Creating a Shared Vision

The typical shop owner or operator makes dozens of decisions, juggles numerous questions and requests from employees, and puts out several fires on a daily basis. 

Think about your typical week. If you had to write down each decision you made and each task you had to keep track of, how many sheets of paper would you need? My guess is, in a week, you’d be able to fill up a whole notebook.  

Dan Dent has been in the automotive industry for almost 20 years, and he sees the same thing happening in collision repair shops across the country. Between managing relationships with vendors, dealing with insurance companies, making sure their shops are compliant with local, state and federal regulations, and making sure their employees are taken care of and doing good work, Dent says it’s a miracle that vehicles are repaired. 

“I'm astonished how they get it done,” Dent says. “The challenge they take on and go through each day is just amazing.” 

Success is hard to come by in the collision repair industry. Shops aren’t built overnight – literally and metaphorically – and very rarely can someone come in and lead effectively without experience. 

“It takes a mind that's been part of it for quite a while,” Dent says. “That learned experience is really what drives them getting good at what they've done.” 

It also takes someone with experience to realize that if they’re going to run a successful shop, they can’t do it alone.  

Andrew Suggs grew up in the industry working with his father. In 2018, he purchased five collision repair facilities from his dad, and he saw firsthand just how much of a grind staying on top of the day-to-day responsibilities could be.  

“The business aged [my dad] a lot when he was in it. And now that he’s out, he looks 10 years younger,” Suggs says. “We always ran very lean, and we were very successful in doing that, but that comes with a lack of extra time. You get stuck in the minutiae of the business.” 

Suggs is the co-founder of Collision Vision, a platform that he describes as a “CRM [customer relationship management platform] on steroids.” It’s pretty simple on the surface; it’s an all-in-one portal that helps shops track everything from OEM and technician certifications to employee training and proper tooling required for a job. 

It’s a tool that’s designed to help shops catch up with the times. 

“It’s not anything that’s super ground-breaking,” Suggs says. It’s just bringing everything up to 2025. The fact that no one has done it up to this point is kind of surprising.” 

Building a Sandbox 

Collision Vision wasn’t initially a CRM platform. After Suggs sold his shops, he caught up with industry colleagues Jimmy Lefler and Matt McDonnell. Those two had also sold their collision shops, and each was off doing their own thing in the automotive space. 

“I was just catching up with Matt randomly, and he was telling me about one of the companies they had started, which was an augmented reality company,” Suggs says. “They were using HoloLens technology to build out training and repair procedures.”  

Suggs says he was impressed by the use of AR tech to bring “repair procedures to life” through an AI scan tool that assessed damage and instantly pulled up the necessary repair info.  

Suggs and Lefler decided to invest in McDonnell’s company, but they ran into one big problem as they were developing the tool.  

“Basically every OEM that we talked to said ‘yeah, we’re not giving you access to that kind of data,’” Suggs says.  

Undeterred, the trio continued to workshop. After a conversation with Collision Advice’s Mike Anderson, they decided to start focusing on building out structural virtual audits with the intention of gaining the trust of OEMs once they were established. As they worked, though, it started looking like they might just be building another website for shops to have to log into.  

Sugg’s experience as a shop owner with no extra time in the day gave him pause. 

“I don't want another website. I don't want another portal or whatever you want to call it,” he says. “I would be adamantly against it as a shop owner.” 

Building on that experience, Collision Vision eventually turned into the all-in-one portal that it is now. Suggs describes Collision Vision as a “sandbox” that allows shops and their employees to log in and find everything they need for training, certification status, necessary tools for jobs and certifications, and much more. 

Come Play with Us 

Collision Vision is constantly partnering with individual vendors, training providers and other essential players in the industry to keep bringing the latest requirements for repairing vehicles all in one place. Dent, who was hired as CEO of Collision Vision last year, says the platform is really the first time that so many different players have come together for the betterment of shops. 

“That's one of the great things about Collision Vision,” Dent says. “It’s driving efficiency, partnership and collaboration for anybody who wants to be part of it.” 

With Collision Vision, shops can create profiles for each of their technicians as well as their shop as a whole. For individual techs, they can list all of the trainings and certifications they have received, and the platform will automatically show any other trainings they might need to gain another certification or to stay certified. 

For the shop, if they’re interested in becoming OEM-certified for a specific make, the platform automatically populates every training that your technicians need to go through to achieve that certification. 

“It consolidates down the chasing of ‘How do I get certified?’” Dent says. “That's one of the biggest headaches for a shop. If you're interested, where do you go look? You go look on the internet, and it's not really easy to find half the time. So, what we've done is kind of consolidated it into a platform so they can see everything.” 

Additionally, using the AI scan tool through the platform, shops can register each and every piece of equipment they have, and it will automatically keep track of when each piece of equipment needs to be serviced based on information provided by vendors. 

The platform also uses AI to pull and consolidate hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of documents online related to a specific certification or tool that a shop can look for and puts it all in one place. 

Vendors also have access to their own portals, where they can upload their own documents and training requirements. 

Suggs says the Collision Vision team has backed into something much bigger than it ever envisioned for the platform, but he and Dent both say the larger goal for the team has remained the same.  

“If it doesn’t add value and it isn’t a benefit for the collision center, we’re not going to do it,” Dent says. “That’s what we’re really focused on, is how can we make things better for the shop?” 

Suggs says Collision Vision is a tool built by shop owners for shop owners, and its sole purpose is to make daily life more manageable.  

Suggs says the unique part of Collision Vision is that it provides common ground for every player in the industry to come together and work for the betterment of the shops. 

“None of these people talk to each other, and the shop's the only one that's getting screwed,” Suggs says. “With Collision Vision, we can take all these different entities and say, ‘You guys need to come play because it's the good for your customer.’ And so that's what we did. We build this giant sandbox that everybody can come and play in.”