Collision repairers who missed the “out-of-the-box” Society of Collision Repair Specialists Repairer Roundtable event featuring Chipotle Chief Financial Officer Jack Hartung are in luck.

The trade group on Thursday posted the video of Hartung’s speech and a panel featuring Hartung and body shop owners Robert Grieve of Nylund’s Collision Center, Jeff Kallemeyn of Kallemeyn Collision and Matthew McDonnell of Big Sky Collision.

Chipotle’s story shows that some customers are willing to seek out quality — and catering to that base can be highly profitable for a business. Chipotle’s stock opened in January 2006 at $42.20 and was trading at $450.90 a share as of early Friday afternoon, according to Yahoo Finance. Its 2017 revenue was $4.5 billion, with net income of $176.3 million, and it ended the year with 2,408 restaurants — compared to just one location 25 years ago.

That’s an important message for a collision industry that sometimes can feel as though it’s in a “race to the bottom” fueled by cut-rate practitioners or insurer pressure.

Rather than go the “whole paycheck” model of Whole Foods and charge customers more than fast-casual rivals like Panera, Moe’s and Qdoba, Hartung said Chipotle looked for efficiencies in line items other than food to help achieve the trifecta business school professors have called impossible: higher-quality ingredients at a higher expense, charging about the same as other fast-casual competitors and high returns. It also focused on educating customers about their food, he said.

Hartung also provided several insights into how auto body shops might attract and retrain good workers and use them to deliver a proper repair to customers.

Get people who buy into the company’s vision and train them, and “people will work really hard,” he said. In contrast, telling people to work hard and “kicking them” to do so will just produce employees whose energy level will “drop dramatically” the minute you leave the area, according to Hartung.

The event came six months after the multimillion-dollar, industry-shaking John Eagle Collision Center verdict, a reputational and financial nightmare scenario for any shop. Chipotle recently had a similar rocky reputational and financial time of it, and Hartung during the April presentation offered lessons for shops on how to rebuild a business and customer trust after internal and external incidents.

Chipotle’s 2017 10-K notes the impact its issues with E.coli and norovirus between 2015 and 2017 had on the company and points out how its problems might have been exacerbated by the rise of social media. The company also experienced a data breach in 2017 from malware on credit card point-of-sale terminals — a tech concern all retailers should fear  — and set aside $30 million for liabilities related to it.

More information:

“SCRS 2018 Repairer Roundtable – Presentation from Jack Hartung of Chipotle (Part I)”

Society of Collision Repair Specialists YouTube channel, July 5, 2018

“SCRS 2018 Repairer Roundtable – Q&A with Jack Hartung of Chipotle (Part II)”

SCRS YouTube channel, July 5, 2018

Featured image: Collision repairers who missed the “out-of-the-box” Society of Collision Repair Specialists Repairer Roundtable event featuring Chipotle Chief Financial Officer Jack Hartung are in luck. The trade group on Thursday posted the video of Hartung’s speech and a panel featuring Hartung and body shop owners Robert Grieve of Nylund’s Collision Center, Jeff Kallemeyn of Kallemeyn Collision and Matthew McDonnell of Big Sky Collision. (Screenshot from SCRS YouTube channel)