Most collision shops were built on referrals from insurers and from the body shop next door going out of business. That worked while DRP volume held. It stops working the month a program cuts your allocation, a consolidator opens two miles away, or your best adjuster relationship retires.
This site is for the shop that wants a second source of work it owns. Customer-pay repairs, deductible-free PDR, bumper and cosmetic jobs, restoration, fleet accounts. The kind of work that comes in because a vehicle owner chose you, not because a claims system routed you.
What is on the site
The benchmark report is built from 70,441 public Google Business Profile listings for auto body and collision shops across 51 states. Half of them have 54 reviews or fewer. 35.4% list no website. Shops that do list a website carry a median of 91 reviews against 21 for shops that do not. Look up where your shop sits before anyone sells you anything.
The guides cover the parts of this that move drivable work into your lot: review velocity from a business where the customer never watches you work, an online estimate request that takes photos, Google Ads that do not spend your budget on people shopping insurance quotes, Meta offers built around PDR and cosmetic repair, cycle time as a marketing asset, and how to answer the vehicle owner who says the insurer told them to go somewhere else.
The missed-call calculator uses your own average repair order and monthly car count. At a $3,100 average RO the arithmetic gets uncomfortable fast, which is the point.
Who writes this
Steve Meitler edits the site. He runs growth campaigns for local service businesses, collision shops among them, and builds the benchmark dataset himself from public listings. Method and editorial rules are on the about page.