Collision Rentals Done Right!

**🎙️ Podcast Show Notes:

What if the fastest way to win more keys is to hand clients your keys—on your terms? In this episode, we sit down with Laura Tierney of ShopLoaner.com to break down how collision and auto repair shops can take control of one of their biggest bottlenecks: rentals. From slow insurance claims to unavailable third-party cars, we explore how a shop-owned rental fleet can turn frustration into a streamlined, profitable system that locks in jobs and elevates customer satisfaction.

Laura walks us through the complete blueprint for setting up your own fleet the right way—from forming a separate LLC for liability protection, to properly titling and insuring vehicles, to using airtight rental agreements that handle ID, insurance, and e-signatures in minutes. You’ll learn how a cloud-based platform automates pre-checks, captures credit cards securely, tracks fuel and damage, and keeps your entire team aligned with color-coded scheduling.

The payoff? No more waiting on outside rental agencies, no more losing repair jobs because a customer’s coverage ran out, and no more juggling paperwork. Just a clean, controlled process that builds loyalty, boosts reviews, and adds a new profit stream to your business.

4       Key Takeaways:

🗝️ Own the Experience: Stop relying on third-party rentals—take control of your customer’s   journey and your schedule.

🗝️ Protect & Simplify: Separate your rental LLC, set up insurance properly, and use smart agreements that safeguard your shop.

🗝️ Automate the Workflow: Modern rental software handles pre-checks, payments, and fuel recoup—no headaches required.

🗝️ Profit from Convenience: Every rental becomes an opportunity—whether through insurer reimbursement or direct-to-customer rentals.

Ready to boost revenue, win more repairs, and make the rental process work for you? Tune in—you’ll never look at “loaner cars” the same way again.

GUEST CONTACT

Laura Tierney – lbtierney@hotmail.com – ltierney@arsloaner.com

Website  – https://www.shoploaner.com/     

LinkedIn – https://tinyurl.com/pv3xr5t8

Sign up for FREE to my "Quote of the Day" below:

 https://tinyurl.com/fv5xr68h

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, Reviews, And Slower Market
• 2:34 Meet Laura Tierney And ShopLoaner
• 7:45 Why Run Your Own Rental Fleet
• 13:06 Liability, LLCs, And Ironclad Contracts
• 18:20 Digital Workflows, Payments, And Toll Recapture
• 22:40 Ease Of Use And Team Adoption
• 25:40 Who To Rent To, Coverage Options
• 31:00 Getting Started: Cars, Titles, Insurance
• 36:20 Paperless Docs, Scheduling, Due Dates
• 41:00 Revenue Beyond Repairs: Public Rentals
• 46:00 Pushback, Mindset, And Process Wins
• 50:05 Costs, Free Trial, And How To Engage

Transcript

Rick: 0:00

So if you're a shop owner that ever wondered if there's a simple bolt-on revenue stream uh that you can add to your collision or auto repair business, or if you're wondering if there's an easier way to manage that whole shop owner rental car process without losing your hair or your profit, then this episode's for you. Welcome to the Mind Rent Podcast with your host, Rick Sullivan, where minor adjustments produce major improvements in mindset, personal growth, and success. This is the place to be every Monday, where we make small improvements and positive actions in our business and personal lives that will make a major impact in our success, next level growth, and quality of life everyone. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to the Mindwrench Podcast. I'm your host, Rick Selover. Thanks so much for stopping in. If you're a returning listener and haven't done so already, please take a minute and click the follow or subscribe button and then rate and review the show. When you rate and review the show, the algorithms for Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, and all the other platforms will see that it's valuable and show it to more people that have never seen it before. And hopefully it can help them too. I would really, really, really appreciate your help sharing this word with your friends and family as well. And if you're a brand new listener, welcome. I hope you find something of value here that helps you in your personal or professional life as well. Please make sure to click the subscribe or follow button so you never miss another episode. If you've been listening to the show for a while, or been on the receiving end of my daily quote of the day emails, or maybe just catch my post on Facebook or LinkedIn. You know I'm all about the quotes, right? If you'd like to start receiving my quote of the day emails, there's a link in the show notes to sign up for it's free, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I think we can all agree that 2025 has not been a stellar year in collision like the previous four years post-COVID, right? Claims are down, insurance carriers are clawing back labor rates and refusing to pay for many needed procedures, and other economic factors are at play. Through the first three quarters, shops have been racking their brains on what they need to do to get more business during the slowdown, or should they do more advertising, or go after some fleet business, or head a detail department, or start an ADA center, or what? All good ideas. But what if you could add a steady income stream to your business and recapture dollars you've been paying out for years while simultaneously capturing more keys? Well, this week's special guest is Laura Tierney, owner of ASR Loaner and Shoploaner.com. And she's going to share this hidden gem of an add-on business to your collision and auto repair shop. There are so many awesome advantages to adding your own rental car program to your existing business. So stay tuned, and Laura will explain all that for you today. Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Mind Wrench Podcast. I'm your host, Rick Selover. So if you're a shop owner that ever wondered if there's a simple bolt-on revenue stream uh that you can add to your collision or auto repair business, or if you're wondering if there's an easier way to manage that whole shoploaner rental car process without losing your hair or your profit, then this episode's for you. Uh this week's special guest is Laura Tierney, owner of shoploaner.com. An easy to use uh complete car rental software program that's been helping small dealers and auto repair shops uh manage that piece of the business for the past decade. So uh without any further ado, Laura, welcome to the Mind Wrench Podcast

Laura: 3:36

Hi, Rick. Thanks for having me.

Rick: 3:39

Glad to have you here. So um I did have uh I have a client I work with that did recommend um your services, and he's been doing really well with it, and he can't uh can't stop uh bragging about it. So I thought you'd be a perfect person to have on the show. Um as as we went through probably you know the first half to three quarters of this year, most shops were down, they were slow. They're all looking for what do I do? I I need to make more money and and I I need to make some improvements to my business, and everybody's kind of lost on what steps to take. And I was always thinking of there's you know, I know there's always add-on businesses shops should add or could add, but anyways, this one seemed like a really good opportunity, and I thought it even though it's a little late in the year, um shops are not flush again and they're not busy with backlogs, so I think this is a great time to talk about this. Uh especially before SEMA. So um but if you could before we jump into it, uh can you give me a little background on on you and kind of how you got to the point where you are now with Shopler?

Laura: 4:46

Sure thing. So um again, my name's Laura Tierney, and I am an owner at ShopOwner. Umriginally going way back, um our company was a couple of computer consultants, and I actually worked part-time um just helping them manage their clients, while I was also a part-time teacher. Um, we had one of our clients, was a new car dealership group, that had the problem of keeping track of customers they were putting in the their courtesy transportation vehicles and filling out the necessary paperwork for that, which is a headache, especially if you're filling out forms and triplicate. Now, this is way back when um you know paper was you know a very common thing that fill out everything on paper in the 90s. We wrote a basically what I would call a form filler for them and help keep us track of some basic data in DOS. So, anybody who's too young to know what DOS is, if you've seen an old movie with the blinking green cursor uh on the computer screen, that's how the program originally worked. Um, so the same dealership group wanted to just keep putting it in more and more locations, and finally, in like the mid-2010 to 2015, um, we just finally proposed a solution that, hey, why don't we rewrite this as a cloud-based solution uh with a little bit uh more you know amped up features to help you keep track of the vehicles, all these other things that go along with having the cars, and then you know, rather than you putting it standalone in all these different locations, we can help you even with the storing the data, which by the way, that's part of the big problems when you have everything standalone and you're trying to figure out a great way to store all this data and never lose it. And again, we don't need to go back in time, but that was an issue. So now we can have this cloud-based solution where all your data is stored in the cloud securely, and we can make your life easier. We want to do this, we will program it, we will create the product with the understanding that we are going to market and sell this as a software, monthly software subscription. So we launched it as ARS loaner in 2015, and our main target was new car dealerships. Um, that was great. We worked in the OEM world and serviced several of the major manufacturers in their dealerships. Um and then 20 uh 20 hit, and we all know what happened that year, COVID. Um, so we had a handful of shops using this program, but didn't really understand up until this point how many shops actually have loner or rental fleets that they keep. Um, in 2020, everything kind of exploded because all these shop owners who did have this already kind of established in their shops, they did not they wanted to keep cars flowing in, they wanted to keep fixing customers' cars, but they were pretty much told you can't have people in the waiting room, you know, all these type of things. So um they needed a way to basically virtually fill out paperwork, and they never had gone down this road before. I did a couple podcasts for shop owner groups that had found out about me and just started to kind of snore ball and get bigger and bigger in the shop world. So we decided to spin off shopler.com after 2020, and the main reason we spun off this separate um basically brand is it doesn't have any less functionality for shop owners, it's more geared though to shop owners and less geared toward dealerships. And the main reason being the only thing I can really explain is that when you work in the OEM world, the OEMs kind of dictate from above what has to happen, um, different requirements, different things that shop owners really don't need to worry about. So we then, like I said, spun off shop owners so that it was more shop friendly, all these little things that kind of pop up because you know the OEMs decide, you know, that you know, courtesy transportation fleet has to run a certain way. Shop owners really don't have to worry about that. So that was the main reason uh for the different branding. And since 2020, I would say our customer base has not quite, but almost flip-flopped. Uh, we're we're almost at 50-50 for shop owner versus Air Us owner now in um the number of customers that we have. And I just like to add, I love the shop world because it's a place where again everybody gets to make their own decisions. Um, if we do a really good job for a shop owner, you know, it's very likely that they're gonna recommend us to other shop owners, and um, there's no limitations in the vendors that they can pick, if that makes sense.

Rick: 9:49

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I I I've dealt with dealerships, I've dealt with uh regular collision centers and in individual body shops for decades, and I know there's a massive difference in how dealers operate just because they are, you know, they're selling a brand from a manufacturer, and there's certain things that they have to, you know, uh stick to, right? I so I totally get that. Um, and you will find a much more open platform in the collision world. Uh shop owners are they're all individuals, they're all unique. Uh but when something works for them, man, they love to brag about that to all their all their counterparts out there. So it's a good thing, right?

Laura: 10:26

It's a great thing for us. Um, like I said, in the OEM world, we could we could be eliminated by an entire manufacturing, you know, because they've decided that they're gonna choose just one vendor. Um, so that never happens to us in the shop and collision world.

Rick: 10:41

Right.

Laura: 10:42

Not so far anyway.

Rick: 10:43

No, so it and from what I've seen, Lori, my background as a distributor for over three or over three decades, is most shops, most collision shops. I didn't call on auto repair shops. I'd seen a couple of them, and I knew some and I have friends that have some, but uh for the collision centers, uh, not many people had a program for loaners or for rentals, right? They just did. They usually used you know, enterprise or budget, or you know, one of the rental the branded rental car companies out there, uh or whoever their insurance carriers recommended that they use. And I use the word recommended softly. Um so why would a repair shop, so an auto repair or a collision shop, why would they need their own rental car program? What what what would be the purpose of that?

Laura: 11:34

Well, it's it's multifaceted. So let's just start with um my philosophy on the number one reason I think that they should have vehicles at their disposal that they have control over is because it allows them to make a sale. Um so when you have someone and let's kind of like gear a little bit more toward collision in this case. Um, when you have someone that comes in that maybe doesn't have um coverage for the replacement vehicle included with their insurance, they're you know, they're trying to get the best possible um scenario they can as they drop their car, if could be you know a week multi-week repair, and if they don't have that coverage and you can offer them a vehicle as a courtesy, uh that's a way to close the sale, number one. Um, and it doesn't even honestly have to be a courtesy. A lot of people they will, if they don't give it away as a zero dollar per day, they will, or you know, maybe they even put a dollar per day on it and they comp it back. Um, you could even just say, hey, I have a vehicle that you can rent for X number of dollars per day, that's a lot less expensive than them trying to rent a vehicle on their own. So it's a it's a way that you keep that customer there, you close the sale with them, and hopefully you're you are gonna have vehicles, your car count's gonna go up because you didn't let that person walk away.

Rick: 13:06

If you're looking for a competitive edge for your business or a more effective jumpstart to your personal development, I'll make your first step super simple. It is a fact that an incredible number of the most successful business owners, nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, top-earning professional athletes, entertainers, and industry leaders like Microsoft's Bill Gates, former President Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce Mark Benioff all have one thing in common. They all have at least one coach, and some have several, that they work with on a consistent basis, someone that helps guide, mentor, and support them, challenge them, help them set and achieve goals that move them forward, and then hold them accountable to follow through, driving personal and professional growth. Working with a coach has many substantial benefits. Just for an example, 80% of coaching clients report improved self-esteem or self-confidence thanks to coaching. 99% of individuals and companies that hire a coach report being very satisfied, and 96% would do it again. But deep down, you know it's time to make those improvements in your business or your personal life that you've kicked down the road year after year. If you're tired of knowing there's a better version of you waiting to shine, but unsure of how to bring that version to light. If you're tired of wanting to enjoy a more successful business, but not sure how to start, and if you don't want to go another 12 months without better results, but you don't want to go it alone, then take the first step. It's super simple. Sometimes talking to the right person can make all the difference. Go to www.rixlover.com slash contact, and I'll set you up with a free consultation call with me to see if one-on-one coaching is right for you.

Laura: 14:47

Um the second reason is because, again, I'm going to go back to COVID. Um, when you are competing to get these vehicles at a set rate per day for an insurance claim, oftentimes companies like Enterprise, etc., and again, I don't want to rag on them. I don't know them versus another one. I just know that it happens to be a very common one that collision shops use. Um you're competing against um, let's say, airport rentals or you know, anything like that, where they can get a higher dollar per day for a vehicle. And we did see this happen during COVID, where all of a sudden all the collision repair shops were struggling to get their customers scheduled because they could not get the rental car scheduled. If they would have just had a fleet of their own vehicles, even in the case where insurance does pay for a replacement vehicle, you get that customer scheduled. And if you are running this like a you know, rental car company that's adjacent to your collision shop, you now can claim that $35, $40 a day that the insurance company will pay you and get reversed. And again, you capture that customer instead of waiting uh until you find out whether or not you can get a rental car from a rental car company. And again, those those rentals during COVID were taking sometimes a month to get a customer just scheduled to come in the door to start the repair because collision shops could not get um.

Rick: 16:23

Yeah, I remember that time period that the rental cars were just they were not to be found anywhere. So, and if you could find one, it was extremely expensive. So I know the the shops had a lot of pains back amongst all the other things. The whole rental car thing was a huge issue for them.

Laura: 16:39

So yeah, as somebody who travels for work, I remember specifically going to a town wasn't like a big urban area, and just trying to get a rental car. I think I finally got like a Toyota Corolla for like $75 a day.

Rick: 16:53

Wow.

Laura: 16:54

And you know, it was just that price point. And when an insurance company is typically insurance reimbursements are somewhere between $35 and $45 a day, is what I usually see. I mean, you can't you can't get a car, they they're gonna rent it all day long for $75 a day.

Rick: 17:09

Right. Yeah, I I think another issue is uh it's it's probably more specific to collision repair shops than auto repair shops or dealerships, is when you get into a repair, um, there's a million things that can go wrong. Even the best shops can plan, they can blueprint, they can do you know the right thing to plan out a repair, but there's inevitably always something that'll go wrong. And if it's a big job and you're in there for you know 18 or 20 days normally to do whatever this big repair is, um you come up with a part that you can't get that's uh important enough to where you can't put the car back together and ship it. Uh you're stuck waiting, and a lot of times people uh their rentals, um their allowances from the insurance companies that runs out. So now either the shop has to pay for a rental to a rental car company, or they got to figure something else out. I've seen owners go, hey, here just take my car, you can use it for the next three days, take my wife's car. You know, I see that a lot, and to me that seems extremely risky, number one, but I know they're trying to do the right thing and help their customer out. So this kind of eliminates that, doesn't it?

Laura: 18:19

It does. I mean, again, I would say that that would be my number one thing that I would tell you is a big no-no. Don't hand your personal vehicle over to a customer. And again, we I I mentioned if we can set up a customer can set up a separate LLC and they run it as a rental car company. Um, again, that separates the liability from your personal assets. Number one, your personal car is tied up to you, you don't want that to happen. But then there are there are shops who will have shop-owned vehicles that are tied up to the shop. And again, I think that that's an okay scenario. You just have to be very careful to make sure that everything's insured properly. But it's very common practice for a shop then to set up just a separate LLC because now you can imagine you've separated your liability even further because you've got this small rental car company. Uh you title all the vehicles to that company and you insure them through that company. And now, and again, when you fill out this legal documentation, we're we're saying this is the company that's running you the car, you're responsible. But if you really think about it, and again, these shops may have somewhere, I would say a collision shop probably should have somewhere between five and ten cars if they're going to do this, just because that allows for the longer term uh rentals and things like that. But maybe you have five to ten vehicles in this fleet. I mean, if that's all the assets that this company really has, if something really were to go sideways and someone or someone's insurance company comes after you for the liability, something that happens with those cars, the assets in that company are very limited. And so I I mean, I do think it's it's a good idea. And the other reason that uh collision shop owners, again, it's not a make or break it if you have to do it that way, but the other reason that collision shop owners might want to consider setting up that separate LLC is because insurance companies, when they when you reimburse, some of them are very particular, they want to know who they're reimbursing, and it needs to be a rental car company for a rental car. If they think that you're just putting them in your personal car or something like that, you could have that reimbursement denied.

Rick: 20:44

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense to to separate uh LLC, something like that. Because you know, shops I think that expand beyond just doing bodywork, they do that with glasswork, they do that with uh if they're doing wraps or any other kind of business units, they still separate that out because it makes sense. But you know, from the liability standpoint, man, that would be uh that would be an absolute must, I would think. Uh, because you're sending somebody out now, let's say you know you have a couple, four, five, six rental cars that you either bought, rebuilt, or whatever, and you got people out there, you know, you don't know what they're gonna get into, what kind of accidents they'll get into, and it seems like a tremendous amount of liability uh for a shop owner. I mean, just doing a repair properly is a liability, but to have something out there beyond your control, uh seems like you'd have to secure that somehow, right?

Laura: 21:34

Right. And again, setting up that separate company is a big thing, and then once you have that separate company set up, you have it, the cars titled to it, you have them insured properly. Honestly, the the next thing you really, really need to have, and luckily this is why we're in business, is you need to have a rental agreement form. And that form needs to be built out so completely and accurately, there's so much data that's required on that form for it to be a good form. I mean, all the customers' information, all their driver's license information, all their insurance information. And then your vehicle, believe it or not, should be very detailed on the VIN, make model color, all these things should be on that form. So you can imagine if somebody were gonna try to generate one of these contracts by hand, you start skipping some things, you don't think it's important to fill it out all the time before you have a customer sign off. I would tell you that if you skip too much of that, that that legal document is not gonna be worth the paper that it's written on. So, again, our whole idea is you you need to get all this taken care of, let us do it for you. We can pretty much all fill a form and get the customer to fill in the missing pieces of their information, um, sign off on the terms and conditions so that you can generate this legal contract pretty much on the fly uh and get people in and out very quickly, but also document everything you need document it and have all that data saved. So that if something does go sideways, you can figure it out. You know who was in the car on those days, and you can find the document. It's not like buried on someone's desk, you know, have throw it out.

Rick: 23:10

Right. So you so shop owner, your program provides all that uh all the forms, all the necessary paperwork, all that stuff, right? So a shop owner who's already got a million things on his head, he doesn't have to deal with any of that stuff. You just got to make sure he sends what a link, he can send a link. I believe you said he could text a link to a potential new customer, a guy coming in or girl coming in, and they can have everything filled up before they even get to the door, right?

Laura: 23:36

Yeah, I think and I think that's a great idea because how many times have you been in your car and you need to pull out your like proof of insurance, you go to get it and you have an expired card that you're like, oh, they mailed me that the other day and it's still sitting on my desk at home. If they get the heads up, and again it's very easy when you schedule a car in our system, and again, I recommend using our scheduling reservations um portion, you select the vehicle, okay? So that's one piece of that puzzle, and then to select the customer, if they're a return customer, it's really easy. Um, we do integrate with um some of the shop management systems that you could pull the customer's data from there, which also makes it easy because you don't have to do double um entry for the data, but at the very least, all you need is their name and their mobile number. And when you schedule that car, you save it and you send them a link. So two pieces of the puzzle are the vehicle and then the customer. So once you've sent them the link, they're gonna fill in the misses missing pieces on their side, um, which includes you know filling out all the data fields if they're not already filled out, take a picture of their driver's license, take a picture of their insurance card for you. Um, some places really like to have the customer's credit card as part of this process. And we handle that, it's PCI compliant the way we do it. We can embed an online merchant account into the program, which allows the customer or you to put their credit card number in and do a pre-authorization on the credit card. Um, and then if you don't want to charge them for anything, uh, when you return the vehicle, it'll just release the pre-auth off the card. But there's always a token that is attached to the customer record and their agreement. So just as an example, you go to return the vehicle, and again, the biggest problem for shops is they don't have the time to get out there and look at their car as someone's picking up the vehicle. These things all happen, it turns out, between like 3:30 and 5 p.m. every day. Everyone comes in to pick up their vehicle and drop off the loader or rental at the same time. So now you get out to look at the car, they didn't put gas in it, maybe they damaged it, or just you know, track whatever the reason is. You can uh have all this on your your terms and conditions that they're responsible for these things. And if you decide to charge them instead of releasing the hold off the credit card, you can use that token to authorize a charge. And then the other great thing about it is for any shop owner that's out there in an area with toll roads, roll out camera tickets, all these little things that you don't really think about until one of them lands on your desk, you know, the ticket, the parking ticket that someone decided not to pay because they thought, oh, they're not gonna figure it out. This isn't my car. Yeah. So when those land on your desk, or you know, you get your tool bill for the month and you can see who's in the different cars on the different days. In our system, you just go back in, you see who's driving the car on that day, open up their agreement, and you can process a payment. It could be, you know, m weeks to months after they've returned that car. Um, and then the other great thing about it is it's all set up very nicely, but when you process that payment, it regenerates the document as a receipt with the charges on it, and we'll email it to them. But you can also really quickly send them a text message right on the same screen, and these can all be pre-populated so that you're not spending like 10 minutes writing a text message, you're just like, oh, it's the one for toll charge, click, click, click, and you've charged them and sent them a text message in less than 15 seconds.

Rick: 27:14

Nice. Oh, I like that. Yeah, so that kind of leads me to a question I had on complexity. So um shops hate having extra complexity in their days because it gets more complex by the minute for them. Um, so uh from a complexity standpoint, how easy or how moderately difficult is it to use the system? Let's say you had a newer CSR or your estimator is the person designated to take care of the rental car piece. Um, how how easy is that for them?

Laura: 27:48

I mean, anybody who's at all tech savvy and has used any software in the automotive industry, I think picks it up very quickly. You can run it on a desktop, and that allows you, in my opinion, to see everything on a nice big screen with your keyboard anytime you need to like be looking at cars or making reservations or any of these things, a very simple process to do. However, it also works very well on a tablet or an iPad, it could be Apple or Android, and the nice thing about that is once you kind of get the hang of checking cards in and out, you can go for this more mobile version of it where it's basically just a checklist. You need to get these green check marks next to each thing to complete the process, and then at the end, you just click a button to start the agreement and save it. Um, so again, it's literally like we're walking you right through the steps of what you need to do to get a good agreement filled out. Um, we offer training. I mean, I I would tell you probably 50% of the time, I'll I'll do like a quick Zoom meeting with a customer as a demo to try to make sure they understand what's happening, and then we give a free 30-day trial. I would say 50% of the time, people are like, I don't need any training. I I got it. This is pretty easy. You know.

Rick: 29:08

Well, that's good. So it's flexible, it's easily usable by a shop owner or any of the employees. Um what would be a good candidate for a loaner car or a rental car?

Laura: 29:22

So you mean a good candidate as far as who's walking into your shop?

Rick: 29:28

Yes.

Laura: 29:28

Well, I personally think your best bet is to put it in put someone in the vehicle that does have full coverage insurance themselves.

Rick: 29:37

Okay.

Laura: 29:38

Um, because this document that we're creating is shifting liability from your shop or rental car company to the driver of the vehicle and their insurance company is going to cover your car. Um, so again, some people, if they're renting a car, you know, their credit card might give them some. Coverage, but um the interesting thing about that is, and and shop owners need to be aware of that. If somebody says, Hey, I have rental card coverage on my credit card, that is very limited in the time length. If you read your credit card benefits in that part of it, the rental car coverage, it is typically not more than a week's worth of rental continuous. So that's a little bit tricky. Um, and and that's a lot for a shop owner to look into. I mean, if you have somebody that has full coverage and you can put them in the vehicle, that means their coverage is typically going to cover your car. That's why I think they're the best candidates. Um, one thing that they're offering, and we're slowly rolling it out to multiple states, um, and again, it has to do with insurance levels, why we're only doing it in certain states. We have to make sure each state that we roll it out to has been fully, you know, vetted and we have everything in place working properly. We are starting to offer a daily coverage for shop owners. Um, we started in Ohio because that's where we're located, and now we have about five states where let's say I came in, I really need the car, and um I don't have full coverage on my vehicle. A shop owner could say, Well, you know, I really can't let you drive my vehicle unless, and again, maybe we're gonna give them a free courtesy car just to get their to get that repair. Um maybe though, what you can offer them is hey, for $18 a day, I it's not free, but for $18 a day, you're gonna have to purchase this coverage in order to be able to use my car. And we can actually put that right through our system. And it's no cost to the shop owner, which is a great thing. Oh, that's cool. We have it backed, yeah, we have it backed by an insurance company. So all that um shops have to do, they apply for this um insurance policy. Basically, uh, we send it off to the insurance company, get them a policy number, and then it's oh it's charged to the customer based on the number of days they have the vehicle only, you know. It's just like when you go to the rental car company and they say, Hey, do you want to sign up for the daily coverage? If you say yes to it, then it will charge them per day that $18 a day. If you um, and again, it just runs through our system, you do have to have the thing set up where you have their credit card tokenized in there so that we can hit the card for that insurance daily rate uh for the coverage. Um, but if they decline it, I mean again, you you don't have to you don't have to give make everyone take it. It's it's just and then some customers, believe it or not, now I've always been the person that's like I have really good in uh I have really good um car insurance. I don't need that, I don't need that. But I guess there are people out there in the world that have a different mindset that are just like, well, for $18 a day, if something happens to the car, I don't have to put this claim on my policy if someone damages the vehicle, or you know, somehow the vehicle gets damaged. I can for $18 a day keep this from having to go into my policy. So I mean, it there are other people out there that might just take this coverage for that reason. I think I got a little bit off topic there uh to some extent as far as like who's a good candidate, but that's usually the number one thing that I look for is someone with full coverage. And again, like you know, people tend to have full coverage that have nicer cars and things like that. Um but again, you it's that's the only thing I think is a little bit iffy is trying to put someone in a car that doesn't have an insurance policy that will cover your vehicle.

Rick: 33:49

And that's what I was gonna ask. Is there anybody you should absolutely not be uh renting one of your cars to?

Laura: 33:57

Well, you know, I mean, I hate I don't want to tell people to profile people, but I personally, if somebody pulled up in their car and their car is completely trashed, and yeah, it got wrecked or but I'm talking beyond that. Like, it's dirty, it's dirty on the inside. You know, we have like you know the situation I'm talking about. You're looking at the wheel.

Rick: 34:19

You can put the window down, you can smell the weed rolling out towards the front.

Laura: 34:22

Exactly. I mean, we have people on our yeah, we have something in our system, by the way, it's called the do not rent list. One of my favorite one of those, and I've mentioned this on various podcasts, is I have a customer, and I just happen to be scrolling through um the database of uh the do not rent list. And um I saw I saw this customer, it said, Do not rent. Um empty bottle of Remy Martin found under the driver's seat. So not even under the passenger seat, but under the driver's seat. And then it went on to say, vehicle smell of vehicle smelled of smoke or weeds, weed and sigs, is what it said in the last part of it. And I was like, yeah, that's the person you don't ever want to rent to. If you could have figured out not to rent to them in the first place, probably would have been a good plan. But anytime something like that happens, we have a feature that's called the do not rent list, where you basically take a customer's customer's record and you change them and edit their customer record from an active customer to do not rent, and it will block them from getting a reservation or a rental agreement filled out. Uh, but yeah, like again, if you could profile that ahead of time, you you can't always pick up on that before you hand in the keys. But like you said, if somebody pulls up and their car's got like, you know, 10 empty beer cans, smells like marijuana, I'm thinking probably you don't have any available vehicles that day.

Rick: 35:46

Right. No, I and and it's not to be you know disrespectful to anybody, but it's like these are your rentals or your cars that you're you know the benefit of of renting through you because it may be a reduced rate. Hell, it may be free, but you should have that right to you know have a do not rent to list from people that abuse, you know, having a car or they're you know questionable in what rolls out of their car when you get into it, or you know anyway. Okay, I just I just want to know, and it's good to know that there is a do not rental list, so that's cool. Yeah. Um, so what would what would a shop what would a shop need um to start a loaner program? What's what would be the prep they would have to do to prepare themselves to get into this program?

Laura: 36:32

Okay, so the first thing you're gonna do is you need to get some cars. And pretty much I would be willing to bet that almost every collision shop out there has a couple cars they've kept that were totaled out or something along, I don't know, I don't know what the words are for it, but you have cars on your lot that you can fix, and you probably have all intention of either fixing them and selling them or something. Take three of those cars to start out with, fix them up, and um get them ready to use. Now you need to get them titled, and I've already mentioned this. You have to figure out whether or not you're gonna have the vehicles owned by your shop, not you personally, either by your shop or you're gonna set up a separate rental LLC. If you're gonna do the separate rental LLC, you need to take uh probably a couple days and set that up. It's not hard. Most people can do it in most states on like legal zone, and you get this separate rental LLC set up. Now get the cars titled in the name of that company. Um, because you don't the next step is that you want to get insurance on those vehicles, and you don't want to go ask for insurance coverage and then say, Oh, yeah, these cars are owned, it's gonna be my new company, um, acne rentals, and then the insurance company pulls up the bid on that car and they say, Well, no, this car is titled to you personally. They're not gonna give you coverage, the title has to match the company that is insuring the car. So that's why you want to do it in that order. Cars, figure out who's gonna own them, get them titled, and then apply for the insurance. Now, I'm gonna just throw this out there, and I won't give the name of this company because I don't I don't want to like un be unfair because there's probably other companies out there that do this as well. But if you're looking for coverage on these cars, there is a company specifically that does rental or loader cars for repair shops and collision shops, etc., because they are only insuring the vehicle beyond the driver. So it's usually a less expensive way than getting a full coverage policy or even possibly adding it on to like your shopkeeper's insurance.

Rick: 38:43

Oh, okay.

Laura: 38:44

Um yeah, so there there are companies that specifically write this type of auto policy.

Rick: 38:49

Okay.

Laura: 38:49

And then once you have that policy in place, then typically people call me because whoever insures your car is gonna say to you, Oh, you're letting other people drive the car. You have to get this document filled out every single time. Uh, and then they a lot of times the insurance company will say, You need to get a document. They don't typically provide you with that document. And then the shop owners are like, Oh my gosh, where am I gonna get the document? Well, that's where we come in. We have a really nice document, uh, it's customizable on the front as far as your terms and conditions, but the back of it has got a very comprehensive legal agreement on it, all the fine print uh that we provide. And I typically tell people, once you've done those first four steps, then call us. Um, I can do a demo with you and explain how it works, show you what the document looks like, help you get set up specific to your needs, and we give people a free 30-day trial. Um, which I personally think it's great to do the free 30-day trial if you're thinking about getting into this um whole thing because it allows you to put a really good process in place from the very beginning rather than hey, we're gonna wing it, we're gonna fill out some paper agreements, see how it goes, and then if it gets up and running, uh you know, we'll call you later. I mean that's fine too, but I mean, why not get all the employees on board with how this has to work and how important it is to get the document filled out every single time.

Rick: 40:12

Right. No, I agree with that. Um, speaking of documents, so this it sounds like this program can be perfectly paperless for both the customer and for the shop, correct?

Laura: 40:25

It can. Um, I will tell you the document is generated as a PDF. Um when we when in our system saves, you know, when you go to save this agreement, if you've done everything according to our best practice where you're getting the signature, et cetera, our system will save a signed copy for the shop owner in the system, it will also email the customer a copy of that PDF. Um, so in a perfect world where everyone's you know fairly tech savvy and okay with having that on their phone, right? Fine. You don't need to even print one for the customer. Now, there are, I'm sure, occasions where you might want to send it to the printer uh for someone to have in the vehicle. And the reason that I say that is they should be able to produce that document if they're pulled over. It is their proof of registration that they're allowed to be driving your vehicle, by the way.

Rick: 41:14

It it seems like it should be printed out and shoved in the dashboard or something when they're driving the vehicle.

Laura: 41:20

And then one other thing I want to add to that is if you are going to be doing that, like in our system, we have a way that you can redact any kind of sensitive data off of the second copy of it. So you want to keep up, you want to keep a copy for the shop. But if you're sending them to the printer, we can print a redacted copy so that you know somebody who's not really thinking, and again, a lot of people are naive, I think, just to the world younger people. I don't I don't want to classify anybody. I'll just say there are people in the world that are naive to the fact that they probably should not leave a rental agreement document that has their name, address, their driver's license information, their birth date sitting on the front seat of a car.

Rick: 41:59

Correct.

Laura: 41:59

If that makes sense. So I that is why I would kind of discourage a lot of the printed copies because I think a lot of times people don't pay attention to that. And again, in our system, you just have to click a setting to print a redacted copy where it basically doesn't put all of that information. It's basically their name and all your vehicle information that they're allowed to be driving your car. But then, if again, if there's some kind of major claim for something were to happen, you need to be able to produce the document with all the data filled out.

Rick: 42:31

Okay. No, that's that makes sense. So is there um there is a like a scheduling management piece to this, right? So someone can actually have a full schedule of, you know, let's say they got 12 cars out there, and they can kind of see where every one of them's at or what customer they're tied to. And for you can you can designate the period, how long they're gonna be renting. Um is there well, of course, with the collision, I think every end date's gonna be questionable.

Laura: 43:01

I would say that okay, so as far as that document, you never want to leave the due date blank. Sometimes people are like, Well, I don't know when it's coming back. Again, we keep talking about this legal document. Just to throw one more thing out there, um, you would rather have a car that's overdue than one that's never due, if that makes sense. Because if somebody decides that they're not gonna bring your car back, and you try to go to the authorities and say, like, I think this car's stolen, they won't bring my car back. If they have an open-ended agreement and you can't show when that car was supposed to be returned to you, you have an uphill battle trying to get anybody to help you get your car back. So in our system, um, and again, it's totally up to the shop owner. We can set a default due date, meaning if you want it to be five days, we I would say most collision shops, I I usually try to default them to a week at the minimum.

Rick: 43:53

Yeah.

Laura: 43:53

And then the scheduling portion, the scheduling portion is a calendar where you see your vehicles, and it's all color-coded so that if a vehicle is available, light green. If it's a weekend day, we mark it off as dark green, just so you have a nice visual there. A car that's out with a customer will be indicated by a gold bar. And then if you've reserved the one that hasn't yet left, it'll be a red line on the on the bars across the grid. Now, the great thing about that calendar grid in our system is that it's all clickable. So if you set up a reservation for someone and you need to edit or change it, or even a car that's out with a customer, you can literally keep that grid up as your home screen and you can click right on it to edit, extend the due date, you know, reprint the document, cancel, edit the reservation dates. It's all super user user friendly.

Rick: 44:44

Okay. No, that's great. That's fantastic. And let's say you go ahead with this program with the intention of I want to make sure I have rental cars available for my customers that maybe don't have the coverage, or maybe I know this one's gonna run long and they're probably gonna run out of coverage. Or I'm a little slow right now and I get guys come in here to get estimates and out the door they go without me capturing the keys. It's it's an advantage, I would imagine, for capturing keys, right? When you can go, you can leave it right now, I got a car for you. You don't have to go anywhere and do anything, it won't cost you nothing, right?

Laura: 45:23

I mean, it's classic, it's the way that, and again, going back to repair shops and dealerships, this is how they lock in those big dollar repairs because when people are anxious to get their vehicle back and they don't have transportation, they don't want to leave you their car. But if you can put them in a vehicle um and like you said, hand them the keys, just leave your car right now, we'll take care of it for you. Like, let's get it off your mind. Um, because the other part about that is when you've given them alternate transportation, you've taken the pressure off of you and your techs or your service advisors, whoever is dealing with that customer. Because when someone doesn't have transportation, not only are you not going to capture the sale in the beginning, they're also going to keep asking you over and over and over again, when is my car ready? When is my car? Is my car ready this week? If they're driving a car that you've given them and they're not, especially if it's a courtesy, they're they're they don't care about how long it's a lot of people. Yeah, I can tell you during COVID, um, I had an Amazon truck back into my car and kind of gouged the side of it, but it took off like the the mirror, you know, that would come in and out and get cameras on it and everything else. I don't know what it was. That mirror was a big hold up, I can tell you that. Um, and we've talked about this already. The the collision repairs, you may start thinking that the estimate is one thing, but then once you get inside and you have to, I think, adjust your estimate. Again, I don't work in collision shops, but now we figured out that once we took that mirror off, there's three other parts that we actually had to replace we didn't know about. Um, you know, so now that we have to order those. What I think the first thing they have to do, and again, I could be wrong, is they have to get approval from my insurance company to add that to the estimate. And then they have to get the parts, and now we've extended. So I was in this rental car during COVID for over a month because this process took so long. And I mean, if I did not have a car that you know I was driving, if I was like struggling to find another way, you know, I would have been calling them at least twice a week.

Rick: 47:40

It would destroy whatever good feeling you had about getting the car repaired there to begin with. And regardless of how nice the vehicle comes out, that would still be a bad score on Google reviews or anything else because you were put out on just the rental car piece, right? Would not affect the whole your whole experience with that body shop.

Laura: 48:03

Yeah, I mean, I just I I and I guess what I didn't call him one time. I mean, maybe I called him about three weeks in and just said, hey, I just want to make sure that you know everything's going okay with my repair. And the guy said to me, Listen, once we took your mirror off and that, you know, side panel of your door, we had to readjust our estimate. We're we had to wait for the insurance company to approve it. And I was like, okay. Um, he's like, We promise you we will call you as soon as it's ready. And I'm hey, I was just and he was like, Don't worry about it. And I was like, Okay, sounds good to me. And I didn't call him again.

Rick: 48:38

No, that's the way that should work, right? So yeah. Um, so what other um I guess what other ways of building some income can you do with your if you have a shop owner program like yours and you have some vehicles that you're using for loaders, um besides just taking care of your customers in a pinch or so they can drop their car off for a blueprint repair, you know, blueprint uh analysis, you know, where they gotta take the front end apart maybe and see what damage it is, and then kind of put it back together so you can drive it. Um what other ways of income uh can you use that, this this new uh benefit that you have?

Laura: 49:19

Well, I'm gonna go out there and say, and again, this I think is dependent on where your shop is located, but I so many shop owners tell me that um they're in a part of the country where there's not a lot of rental car companies. And so when people in their area start to find out that these cars are available as rental cars for you know a collision repair, the next thing that typically happens is someone says, Hey, I know you have cars that you rent. Can I just rent your car? And um yes, I think that that is again if you've set up the separate rental car company, why not? Right, as long as you have enough vehicles that you're not passing up, you know, you don't want someone renting your car for 35 bucks a day if you am missing out on your main source of income. However, if you get enough cars in there and you have extra vehicles, why not rent them to the public? And uh we can actually help with that too. We have developed a way that you can link it right into your website again if you want to, where someone, if they are searching rental car companies in your town or your vicinity, and you know your search engine result will pop you up. They can click on a button on your website that says rent a car. And just because they fill out the initial information, I just want to make it clear because we want to be shop owner friendly. We don't want people out there in the world just booking your cars all the time. So, what we do is if they click on there that they want to rent a car and they put in their dates, we have it linked up to your reservation grid so that they can see what vehicles are available on that day, and you can put the rates in that you want, etc., for that car. They have to submit their initial information before they're confirmed, and it very clearly spells out to them, you know, submit this and you'll be contact contacted back to get further information if the rental car is available. And again, it's very clear, like this is not a confirmation that you actually have a rental car, but the shop owner will get a notification that someone wants to rent their car on those days. And if you want to do that, then it's very similar to when you reserve it in your you know yourself in the system. You can then further send them the link to go ahead and upload their like driver's license, their insurance, and their credit card information. So, you know, I always say I feel like collision shops especially have these extra vehicles that they kind of start to accumulate. Um, if you think it's a good deal and you have some cars that um will make good rental cars, uh go ahead. I mean, you can start actually renting them out to the public instead of just your customers. And I just want to throw one more thing out there. If you're out there in a part of the country where, you know, there's all different scenarios, but you'll know if it's you. Let's just say I just talked to a gentleman the other day. He's in a part of the country where it's between, he's kind of not in a very urban area, he's between um Houston and Dallas. He does diesel repair. And he's like, I have two or three diesel trucks that I've kept that you know I've I've fixed up myself or whatever, and we were talking about it, he's like, You think I could rent those out? And I said, Yeah, 100%, because you have people again, this was an engine repair place versus collision, but if you're just thinking about along these lines, if you're in an area where like everybody needs a truck for work, and then their truck's unavailable, if you can rent a truck to somebody, I mean that's a great car to have in your fleet. If you know, if you don't mind them using it for work, and most of the time, these trucks that people put in to their fleet, you know, like I said, they fix it up themselves, and so if somebody wants to use it for work, and they can, and I'm gonna tell you, those type of things are more like your $75 a day rentals.

Rick: 53:20

I tell you what, on that line, I would have three or four of those Amazon style tall vans for rentals because uh almost every service company now, every plumbing, mechanical, all that that's what they use. So when theirs goes down, it's in the shop getting repaired, that'd be cool if you have a couple of those available at your body shop that you could use.

Laura: 53:39

I have a I have a customer, this multi-location across the country, and they exploded into this multi-location shop because all they were doing was fixing like the Ford and the Mercedes-type sprinters, and they had those vehicles on hand to put, you know, like you said, the Amazon driver, okay, you're gonna take this truck today while we do the service on the Amazon truck.

Rick: 54:08

Right.

Laura: 54:08

That was their that's their entire business model, and they have a fleet of those vehicles to put their to put the customers in so that they can continue to work.

Rick: 54:18

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, it it sounds like the program is really it's a no-brainer. I I I've dealt with a lot of shops over the years, and only a handful I can recall that had like what you'd call a fleet of their own rental vehicles. And a lot of times it's uh, you know, maybe a small to mid-sized car that's a couple years older, but you know, they've got their brand on it and stuff like that. So they're doing some advertising. But for the most part, most shops are reliant on the rental car companies or they may have one or two vehicles. And you won't see this in in a really nice shop. You'll see this in some of the smaller rural shops. You'll see where they got a couple cars that they were total, they fixed up and now they let their customers use, uh, but they're not charging it, they just let them use it. So seems like it'd be a great program for that. Are you having any pushback when you go to talk to a customer uh uh body shop about why they don't want to put a program like this in place? Is there any pushback on that?

Laura: 55:18

I think the biggest thing is um number one, the liability. You know, they don't want to, they're worried about the liability, and so that's always in the back of their mind of you know, if something goes wrong, anything along those lines that they start to picture like this could go wrong, that could go wrong. I think that's where the pushback comes from. Um I also see a little bit of pushback from employees that don't want to add something else to their day. They're very set in their ways of this is the way we handle things, we don't want to do it. Um and that goes for number one, one to start a learner car fleet, period, um, to we already have a learner car fleet, I just don't want to change the way we've been doing it for the last you know 15 years.

Rick: 56:05

Right.

Laura: 56:05

Um, and I can't fix those problems. Uh, you know, unfortunately, I can't, you know, somebody who's not willing to change the way they've done things or the way the process works, we we do struggle with that at times, but I would say for the most part, if you can buy into this can be an easy process, we can help you with the liability. Um, you know, if you set everything up correctly from the get-go, um I I really think most people once they start it, they they start to relax a little bit about all those things and um see what a good source of revenue it is for them and how it just like takes the pressure off of their employees. Right. If that makes sense. I mean, there's there's so like we've talked about so many reasons, but yeah.

Rick: 56:52

Absolutely. If if it's if it makes that customer experience better, I mean I think that's what most shops are are trying to have is a better customer experience. And that's just that one piece of a puzzle, I think, that can relieve pressure on so many other parts of a repair process. So missing parts, late parts, parts that are discontinued, uh more processes that are discovered that need to be done, and rental car coverage running, and all those other things. I think um to me it just seems like a great tool to have a toolbox. Um I I told you I did have one client I've been working with for a number of years that uh does have your uh program in place. He's I think he's got six cars now that are ready to buy another one. But you know, he told me, he says, Man, I can't believe it's such a good revenue producer um that it's allowing me to pay off that he bought new cars, he's paying off new cars and buying more new cars. And he's finding that it just it helps him close deals, it helps him capture the car right away, and there was just there was no downside to it at all. So uh I think it's fantastic. Fantastic.

Laura: 57:59

I had a client um that called me up and his his family had owned a collision shop for years, and he was like second or third generation in this shop, and he said, I think I'm gonna just try this and buy two cars, he might have leased them, but either way, and um start this rental car company down the street from the collision shop, and I'm going to rent cars basically to my family's collision shop because they're struggling so much to get these vehicles and get customers in them. He had two cars the first month. He added like he literally was just adding two cars like every couple months, and uh within six months he was up to like 10 cars. He had other collision shops in the area reaching out to him to rent cars from him as well. Um, you know, it can be done. It definitely can be done.

Rick: 58:52

Very cool. Well, listen, I know we're running out of time here, so um, I think uh everything you share today is great. Uh I didn't ask you about cost. I wasn't going to ask you about cost. I'll let uh uh those that contact you. Uh, but I'm sure once you see what it is, you're gonna see your ability to not only remove the obstacles that keep you from collecting more keys and and getting customers you know more happy with the process, you're also gonna see that here's a there's a great income stream for you here uh with very little for you to do to get that, right?

Laura: 59:28

I'm just gonna throw out there for the cost. Nobody should be afraid of our cost. Um, most shop owners run our program somewhere between $50 and $150 a month, depending on the bells and whistles they want to add. Um, so it is not like a scary software program where you're spending, you know, thousands of dollars a month to run your your rental car company. And um, you know, the last thing I'd like to add is if if this is something that you know you've been thinking about for a while, think about the steps that you need to. complete to get it in place. And if you're if you're ready to talk to me, you can go to our website, which is shopwomaner.com and you can request a demo. It's not scary at all. I do a quick Zoom meeting with people and really explain how to work it within you know less than 30 minutes, but I like to do the demo just because I like to get a feel for how you want it to be set up and I like to help you be successful with it. And if it's something you want to do, we do we set up a free trial for you. So like I said you can hit the ground running, get a process in place from the beginning to run things right. And you know again my name's Laura Tierney. If you have any other questions you can even you know get on our website give us a call we're we're willing to to help you work through the process.

Rick: 1:00:50

Absolutely and I'll leave uh all Laura's information contact info and the website address all that stuff in the show notes uh for this podcast so um sounds great Laura I I really appreciate you coming on today sharing all that you shared uh I I know personally that it's a great program if I had a body shop there's no way I wouldn't have this just because I know the power of having a car on hand and saying yes Mrs. Smith I can get you in a car right now back first day is free it's not gonna cost you you know you have that flexibility to do whatever you want it's an awesome awesome um ability to have for shop owners so thank you so much for being here today we'll look forward to talking to you soon yeah thanks for having me appreciate it well that's all I had for you today thanks again for tuning in I really appreciate your support and I hope you have a great week I can always be reached at www.rixilover dot com or you can find all my social media links for podcast episodes or blog posts and much more is that