#71 Insurance Talk
===
[00:00:00] What's up, guys? Gene Petty back at you with another episode of the All Access Podcast from Dent Repair Now. It is a shaky week here with this table. Uh, anyways, uh, it is Memorial Day week weekend. That is why the show is dropping on Tuesday, not Monday, because I was like, "Man, y'all ain't working." I wasn't working.
Uh, I mean, we stopped at the shop, but we weren't working on cars. So I figured I would have it ready for you first thing Tuesday morning to kick off your short week. So here we are Story time. We're gonna talk insurance, uh, and claims, uh, is what we're gonna talk about this week. So, uh, [00:01:00] I've seen quite a few people talking about insurance issues this year.
Uh, it seems, you know, there's always issues with claims and companies, uh, but this year seems to be a bit more excessive. Uh, it's almost like we're seeing a little bit more pushback, uh, than we're used to. Um, we certainly are seeing it, especially on this claim that, that we have right now. So I wanna talk about this claim, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, and I'm like, "Let's maybe talk about it and see what kind of solutions, uh, we can come up with."
So we wrote a track, uh, I don't think it's a deer hit, but for the sake of this conversation, for this story, let's call it a deer hit Right rear door smacked pretty good below the body line or bot- you know, bottom of the door, like actually in the cluster of body lines, uh, with a touch on the cab corner, another flip around and [00:02:00] hit in front of the wheel on the bedside and sh- sh- right swoop around and another hit on the back end of the bedside.
So we've got literal feet of damage. I think, I think Shannon wrote the front door or the back door at 30 inches. We're probably talking a, I don't know, seven or eight inch dent, uh, in front of the wheel house and then a five or six dent, dent on the back, right roundabout. It doesn't, it doesn't really matter the exact sizes for this conversation.
So we wrote it, um, actually when the car was there, I wasn't there and Shannon FaceTimed me, so that was my, my look at the car was FaceTime. Um, they didn't see any, uh, major paint damage. Uh, it looked like everything would buff off. Um, it did hit into the, uh, wheel well molding on the quarter, um hit in front of there.
That was my only unknown was [00:03:00] did the impact on top of the wheel well, or the wheel well molding, did it... Was it worse than it looked and like it smashed at the edge and blown apart paint and we can't fix it? Uh, but everything else looked pretty good, so I polished. Anyways, so we wrote the car for round numbers, 4,800 bucks i- is what we put on this car.
Customer's like, "Man, that's a lot worse than, than I thought it was gonna be. You know what? I'm gonna make a claim." Which you should They make the claim. Um, I don't wanna bring insurance company names specifically into this, so let's just call it Jake's Insurance Company, uh, have them do a photo estimate in their photo app, right?
"Oh, sir, just get your phone and take some pictures and this is easy." We all know how easy that is
they end up with Right, maybe right at 3,000, [00:04:00] give or take. Right? Like pretty significantly low. Um, but like we expect that. In fact, we prep the customers on, "Hey, they're gonna make you use a photo app. Probably gonna be low. Probably gonna be probably, probably." Right? So we prep our customers before that Protocol, right?
We're gonna bring the truck in on a Monday. We will call for a supplement and, you know, hopefully they're here Tuesday, Wednesday, and we can still roll the truck out. Cool. Well, this year delay has been a big issue, right? Like, oh, we're not coming out too fast. So even though they already had our estimate, I'm sure the customer offered to send our estimate and they said, "No, we'll write our own estimate."
Um
We file for a supplement on Monday. Shannon checks in on Tuesday. "Well, I confirm that we received it. [00:05:00] We'll see if we can get somebody assigned." I think on Wednesday we got a call that, um, somebody will be out on Thur- on Friday. So I'm like, "Well," like first hiccup is now the smash that I had all week that was supposed to leave on Friday, um, isn't even gonna get looked at until Friday, right?
Like, it just, it makes for a scheduling nightmare. We will talk about that later in the show. You know, it is what it is
So Friday morning comes and I look in the CRM and see that, uh, let's call him Bob from Jake's Insurance Company, uh, had called before we opened, right? And I thought-- And, and, and the insurance company said, "Oh, the adjuster will call you and tell you what time they'll be out." Now, we've dealt with Bob from Jake's Insurance Company before, and super cool, super easy to get along with.
No [00:06:00] issues whatsoever. Very personable guy, this Bob guy. So I'm like, "Hey, Shane, call him just to make sure there's no hiccups or something. Like, we really need to get going on this car. Probably gonna work all freaking weekend on this thing 'cause it's not like we didn't schedule cars this week." Again, we'll talk about that more later in the show So she calls him, and she comes like storming out of the, the front office.
I'm like, "What's the matter?" And she's holding up the phone on speaker and she's like, "This is Bob from Jake's insurance company." "Hey man, what's up? How you doing?" "Man, I'm not coming out there." "Uh, they, they said you were coming out. What's the deal?" "Uh, you're not a body shop, and we wrote this truck for conventional repair, and, uh, we're, we're not coming out to inspect this.
We're not wasting our time." Never in all of my years ... So I've been doing, I've been doing [00:07:00] insurance claims with PDR, mm, since 2008, I think is when I started. You know, that's my first hail storm anyway. So, so in 18 years, I'm getting old. For 18 years of doing insurance claims, I've never had an adjuster say, "I'm not gonna come out and look at the car."
That's ridiculous I, I'm like, I, I'm like, I'm almost dumbfounded. Like, I'm still drinking my morning coffee here at the shop, and this dude's throwing shade. Well, before I got all gray, right, I was full on ginger. I get a little, I get a little fired up, and he could tell I was getting fired up, and he said, "Well, listen, man, I'm not
this isn't a personal attack." And I'm like, "Well, it kind of is an attack because you're saying that just because you don't like how I repair the car or you don't think I can repair the car, you're not even gonna engage." And he's like, "Listen, man, the original adjuster wrote this for a conventional repair, and I'm not gonna come out, and I agree with him."[00:08:00]
I'm like, "But you guys haven't seen the car." "That's irrelevant." I said, "You're ... " I said, like, "I think you wrote four and a half hours on this door. Every body shop around is gonna say this thing needs a skin or a door, period. They're not even gonna try to fix it, and you put four and a half hours on it." "Hey, if you're a body shop, we could do it.
It'll be in process." I'm like, "It is in process. I already pulled the flare off to see what's going on behind it to make sure it's cool. I'm not coming out..." Dude, like, standing his ground and really kind of being a dick, and I don't like when people are dicks, especially when I just want you to do your fricking job, right?
And I'm sorry, I'm getting a little fired up. So he hangs up, and I'm like, "What are we gonna do?" Like, we ... I'm like, I know that their conventional estimate is way short of what a conventional estimate would be. I know it. But this dude won't even talk to me on it. Like, he's [00:09:00] just, he's done, drew a line in the sand, and that was it.
So we got a, I've got a great friend that has a body shop. It's the body shop we, that paints all of our stuff, right? You know, a hail car needs a hood, that goes to there. So I call him and I'm like, "Hey, can, can I bring you this truck? Can you stop by and look at this truck?" Like, I just need to know, one, that I'm not an idiot, and two, I need to like have some...
I need to give my customer some leg to stand on
He swings by. So I, I go off on a couple rants, I make some calls. I'm trying to figure out what my play is. We basically tell the customer like, "I... Dude, my hands are tied. Like, I can't fix this truck for three grand. Like, I just, I can't do it. There's too much work there, and on principle alone, I will not let those sons of bitches off the hook on what I know they should owe or what they should pay."[00:10:00]
So the body shop guy shows up just after lunch, and he's like, "Man, let's, you know, let's go take a look at this." And he walks around the, the other car in the shop, and he's like, "That thing needs a door." He's like, "You can fix that door?" I'm like, "Well, if I didn't think I could fix the door, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
And he was kinda like, "Well, if you think so, cool." He's like, "But that definitely needs a door." So I grab the sheet from the insurance company, right, their estimate. I'm like, "Dude, look at this. There's no way, right?" And he's looking, and he's like, "Four and a half hours? Nope. This? Nope. No way. Like, this is way, way short."
He goes, "Oh, wait a minute, I know the original adjuster." Let's call him Jim, because I don't want anybody getting pissy because they suck at their job. But they're doing exactly what their job wants them to do. That's a whole 'nother, that's a whole 'nother rant[00:11:00]
He goes, he goes, "Man, like Jim's a pretty good dude. Let me, let me shoot him a text." So right, we look, sort of look at the car and he's like, "Well, I'll take a bunch of photos and we'll see if I can... You know, I'll start writing up an estimate." And he texts, texts Jim the, the original adjuster on the phone.
Now it's a virtual estimate, so the insurance companies like Note have started, and this is the first time I've seen this because normally they're to like a call center, uh, and we'll talk about it again more in, in a little bit further in the show. Now they're taking their photo claims and pushing their photo claims to local adjusters, and the local adjusters are writing them locally, virtually, which doesn't make any sense.
Like these guys are already overworked. Let them go look at freaking cars. But you sons of bitches don't want them to look at cars because they can write what is owed on the car and not shortchange the way you all do. Oh, God- [00:12:00] I think they're criminal enterprises and I can't freaking stand it. Anyways, he texts this dude.
Dude calls him up. "Hey, Jim. Yeah, what's up, Joey? How you doing?" Blah, blah, you know, back and forth. He, uh... And, and the adjuster goes, or the, the body shop guy goes, um, "Hey, so, so you know this truck, like you wrote it originally?" Now, the adjuster doesn't realize he's on speakerphone, and he goes, "Oh, man, how'd you get roped into this thing?"
Body shop guy goes, "Oh, you, you've heard, you, you know about this truck?" He goes, "This dent guy's out of his bleeping mind And and then the, the bodyguard goes, "Well, he's standing right here." And it is dead silence on the other end of the phone, right? It went from like jovial joking Jim to dead [00:13:00] silence. And, uh
And he's like, "Well, listen, he, he wants $2,500 to fix that door. He's like, oh, I need this." He's talking... Like, he's ranting all this stuff. And he's like, "Oh, we're just, we're not paying more than conventional." And I was like, "Yo, Jim, it's... I'm Gene. It's nice to meet you, even though I haven't got to meet you.
All I want is a properly written conventional estimate." He goes, "Well, I don't care how you fix her. You can roll the paint on, you can do PDR, you can do it..." He's like, "I don't care, but I'm only paying what we owe." And I'm like, "That's all I want, is for you to hold up your end of your agreement with your customer and return this truck to pre-loss condition.
That's all I want you to do. I'm not even busting balls. I just want a fairly written estimate." And I'm like, "Listen, you put four and a half hours of repair on this door. As soon as the body guy [00:14:00] walked around the thing, he goes, 'That thing needs a door.' And you put four and a half hours on it. Like, we're not even close."
He goes, "Well, it was all scratched." I said, "I polished all the scratches off. There's no scratches to be there. It was all scuffs and transfer, and, and your customer does not want his truck, the side of his beautiful tri-coat Ram repainted, right? All I want is fair numbers." So, like, we sort of banter back and forth He comes back around and he's like, "Well, do you have this claim at your shop?"
I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well, I'm coming out Tuesday to look at that car." He's like, "I'll pull it back off of the first guy that wouldn't come out. I'll pull it to me, and I'll look at the, the truck when I'm there on Tuesday." I'm like, "Great. That's all I want. If you people would just do your freaking job and look at these cars and write a fair number, [00:15:00] none of this would be an issue But I believe, I truly believe that these companies want short estimates on their cars because they know there's a certain percentage, and it's probably a large percentage of these claims are not gonna get fixed, and the people are gonna pocket the money and walk away, and every penny they're short saves them money I can't freaking stand that.
You insure the car against loss. Then there's a loss or a claim on the car, and you don't wanna do your end of the bargain and write a fair ticket. But you can pay celebrities and all these pseudo-celebrities huge millions of dollars of contracts to do all these commercials for you to get more money to short pay?
I can't stand it. It drive-- It makes me freaking sick that you people operate that way. Disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Tell your mom what you do. That's what you should do. You should sit down and be like, "Hey, Mom, guess what [00:16:00] we do? We screw over all of our customers." It's ridiculous. I can't wait to see the clips that Opus pulls out of this I'm gonna look like I lost my freaking mind.
It's crazy. So I will try to update you on the next episode on how my meeting with... I can't even remember the fake names we're using, except for Jake's insurance company. I will let you know how the meeting goes with Jake's insurance company tomorrow at the shop, and we'll see if we can do it. Stick around for the next episode of the All Access Podcast.
Ugh, man, it really pisses me off. Sorry I'm a little spicy tonight. So I also just heard, uh, now I guess if, I believe if you're west of the Mississippi, this doesn't necessarily apply to you as much, but east of the Mississippi, and certainly here in Pennsylvania in the Northeast, um, Erie Insurance. Erie is a [00:17:00] big insurer around me.
Their headquarters is like two and a half hours away. I have all my insurance through Erie. They're a great company. Really one of the best to deal with. They're not like Jake's insurance company. Erie is a fantastic company to deal with as a, uh, policy holder and as a repairer, right? Really a fantastic company to deal with.
However, I'm a little worried because I just heard that they are taking their in-person automotive adjusters and pulling them out of the field before the end of the year. That is terrifying because now every claim is gonna turn into a battle, right? I just... Love her or hate her, uh, Kristen Feller from Collision Hub was supposed to come to Kamado for the, uh, event [00:18:00] to be one of the judges, um, and she was gonna give like an hour talk on claims handling and, and dealing with insurance.
Dealing with, dealing with bill payers I think was the, the title. Well, she couldn't make it. She got a s- uh, subpoena for a case that she was in, uh, and she couldn't make the trip up. However, she did, uh, do a really nice presentation for us, um, and sent out a link to Charles, and I'm sure Charles and the crew there like forwarded it to the attendees.
Kristen, thanks for putting that together. Very informative talk
Again, love her or hate her. She's a polarizing person for sure. Um, she had a lot of good information in there. And a lot of what we're seeing as we run into stuff is not so much like this human interaction where adjusters get to think and make smart decisions, or maybe not smart, in- informed decisions.[00:19:00]
Um, they're stuck in scripts, and a lot of this stuff is like AI saying, "We don't pay for that. We don't do this. We don't do that." Kristen gave some pretty cool little tactics in her talk, uh, that give you some ways to, to work around stuff, right? I need to go back and listen to it and take notes, uh, and, and learn how to use the language better to help direct conversations, uh, and get around this, these dead ends that, that the insurers are intentionally having the conversations lead to.
Like the, the, "We don't pay for that." "What do you mean you don't pay for that?" "Well, we just don't pay for that." Well, if you don't have some sort of verbiage to work around that, guess what? You're not gonna get paid for that. Um, we don't, uh, think that this is required, um, is another one, right? Like, why [00:20:00] don't...
We don't know that that's required. Is it required to calibrate whenever you aren't a bumper? Well, maybe as a whole, no, or generally speaking, but per, I believe Toyota, per Toyota's, uh, procedures here, it says if you remove the front bumper that it needs to go through a calibration to, to make it make sense.
Oh, well. You know what I mean? Like, learning the verbiage, learning the, the way to talk to work things through. Um, honestly, like I heard a bunch of people kind of complaining that it was... No, it was in Montreal, so a foreign country for a lot of us. Um, but like the 300 bucks to go attend the GPR, PDR, GPR competition.
I guess there's two GPRs and one PDR. Anyways, um, I'm telling you, I would almost pay the $300 for Kristen's talk. Like, certainly as I go back and study that and listen again and again and [00:21:00] again, it will help me to navigate well more than $300 worth of stuff. So Kristen, not that you're gonna watch my podcast, but if you do, thank you for putting together that talk.
Very educational. Uh, I definitely learned some stuff and will be applying and putting some of those tactics into place. So back to Erie, right? Eerie is pulling all of these adjusters off the road, uh, and switching them to virtual. Well, I can promise you that virtual is not going to be easier to deal with than in person
I feel like we as a whole in the PDR industry have come a long way on the smash side of the business, right? Hail has always been, uh, insurance claim-based, right? That's [00:22:00] part of what makes it so profitable is that it is an insured paid insurance, insurer paid service We, right, let's call it over the last 10 years maybe.
Um, I'm trying to think back to like my big retail, like when I started really making the big jump to retail. Maybe 10 years we are seeing, we're at one, right, tools, glue pull. Thanks, Keco. Thanks, Cam Auto. Thanks, Black Plague. Thanks, Dan Reaper. Thanks, Dan Chance. Um, right, like through glue pulling and, and tactics and techniques, um, better tooling, better lighting, we're able to fix minor collisions, which a lot of times turn into insurance claims.
And certainly as a shop owner, right? So we started, we opened the shop in '18, so we are eight years in. The number of insurance claims we do, non-hail, [00:23:00] through the roof. The number of multi-day repairs that are claims that we do, through the roof. And I feel like we're making great progress. I feel like this big shift with the insurers away from in-person estimators into virtual, we are back to like maybe less than square one.
Because immediately when I started doing those smashes, I could have intelligent conversations in person with adjusters looking at cars and do some amazing repairs, right? And then prove to them that we can do it, and then build those relationships and they're like, "Oh, listen, if Gene says he can do it, like there's a pretty good chance he can do it, and he's never come back and hit me with this and X, Y, and Z," right?
I think we are in for increased difficulties on the smash insurance side of things. [00:24:00] I wanna start some conversation here, right? Comment on YouTube, Facebook, whatever. DM me if you don't wanna post publicly. What are you guys seeing in the insurance space and the claims side of things, especially smash?
What are you seeing different on the hail side, right? We're already seeing a big shift on the hail side. I started seeing that in '24. Was it '24? Man, the years fly by. Yeah, it was '24. Uh, I was out in St. Louis helping a buddy, and man, the delay on getting some of these cars in, like weeks and weeks and weeks was ridiculous.
And then we had a, a nice little pocket storm in '25, and the delays for us were ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous, like through the roof. We had one little girl's car for over a month, and she only had like 1,500 miles on this thing, and the insurance company delayed so [00:25:00] bad that like it was ridiculous. I'm certain she's no longer with that insurance company
Here's the questions. Here's the conversation I wanna have this week with you guys. One, what problems are you seeing on the collision side, smash side, with insurers? What hiccups are you seeing on the hail side with insurers? What are your thoughts on them switching over to all this virtual BS? I don't like it.
I can't fix dents virtually. We need to see people in person, and of course, you can't see it in the picture. Where do we go? Where, where, where's a good place to have this conversation as an industry to help make it better? What can we do as repairers and niche repairers inside of a niche, right? Like, what can we do [00:26:00] to make it easier to flow through this insurance?
How do we schedule this, right? Like it, it's crazy. We scheduled that car for last week for five days. Well, all five days of the schedule were held waiting for an insurance adjuster to show up, and now one, two, three, they're coming out again on a fourth day after... Like this is ridiculous. Like w- it's gonna be coming into the ninth day, right?
'Cause seven, Monday's eight, Tuesday's nine. You had nine days before I get somebody out to look a car. That's... How do I schedule that? I don't have 50 of these cars laying around where I'm waiting. Like I go on vacation in a week, bro. I guess Gene doesn't sleep this week
Another thing, right? Like inside of the, [00:27:00] uh, estimating softwares, you know, like your CCC, Mitchell, Autotext, their PDR modules are still only hail-based. So it's almost like if these guys can't write a hail estimate on your damage, then they can't write a insurance-approved estimate on it right in their software.
So they have to write conventional, and then we have an agreement with the vehicle owner that we are gonna convert conventional dollars to PDR dollars, right? So it's what we do, it's how we roll, and then repair PDR. It's worked well for... Right, again, I've been doing insurance claims for 18 years, uh, smashes, smash insurance for at least 10.
It's worked out well so far. How do we even make the argument now when they say, "Well, you're a PDR shop, not a body shop. We write this conventional. You're PDR. We're not even speaking the same [00:28:00] language. We won't even come out and look at it." I don't know what the answer is. I'm gonna figure out, or I'm gonna buy a blow-up paint booth and put it in my shop.
I don't wanna paint, but I'll be like, "My paint booth's right there, so you gotta write it conventional, and then I'll deal with my customer and make a PDR. But I got a body sh- or I got a paint booth right there." Is that the answer? I don't freaking know. But I can tell you that it's driving me crazy, and I'm sure you guys heard it.
I'm pretty fired up. So, well, I guess that's it. I'm just, I'm just gonna chill out. We're gonna do a little bit of meditating. A little om, right? Bring it down a few notches. Not be so fired up and angry. We're gonna go into work tomorrow, and the adjuster's gonna be amazing to deal with, and we're gonna get all of our money to deal with it, and we're gonna make the dents go away, and the metals are gonna be smooth, and everybody's gonna be real happy, right?
I think that's [00:29:00] what we're gonna do. We're gonna just dial it down a notch. We're gonna will it to be good and make it happen for this week, uh, because I've got a crazy busy week coming up. Speaking of coming up, uh, on the books in the PDR world that I know of, uh, we have got the PDR Expo coming up at the end of September, [25, 26, 26, 27] Friday and Saturday, whatever numbers in September land around there, at the Rio in Las Vegas.
Uh, we have got a group discussion with a bunch of guys on Friday. I think we're changing the title up, so to be determined. Come back next week, and maybe I'll have an answer. And I, on Saturday morning, am gonna be talking all about cold glue. Uh, we're breaking it up. We're mixing it up this year. I'm gonna be typical talk first, like a first half.
Um, get into the nitty-gritty of it, why it works, how it works, talk about the different brands, uh, the different slide hammers that are out there, the [00:30:00] techniques, what I find works for me, so on and so forth. And then the second half I'm super excited about, MTE or PDR Expo, Convex, is bringing in a live car into the room where I get to do live damage, live repairs, live teaching.
And it gets better We're gonna pull some people out of the class, and I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna teach you, and you're gonna do it. And they're supposed to have a camera crew there and everything so everybody can see it, but it is going to be a live demonstration, hands-on class. Super stoked for that.
I'm really hoping we can kick ass with this, and then maybe, yes, maybe they can bring these types of classes to MTE in Orlando, and we can level up education there. Super, super excited. Anyways, that is coming up. Uh, as always, follow us on social media, @NetworkRepairNow across the board. Let's keep that Facebook growth [00:31:00] churning.
I'm telling you, I want those 10,000 followers. We're almost halfway there. If you told like 500 of your closest friends to go follow me, I would be to over the halfway mark. And if all of you said it, I'd be at 10,000 in no time. We have plenty of listeners that if everybody told 500 people, 500 different people, don't overlap, to go follow us on Network Repair Now, @NetworkRepairNow on Facebook, then we could be there by like Wednesday.
It'd be great. So do that. Tell 500 people you know about us. Um, guys, come back. Give me some comments, some DMs, some texts, whatever works. I want to talk about insurance and all this insurance BS that we're up against, and how do we as a niche repairer inside of a niche get after it, right? I, I'm, I'm curious to figure out these solutions.
Oh yeah, and my lifeblood of work depends on it because [00:32:00] my shop is driven by a lot of insurance work. Hmm. Anyways, they got the old Ginger a little bit fired up. I'm here to take a deep breath and be calm and have an amazing week. And it is all just going to work out. Until next time, see ya. One, two
