MSO CEOs on the right people for the right jobs, and some industry misconceptions

This year’s MSO Symposium brought together “the Four Aces” — the CEOs of Boyd Group, Caliber, Classic Collision, and Crash Champions —in Las Vegas on Monday, who ultimately landed on a simple conclusion: the collision repair industry depends on the right people fitting into the right roles.

When moderator Dan Risley asked what they’re hearing from investors and other stakeholders about the industry today, Boyd Group CEO Brian Kaner responded that the industry isn’t “recession-proof, but it is recession-resilient.”

“There are plenty of opportunities for us to continue to grow our businesses,” he said. “It all comes down to making sure you have the right people in the right roles with the right capabilities. And if you have that and you know how to keep score and you can win with the insurance carriers and you can take care of their customers and really be the extension of what they’re looking for, this is a great business to be in, and it’s something that we can continue to all thrive in.”

Brian Kaner

However, in response to a different question Risley posed about the “temperature” of each MSO’s team leaders, Crash Champions CEO Matt Ebert and Kaner agreed it’s a tense, stressful time for them, and made some important points about estimators.

Ebert said being an estimator, or as Crash Champions calls them, a service advisor, “has to be one of the most miserable spots.”

“You’ve got technicians bitching at you, you’ve got management or ownership bitching at you, you’ve got insurance companies bitching at you,” he said. “Everything you do gets criticized. Everything you do gets reviewed and sent back, and you have to do it again. I wouldn’t last a week. I would quit that job and tell you to shove it up your a**. If you want to know the temperature of our people, that is the truth.”

Ebert added that general managers also face pressure to keep customers, employees, and insurance companies happy while trying to make money and handle the safety, legal, and logistical pieces of their jobs.

Brad Anderson

Kaner said the industry has a “compelling opportunity” to invest in people.

“You’ve got to make investments in estimators,” he said. “We all make investments in technicians. I think one of the bigger gaps we have as an industry right now is in estimators. There’s not enough of them. There’s not enough of them that understand the metrics. There’s not enough of them that are salespeople that can go help actually go sell a consumer-paid job. …it’s a tense time and anytime when you’re in an environment where volume is tight, it just ups the pressure of the organization.”

Brad Anderson, who joined the collision repair industry in June to take over as CEO of Classic Collision, said he believes all jobs in the industry are hard.

“We put a lot on them, and I think all of us as an industry and ecosystem have to consider that it all crashes down to the people at the shop,” he said. “The small changes we make up here get really big when there’s 20 changes happening to the individual, whether it’s a tech, a GM, a service advisor, so we’ve got to simplify the work.”

Matt Ebert

During the discussion, Ebert also noted that 40-50% of MSO employees don’t touch a car, which he said “presents huge administrative opportunity,” another point he and Kaner agreed on.

“We have 15,000 people in our organization, and half of them are technicians and the other half are the people that are just trying to get the car to the back and do all the administrative things that they need to do to get it there,” Kaner said.

The conversation also touched on declining repairable claims volume, with Risley asking what’s missing from that narrative.

Caliber CEO David Simmons said the overall picture on repairable claims is probably a little more positive than the data that’s often quoted, “even though it is bad.” The primary misleading point, he said, is repairable claims data being viewed as representative of the market.

“If you allow yourself to be defined by repairable claims volumes, you have 30 years of history of insurance premium inflation in one year followed by claims frequency 12 to 18 months later,” he said. “And the pattern recognition in that 30-year data set would show that when you get into mid- to low-single-digit insurance premium inflation, which we’ve been in for several quarters now, you have a lag to low- to mid-single-digit claims frequency increase. There’s reasons for optimism that the old pattern holds, kind of offset by a structural shift with consumers because of the shock factor of insurance premium inflation.”

However, outside of insurance claims, one point remains: people are still getting their cars repaired, but they’re paying out of pocket, he said.

“We don’t track the juxtaposition of [the] increase in the dollar value of direct customer pay against the decrease in repairable claims and the dollar value of that,” Simmons said. “If you look at that, the total market has come down, but it’s a lot different dynamic. Now we’re built to service the insurance carrier, so it requires some adaptation to get at this customer pay. But if you want, we have to adapt, but if one’s willing to adapt, that market segment is there, and it’s growing, it’s growing robustly.”

David Simmons

Simmons said he would love to see Mitchell and CCC “come together with a combined audited data set that is as close to accurate as possible on what’s really going on with claims, total losses, repairable claims, and segments of claims.”

Kaner said he thinks one thing people miss is that what’s happening in the industry isn’t all that different from what’s been happening.

“It’s like any ecosystem; something that happens can have a negative effect downstream, and this industry has the same thing,” he said.

In this case, “a very precipitous increase in premiums that then put consumers on heightened alert,” Kaner said, causing them to raise their deductibles, drop coverage, or not file a claim for fear of a large premium increase.

“But if you look at what’s happening in the environment, the underlying claims themselves, i.e., we call for a claims environment to be down 2%,” he said. “I think the claims environment driven by the ADAS systems, collision avoidance systems, is probably just that. What’s happened is the propensity to file a claim over that two-year period of time is really what’s driven much of the negative in the industry. And as that starts to work itself out of the system, you’re starting to see the claims environment come back again.”

Kaner added that too much is ascribed to collision avoidance systems.

“We as an industry have to do a really good job of making sure people don’t hear things like, ‘Oh, well, front-end collisions are down 40%.’ Well, front-end collisions are down 40% in the cars that actually have that technology in them,” he said. “The reality is, for that technology to bleed through the system takes quite a while… Anything that happens new in a car takes 20 years to get all the way through the system.”

Risley also asked the group what the biggest threat to the collision repair industry is. Three out of the four responded, “ourselves.” Anderson’s take was technology.

Images

Featured image: Brian Kaner, Boyd Group CEO; David Simmons, Caliber CEO; Brad Anderson, Classic Collision CEO; and Matt Ebert, Crash Champions CEO, participate in a panel discussion during the 2026 MSO Symposium, held Nov. 2. 

All photos by Lurah Lowery/Repairer Driven News