Like many shop owners, Shawn Crozat came to collision repair by growing up in the business. He didn’t enjoy school that much, he says. So, at 18 he decided college wasn’t for him and took a seat at the reception desk at G&C Auto Body, the business his father Gene started in 1972.
But Shawn didn’t get to enjoy a slow, methodical introduction to the world of collision repair. He got thrown into the fire right away when one of the shop’s estimators was injured in a car accident. That meant all hands on deck and an earnest beginning to what’s been a lifelong career.
“They threw me a clipboard and a Mitchell book, that's how long ago it was, and said, ‘Well you're an estimator now, dude,’” Crozat recalls.
Crozat’s role in the family business only accelerated from there. He opened his own shop at the age of 20, the second location for G&C Auto Body. Crozat had no experience remodeling a business, no experience managing a business, but his dad told him to go out and learn.
“It was just the school of hard knocks,” Crozat says. “I've made a lot of mistakes, I probably cried at my desk more than I would like. But, you know, learned from there.”
It’s fitting Crozat was involved in what was the company’s first expansion. His success in leading that second shop begat a third shop, and that was where the company stayed for a long time. Again came more learning, working through challenges, overcoming bad processes, growing in spurts to 11 locations by 2016.
That was the year Crozat’s father died, leaving big shoes to fill in both the business and their Northern California community. Gene Crozat was an icon in and around the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, known for his radio commercials, charity work, and, of course, quality repairs. Guiding quotes from the family patriarch still dot the G&C website.
“When people ask me how long I’ve been in the auto body business,” one reads, “I tell them I’m in the people pleasing business.”
Taking over from a legend wasn’t easy, but the knowledge gained from both successes and mistakes helped Shawn expand the business to 15 locations by the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of retreat, Crozat took the time to re-examine the company’s processes and refine its leadership team. Since September of 2020, the business nearly doubled in size with 14 more locations. Crozat says G&C is now the largest family-owned body shop business in the United States, and he knows exactly how they’ve done it.
“I think it really comes down to your people and culture,” Crozat says. “And I think that, I honestly know, we have the strongest leadership team and we have a great ability to build our own bench, and we're very good at that, building our own leaders, our technicians, our own writers and we also have an incredibly good culture.”
Maintaining Culture
The efficacy of that culture is right there when looking at the G&C team. Crozat says the business experiences very low turnover, and that’s not easy to do when talking about nearly 30 locations. Crozat credits the leadership team for maintaining company standards, which isn’t always easy to do during times of growth.
Crozat reports the business is roughly 3% down in cycle time from pre-pandemic levels—"which isn’t good enough,” he says. For years G&C has hung its hat on the reputation of repairing cars faster than its competitors. But there are signs that is on its way back up, as Crozat is able to quickly call up the numbers from the fourth quarter of 2022, showing they repaired cars 32% faster in December than they did in August. CSI scores are also back to pre-COVID levels or above.
“We just had to change our focus, had to figure out hey, look, we’ve gotten sick of the excuses,” Crozat says, “It's really benefited us.”
That “no excuses” approach encapsulates Crozat’s business philosophy. There is no magic bullet process to fix any scenario if you don’t have the right people in place. The right people, culture and leadership will result in the right process.
G&C does what it can to routinely monitor its culture even with hundreds of employees across dozens of locations. Every six months the company sends out surveys to its employees to track not only that employee’s self-evaluation but their evaluation of the company as a whole. Crozat says the most recent survey, compiled just before Christmas, gave the company its highest scores yet.
“And I read every single one of [the surveys] twice,” Crozat says, “to look for every opportunity, how we can be a better employer but also learn from our people because they are the ones doing the work. And a lot of our best ideas come from our people, not our leadership, because they're the ones down there.”
The extra appreciation for employees maybe stems in part from G&C being founded and still operated as a family business. Crozat says his mom, his two brothers, sister, cousin, two sisters in law and a second cousin all presently work in the business—“I think I got everybody,” he says with a laugh. The business has helped keep the family together.
Crozat offers the example of his cousin that he grew up with, who formerly lived in Sacramento a two-hour drive or more away. He came to work for G&C more than 20 years ago and was able to move his family closer. G&C’s home base is like the center of the family universe.
“A benefit that I think about often is that so many people, you get a job and you got to go where that job is and it splits up families,” Crozat says. “You got to take the job, you got to move to this state or that state or this town or that town. So it's cool to run this business. It's kept us close.”
Community Responsibility
Crozat and his family also enjoy a close relationship with the North Bay communities they serve, in continuation of the legacy started by Crozat’s father years ago. That assistance has taken many forms over the 50 years G&C has been in business, but for approximately the last 10 years, a focus of charity outreach has been the Crozat Family Foundation. On the foundation website another quote from Gene is displayed:
“It is our responsibility to help our fellow men.”
The foundation does that through the gift of reliable transportation. G&C operates locations mostly in rural areas, where access to a car is a necessity as public transportation can be scant. There is an application process to nominate a person going through hardship and the foundation gives away 24 cars per year. These are either donated through insurance partners or the company buys them, then doing the repair work to make safe, reliable vehicles.
The foundation is so much of a focus at G&C that there is a full-time employee that oversees it. Crozat says recipients are often people who have been the victims of domestic violence and are starting over with little. In addition to the car, recipients receive six months of gas and insurance, among other benefits.
Giving back to the communities the business serves in this way is something Crozat is proud of and something he hopes his dad would be proud of. He recalls learning at a 2021 National Auto Body Council meeting that G&C had donated the third-most cars in the country that year, behind much larger brands Caliber and CARSTAR in first and second, respectively. He still has a photo saved to his phone to prove it.
“We ranked third in the whole nation,” Crozat says proudly. “… So, it was kind of exciting for us to, you know, we're very small compared to all these companies and I think giving back to our community is pretty damn important to us.”
