things that we can take from them that actually will make us better in our training programs? They’ve been fantastic. Our paint suppliers, Exalton, Sherwin Williams, fantastic strategic partners. They actually can really help us identify where we do have needs for upskilling with our painters, you know, and liquid cost per hour analysis and, and so that helps us actually get better at, on the front line. So they’ve been incredible partners for us. We are looking at technology partnerships to make our training more accessible to the front line, to include AI elements that deskill the job to make it easier for People to obtain the information that’s relevant to them right now. So if a service advisor is writing a. An estimate, is there a reference that they need that they can go to quickly as opposed to looking through a huge DRP guide? Where can technology be helpful? That’s also one area that we’re doing some very close partnerships with, which has been fantastic. The other partner is really, again, the US Military. So they’ve been really important to us. And so we have a Changing Lanes program where we’re taking people that are transitioning out of the US Military into our apprentice programs. But we’re looking to expand that to other roles as well. So, you know, those are some of the things that we’re looking at. The other important partner for us. I should really throw this out there is snap on. It’s one of the benefits of being on the larger side of the industry because we partner with them on our. And our TAP graduates or our TAP apprentices so that they come in and we’re in a joint partnership with them. We’re providing our apprentices with a toolkit, and so we share the cost of that. And, you know, obviously there’s some benefit to them in that you could be creating a lifelong, brand loyal, you know, body technician, because they certainly spend an awful lot of money on that. So they’ve been an incredible partner. And we also. Techforce foundation has been really helpful for us. It’s a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting workforce development for technicians. So that’s been pretty critical. And actually, One of our VPs, Angie Babin, she sits as a chair and president on the board of directors. So we definitely want to be out there working with partners to make sure that we’re hearing firsthand what’s going on in the industry and we can make adjustments as quickly as we can.

Cole Strandberg: You’ve mentioned the term culture multiple times. I understand the importance to you and the Caliber organization. You’ve also mentioned kind of career progression and mapping. Interested to know if there are any individuals within the Caliber organization who kind of comes to mind when you think of a Caliber success story of. Of rising through the ranks and what that looks like?

David Dart: Yeah, sure. We have them all over the place. Honestly, this has been one of the best things about this industry is seeing what kind of careers that you. That can be made starting in the. And, you know, as a detailer. So Todd Dillinger is obviously our probably best example of, you know, he’s our. Currently our chief operating officer. I mean, he has over 30,000 people who report to him, you know, and he started in the shop, right, sweeping floors and washing cars. And so he’s been in you know, so many different roles in the center and then you know, at the company as we grew. But we continue to do that here as well. There’s so many opportunities again because we’re expanding but you can learning each step of the way. We just needed to have a framework for it because we got so large so that you could see the opportunity for yourself at a company our size. So for example, the levels that we have is okay, office manager, I’m sorry office assistant to office Manager, maybe to SA1, SA2, SA3 to GM1, GM2, GM3 to RM1, RM2. So we have these steps that you can take and as you expand your capability then you have the ability to grow. It was very organic in the past. It happened naturally as the company grew. But now we’re at a spot where we really do have to be more deliberate which helps keep that consistency of culture and kind of helping people grow but doing it in a more structured fashion than it was when we were smaller. But we still have all of our senior vice presidents and the operations Collision organization are all lifelong collision folks. One person came out of the insurance industry and then came into collision but you know, collision adjacent, you know, very familiar.

Cole Strandberg: So sure with structure comes data and managing that data and really having an understanding of what’s going on to that without giving anything confidential away or anything of that nature. How do you measure the success of your talent development initiatives within caliber?

David Dart: Yeah, that’s a this data insights action, you know, gotta have it. I mean and this wouldn’t be a secret. I think everyone should be worried about this. Our first year turnover for our general managers is something that we look at consistently that’s actually improved dramatically over the course of the last 15 months. I think it has a lot to do with the better new to role training that we’re instituting in the organization. Number two, when we look at first 90 day turnovers of service advisors, that’s a big key indicator. Are you onboarding them well enough? Can they be successful? Are you paying them well enough? How do you make sure that they get a book of business so that they’re moving quickly? So we track first 90 day turnover. I want to make sure my I got the finger on the pulse of that. We look at employee net promoter score and we do quarterly pulse surveys of our centers to make sure that we don’t have any, you know, something that’s happening. You can tell on these pulse surveys they’re shorter than the maybe every 12 to 18 months all teammate survey. But they’re center oriented and we want to just understand hey look, is there somewhere can we do we need to help in this area for these individuals. So that’s a big one for us. We also look at our centers because we are so large. We do put them in quintiles because it helps us monitor the performance across the multiple data sets of performance including enps and turnover overall because body tech turnover is another factor that we certainly look at voluntary and involuntary and we track that regularly and then we report on that so that people do know where they stand in the organization. If you’re a general manager and you’re centers in the bottom quintile or, or fourth quintile, you we are there to help that those organizations to help them move up, up that chain. But we’re looking at all those metrics that lead to driving turnover and that’s the biggest one. It’s the easiest one to look at. But we can start to look at how many people are trained right how many, how many service advisors have gone through the caliber way either through the onboarding learning journey initially or through UP training to make sure that they’re sharpening the saw on a regular basis. So we can monitor that through our learning management system, make sure that we’re making progress on those things. So but the, but the two really big ones for me are first year turnover for general managers and first 90 day for service advisors. If we can get service advisors past 90 days, they stick around for quite a while. If we get GMs past a year, they stick around for quite a while and are successful.

Cole Strandberg: Fantastic. A mentor of mine imprinted this into my brain and that is if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And in a growing organization, I know that’s doubly true. Our conversation has been packed full of insights that listeners could certainly take action on. And so appreciative of you and of caliber for willing to put all this information out into the world. But to put a bow on it, what advice would you give to collision repair business owners who are facing all these challenges we’ve talked about in workforce force development, hiring, retention, all the above.

David Dart: My advice is to understand that people are the only true competitive advantage. I mean like that’s the best advice I think I can give. You know, as a big hr, big company HR person, I view my role as I ensure the company’s strategy is executed through human systems all the way through the value chain. And as a, this industry is a people driven business. People are our product. And so making sure that you’re effectively training your technicians and your service advisors and you know these small business owners, they know this already like they know it like the back of their hand. And so, but, but that would be the advice, right? And then as you get larger and larger it becomes more challenging to do that. And so making sure that your, your team is trained effectively on how to order parts, how to write estimates, how to, how to repair vehicles. You know, the apprentice is moving from graduation to where they’re kind of as a C tech, you know, and capability because it takes a while to really get effective. How do you move them from C to B and B to A. Like what’s that postgraduate program? If you have an apprentice program you have to be thinking about some of those things to make sure that you’re, they’re continuing to grow and, and improve and providing productivity to your location. But it’s really a people driven business that that’s what I would offer and making sure that you’re training them as early and often as possible and creating a great environment for them to grow.

Cole Strandberg: You mentioned we’re making strides here as an industry and I completely agree. But from your perspective, how can the industry as a whole further collaborate in addressing this talent shortage we’re facing?

David Dart: Well, I think there’s two things. One is a little bit of something you mentioned earlier in the conversation which is it’s embracing outside models that outside multi units like studying other industries more effectively. My sense was when I first arrived that the collision industry is like we’re different and we are, we are really different. It’s unique, it’s really interesting model. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been in different manufacturing and multi unit so we are different. But there are things that we can learn from other industries and I think that looking outside the industry as well as inside it would be really helpful for us. But I do think instead of having the just the conflicts that we have in this industry, the last industry I was in was pest management. And the top 100 represented 90% of the revenue in the industry. And, and when you the two largest were 50% I was part of one of those. These businesses are fantastic at over 20% margin. We shared, we knew that everyone could grow. There’s enough room for us all to grow. And so we did spend a lot of time together talking about interesting things, marketing the industry to talent because pest management isn’t, you know, not a lot of people want to go crawl under houses, you know, in the dark. And you know, that’s not like it seems like. Is that an attractive industry? Well, it’s a customer service industry. If you’re customer service oriented, that’s a great industry to go in. You can be a standalone technician in four months. And how do you market that? Right. We need to market as an industry to potential, to young people, to other people in skilled trades that might actually come over. And actually, because the opportunity to earn with us is you can learn over, earn over six figures if you’re willing to work hard and, and get highly skilled. This is a, it’s a great industry and it’s a, it’s a great program. We should make more of an effort together, our competition to make sure that we’re marketing effectively and together. Because we did that pretty well in my last industry and we saw a real rise in the people who joined the industry, including, you know, diversity ended up being a big part of that too. So because we were specifically marketing to women and people of color and it actually yielded a lot of benefits to the organization and to the industry as a whole. But we did a lot of that together.

Cole Strandberg: Absolutely. Nope. Makes total sense. And David, you’ve been so generous with your time today. I have one kind of overarching question left for you before we start to wrap up, and that’s in advance. I’d ask you to go ahead and take out your crystal ball, but what do you see the future of workforce development looking like in the collision repair industry as we continue to grow and we continue to face and knock down some of these challenges we have today?

David Dart: Well, the complexity of the repairs going up so significantly. We have to start as an industry and with our technology partners and with our carrier partners, we have to start leveraging technology. AI, which will help us with more accurate estimates more quickly, will help us diagnose certain issues, will also, because there’s just the volume of changes that are occurring, having access to AI and learning is going to be critical. So we do have to move up that maturity curve as an industry with technology being at the forefront, I think that is really going to be critical for us to keep moving forward because that does end up enabling the teammates on the front line. If it’s too complicated to write an estimate, get 90% of it done through AI. And then coming around the edges, make sure that if you have a bunch of different DRP programs that you have the up to date information of how to actually write those things, AI can help tremendously and we can also do things at scale where you have the glasses and you can do a complex repair and teach it to technicians that are maybe growing in the industry where they don’t have to be in that center, but they can actually work with a quality technical coach and a technician that’s skilled enough to do a complex repair so that they can view it in California even though the repair is being done in Maryland. Those sorts of things have have got to be available to us so that we’re moving up the curve to make sure that we’re keeping up with all the technological advances. And in the auto industry as a.

Cole Strandberg: Whole, those advances are not slowing down. And so appreciate having leaders like you coming here on the Collision Vision sharing the insights with us. Typically, again, as Caliber goes, the industry follows. So really do appreciate all that you guys are doing. I want to ask for some links after we end this call. Certainly for folks who want to learn more about tap and changing lanes in the Caliber way, but at a high level for folks who want to get in touch with you or learn more about Caliber, where can they do that?

David Dart: Well, we have a couple of different places. So you go to www.caliber.com that’s our career site’s there so you can browse our jobs and look at anything there and anyone who’s interested in, you know, having a conversation with me specifically at, you know, david [email protected] I’m happy to answer any questions that people might have regarding Caliber, the industry or kind of where does human capital go now in the future. Happy to make sure that we have some of that available to people.

Cole Strandberg: Awesome. Awesome. And like I said, check the link for links in the show notes rather for some more information. We’ll load that up as well. David, really appreciate you. It was an absolute pleasure and thank you for joining us on the Collision Vision.

Listen and Follow The Collision Vision.