Owner: Jerod Guerin (CEO of Quality Collision Group)
Location: San Diego
Staff Size: 49
Shop Size: 30,000 square feet
Average Monthly Car Count: 150
Average Repair Order: $7,350
Annual Revenue: $13.2 million
Founded in 1980, Amato’s Auto Body has certainly proven itself as a frontrunner in the auto collision sector in Southern California, proudly holding 18 OEM certifications from brands including Tesla, Audi, Porsche, and Land Rover, among others. Their commitment to OEM repairs and shared values caught Quality Collision Group’s (QCG) attention and brought Amato’s under their umbrella in 2022.
The Pictures
The first thing that will catch the unsuspecting eye in the body shop is the look and feel. If you think it’s a retro-style movie theater, then you’ve made the original operator proud.
"He’s a really big movie buff,” Victor Valencia, the GM at Amato’s, said about the original owner, Paul Amato. “It’s a really great icebreaker, especially with customers who are not always in the happiest mood when they come in.”
He said it’s very often that a customer might speak to a staff member and notice a prop or movie poster, and they briefly bond over it. Film is something that connects people of all backgrounds. Especially with classic movies, a slight taste of nostalgia can help some get through having to deal with such an adult situation as taking a car in and out of a shop.
It’s also a testament to the type of customers they get. You can imagine that any successful business based in San Diego is bound to get celebrity customers, and they certainly do.
It’s Showbiz, Kid
Although their names can’t be shared, Valencia shared an instance where the lead singer of a popular children’s animated franchise, from a production company you most certainly heard of, visited the shop.
“She came in and she loved the decor and started talking about the movies that she was in. And it was a great thing to kind of see not only somebody tied to the movie theater aspect of it, but also, she got kind of excited about it,” Valencia said. He even went on to share that the customer brought her friends to see the shop, even though they weren’t involved in a collision repair incident.
MSO Strategy: Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken
In a way, Amato’s Auto Body’s style became QCG’s style.
“Every business that we acquired remained branded the same as it was when we purchased it, and that was the goal,” Brent McKinney, executive vice president of operations, told FenderBender, “to come in and just supplement what they’re doing and buy businesses that are already good businesses that we don’t need to fix.There are no shops anywhere in the country that say ‘QCG’ on them.”
