How to start estimating?

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 02, 2011 6:08 pm
Hi to everyone, I'm new to the site and have to say this is a great place. I have been doing autobody/paint for 14 years. I work for a family business that my father has operated for the past 32 years.I am currently the head bodyman/painter and am planning on taking over the business in the near future. My problem is that i don't do any estimating just the labour part of things and don't know much about estimating. My father usually just estimates in his head how much labour it takes and the cost of materials and calls the dealer for exact part prices. I don't know where to start. Any advice would be appreciated. :rockon:

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 02, 2011 7:45 pm
Do yourself a favor and GO TO SCHOOL"! I cant emphasize this enough!
It would take a long time for your father to teach you this part of the business,,,and its changing all the time......
"The number of parasites in the USA has now eclipsed the number of productive members of society"


Capt Rick Hiott.
www.reelfishhead.com



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PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 12:43 pm
Oh my god I lived through that it's not the way to run a business.
1. old cars or projects Time plus Matirial always
2. Like the old guy said call ADP estimating or try other companies. If you use there software (computer estimating) they usually have a school you can go to for free. its worth it you have to make money to stay in buisiness
And dont try to be a cheap shop I made more money by sticking by the rates. worked less hours and better work.
If you write your estimates by the book you can pay your employees comission they will be happier and do better work.
One peice of advice for that is that they do the job start to finish even clean it up or at least inspect it when it is done it will teach then to follow up on there work better and you wont get hit by a surprise when the customer picks up there car. good luck its hard at first but you can do it.
Also when your working with a customer DO NOT RUSH take your time and sell the job dont worry about what your working on or behind on the customer will pick up on that.



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PostPosted: Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:12 pm
flpainter wrote:Oh my god I lived through that it's not the way to run a business.
1. old cars or projects Time plus Matirial always
2. Like the old guy said call ADP estimating or try other companies. If you use there software (computer estimating) they usually have a school you can go to for free. its worth it you have to make money to stay in buisiness
And dont try to be a cheap shop I made more money by sticking by the rates. worked less hours and better work.
If you write your estimates by the book you can pay your employees comission they will be happier and do better work.
One peice of advice for that is that they do the job start to finish even clean it up or at least inspect it when it is done it will teach then to follow up on there work better and you wont get hit by a surprise when the customer picks up there car. good luck its hard at first but you can do it.
Also when your working with a customer DO NOT RUSH take your time and sell the job dont worry about what your working on or behind on the customer will pick up on that.


Thanks for the kind words flpainter. :bighug:



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PostPosted: Fri Nov 18, 2011 7:03 am
great advise already. i'm not a pro by any means, but when i get someone wanting an estimate on work, i like to go higher than i think. then if in the event it turns out it wasnt as expensive( parts, labor) then the customer is pretty happy.

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 11:35 pm
We do our estimates by panel, around $250-$350 for the bigger panel depending on the color and body work needed. To be honest though, as our shop grows, I have to find an alternative to do this, to make proper estimates. I still get surprised when I get a check from the insurance company for $7k, because I had nowhere near that in my head. One thing to keep in mind when estimating though is that customers that are not using insurance don't want to spend alot of their money, so you have to find that sweet spot where you get the most out of the customer while still keeping the job. I try for the customer to leave me the car on their first visit, without going out for other estimates. Down in South Florida the competition is tough and they're hungry. I like to keep my estimating simple and let the insurance company make their estimates, but that won't work for me for much longer and neither is it the proper way to run a shop. Let me know what you end up doing, as I need to take this step as well in the near future.



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PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2012 8:59 pm
TheCarFactory wrote:We do our estimates by panel, around $250-$350 for the bigger panel depending on the color and body work needed. To be honest though, as our shop grows, I have to find an alternative to do this, to make proper estimates. I still get surprised when I get a check from the insurance company for $7k, because I had nowhere near that in my head. One thing to keep in mind when estimating though is that customers that are not using insurance don't want to spend alot of their money, so you have to find that sweet spot where you get the most out of the customer while still keeping the job. I try for the customer to leave me the car on their first visit, without going out for other estimates. Down in South Florida the competition is tough and they're hungry. I like to keep my estimating simple and let the insurance company make their estimates, but that won't work for me for much longer and neither is it the proper way to run a shop. Let me know what you end up doing, as I need to take this step as well in the near future.



I have done just the opposite for many years especially for friends. I tell them to go get a couple other estimates first then some to me. If the other estimates are too cheap then I tell them I can't do the job for that kind of money. If one or both of the other estimates are good estimates then I tell my customer I can beat the other estimates and save them a few dollars (and I still get well paid in the process). I WANT my customers to know whats going on and what other shops will charge them to do the job they want me to do. In some cases those customers get sticker shock when they see what other shops are charging and they feel more comfortable having me do the job. I have run a small shop (my own shop) for the last 20 years. I have intentionally kept it a small shop because thats the situation I like. I had a larger shop with several employees at one point 25 years ago and it was a real PIA.
I took more money in but the overhead was way higher. I had to worry about keeping the quality of the work up with employees, hard to find good employees who show up every day and even then somehwere near on time. A lot of the bodymen back then were "nomads" who just went from job to job never really trying to find a good place to stay at. Now I put a lot more money in my pocket with a low overhead and an excellent reputation. ALL my work is by word of mouth, several of my customers are second generation where I did work for their parents and now their grown kids also bring work to me. On customer pay work I look the job over and decide in my head what the job is worth to ME to do. I have done pretty well for a long time. If they have estimates for less than what I think is reasonable I tell them I can't do the job for that, friend or no friend. Otherwise I will cut a reasonable estimate by a few dollars and everyone is happy.

Writing estimates is all in what YOU want your business to be. If you don't know what you're doing when it comes to pricing then absolutely get a software program (that can cost you several hundred dollars a month). If you want to run a high volume shop then you'll need computer estimating software. LIke I said, my goal is and was to keep my shop small and personal with all my customers.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 06, 2012 9:19 pm
Down here you can find a shop to give you a paint job for like $500. Its a hack job, but people down here never actually discuss quality, just pricing. They complain about the horrible quality after the fact. I never had this issue, because I don't do "economic" paint jobs, I charge for my work, but I get people in my shop all the time showing up with nasty looking cars. They all complain what a horrible job the last shop did, but they don't understand that a proper job cost money. So when they leave my shop for other estimates, they'll bump into that guy that's going to give them that magical $500 paint job. "THAT'S $1000 CHEAPER THAN THOSE OTHER GUYS!". No questions asked, leave the car to get hacked up. I lose the job in the process, and they live to tell about how some guy ruined their Camry. For this reason, I don't like for people to leave my shop for other estimates.



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:01 am
TheCarFactory wrote:Down here you can find a shop to give you a paint job for like $500. Its a hack job, but people down here never actually discuss quality, just pricing. They complain about the horrible quality after the fact. I never had this issue, because I don't do "economic" paint jobs, I charge for my work, but I get people in my shop all the time showing up with nasty looking cars. They all complain what a horrible job the last shop did, but they don't understand that a proper job cost money. So when they leave my shop for other estimates, they'll bump into that guy that's going to give them that magical $500 paint job. "THAT'S $1000 CHEAPER THAN THOSE OTHER GUYS!". No questions asked, leave the car to get hacked up. I lose the job in the process, and they live to tell about how some guy ruined their Camry. For this reason, I don't like for people to leave my shop for other estimates.



Don't get wrong here, I'm not arguing with you or saying that I'm right and you're wrong. In this situation there really is no right or wrong, just different takes on a similar situation. I think this is an interesting discussion. I have people come to me occaisionally wanting me to paint their car at Maaco prices. I politely tell them that there is a huge difference between a custom urethane basecoat/clearcoat paintjob like I do and a Maaco acrylic enamel paint job that they do. I politely tell them that my cost of materials alone to do a custom BC/CC paint job costs much more than what maaco charges for the whole job. I then tell any customers that ask that my paint jobs start at $2500 for a basic scuff and shoot paint job. That does not include repairing dings, dents, rust, peeling paint, parts replacement, disassembly or any other paint or body related problems. In every case that $2500 goes up quickly from there. Each car is different, requiring different repair procedures to look like new again. I have never done a paint job for the $2500 starting price, it is always considerably more than that because of additional bodywork and deteoriated existing paint before I start on their car. Like I said earlier, I have an excellent reputation because I have kept my work at a high standard and won't do any work (like cheap paint jobs) that could negatively affect my excellent reputation. Because of that good reputation I have a enough work to keep my busy and make a decent income. I won't jeopardize that situation by trying to do work at deeply discounted prices to try and compete with hack shops. I don't feel I lost a job or lost a customer if they take their work to another shop. If I don't get some jobs then there is a reason for them going somewhere else (usually because someone else will do the job cheaper by cutting corners ending up with an unhappy customer.) I always have enough work to keep me busy so I really don't care if someone wants to take their car somewhere else to have it done cheaper. I just tell them " you get what you pay for and I can't do the job for any less than I quoted you".

I have had prospective customers walk into my shop and want me to do old car restoration work for them We go through a conversation where I ask them exactly what they want done to their car and a I get an idea of what their general expectations are in reference to the finished product and what its going to cost them to realize that finished product. I'm good at reading people and a few times I have turned work away because my gut feeling told me to not take on that job (that "gut feeling" is based on many years experience working with a lot of different customers). I had a guy a few years ago call me on the phone and tell me he was referred to me by a mutual friend and that he wanted me to do a full restoration on a 1957 T-Bird. He said he was willing to pay a "fair price" but that the job had to be perfect when I was done. I told him that perfection is an absolute and is not attainable. After talking with him a little more I told him I wasn't interested in doing the job. Just by his attitude I knew that as a customer he would be impossible to please and would in the long run cost me time and money. There is and was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I did the right thing in turning him away from my shop. Jobs that I'm just not interested in doing I politely tell the prospective customer that I'm booked solid for work and wouldn't be able to get to their car for several months up to a year away.

I have a brother down in the Tampa/St Pete area who is a frame man and general bodyman. He told me that there are a LOT of small shops down there that are run by "immigrants" who will work for almost nothing, so the competition is really fierce. Its no where near that bad around here. The good shops stay in business and the bad shops usually fold up and go out of business.



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 25, 2012 3:29 am
If it were my shop, I'd use the programs that tell you the avg rates of the work wanting done. I would then reduce my prices (slightly) so that more people would be coming in. I would ALSO give the customer the option of the hack job "economy special" and INFORM them on what this entails and what should come to expect, and why. I know some companies do this already and they end up giving the customer a pamphlet on their paint jobs and prices "1 year warranty costs $500, 6 year warranty costs $1200, lifetime costs $1600", or whatever. Same concept when you are buying tires from Walmart.

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