First Movers Guide To Never Build Your PDR Company Past The First Stages | Think, Grow, Educate PDR
Blog Dent Repair USA Paintless Dent Repair Lakeland Florida

Quality Paintless Dent Repair Made Simple

First Movers Guide To Never Build Your PDR Company Past The First Stages

First-Mover-No


Paintless Dent Repair Companies beyond the Infancy State isn't tenable or a wise investment in the retail market.


The hard truth about trying to expand your small dent repair company and services. The natural progression of a technician in the infancy stages is to add players to reach a larger area of operations.The truth is, that there is a very good reason that most auto dent and ding operations never leave the infancy or adolescence stages. It's like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Unlike other types of services or duplicatable services, the idea that mobile Paintless Dent Repair can be controlled, contained, and managed outside of the commercial realm may be a fallacy of the highest order. Wasting resources, time, and more importantly, growth in the areas that should be given priority, for future financial freedom. That is, assuming the “first mover’s” goal in this whole endeavor is financial freedom.


It's a failure to understand that the genius that has developed within the "First Mover" cannot be duplicated to scale, and if it could it wouldn’t be profitable. It's like trying to profit from Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Picasso: the very thing that makes them break out to become the total success requires that they be free to express themselves independently.
Once one attempts to warehouse, contain, box, or timestamp, the first movers, they fail to grow. Like veal, the only way to earn from them is by keeping them boxed away in a cage, or cogged, so they cannot grow. If they truly grow and can see outside of themselves and beyond the cage that has been built, they will absolutely leave it and hate the cog for it. 

In the auto paintless dent repair industry, the cog is a series of managers, regional managers, and other corporate figures. They earn their living from the tagged-ear-metal-pushers that they now claim. Through fear, intimidation, lack of pay and basically social sciences they have developed a community that has carefully crafted a world for their technicians, to prevent them from being able to see past the luxury of nationalistic pride that has been built around the corporation.  


What makes Paintless Dent Repair technicians successful in the infancy stages, cannot be duplicated and scaled outside of the first mover. If it were able to push past these stages, the whole purpose of the enterprise comes falling down on its own head. 

The very point of the business and the product itself is destroyed by necessity in its growth. 



Here is the natural flow and progression:
Cog-PDR

  • First, You have a first-mover that builds a business on his cunning and ability to produce extremely high-quality results.

  • Second, He trains another technician or technicians, who attain 70% of the original technician's quality and pay, they are called “secondary movers”. They are almost as good, but they do not understand the business side, they just want to push metal and they are paid well.

  • Thirdly, other non-technician roles are created to augment the production of the technicians, eating into their profitability, these are called “secondary cogs”. This is done to increase profit, but to also control their activity.

  • Fourthly, As the secondary cog sectors grow and the production of the mover's increases, the additional stress requires at least one additional manager to expand the authority of the first technician/owner, these are called the primary cogs. Now nearly 20-40% of the productive technician's additional monetary output, is taken away by simply “cogging” them.

  • Fifth, in order to increase profits, expansion of the movers, begins in full order. With it, the quality always fails. Now you have 50% cogs and 50% movers which kill the high-quality results that made the first-mover successful. 

In conclusion, the only way to successfully profit from a Paintless Dent Repair company is to focus only on the commercial side. Expect, that most of the profit will be lost on the endeavor itself. It is the most volatile and unsatisfactory investment to make. Furthermore, when you consider the nature of Paintless Dent Repair and the type of technical work involved it doesn’t take long to realize that its not something that should be commercialized. In fact, it is wrong to do so. Not only should it not be commercialized, its evil, when you consider the inevitable end of such an enterprise. Once the original mover is gone from the equation, even with all of the cogs and processes involved, it is the process of the cogs themselves that make it useless

  • There is no standard training system in place to ensure growth and quality control. This can be mitigated but only at the very lowest levels.

  • Training new technicians. The kinds of technicians that are good enough to resolve the complexity of larger more complex damage on the retail side are not likely to stay with the company. Since they are by design first movers. The very thing that you are trying to capture with all of this. Also, this can be mitigated, but the variable rate at which they will leave and potentially become your opponent in business is too great. 

  • The Amount Of Management needed to control and run even the good technicians ruins the profitability. Drives down the quality of the technician, and essentially ruins the product. This dilutes the product and makes it only usable in the commercial format. The only way to remain profitable is by gaining large contracts. 

I get it, you want to grow your brand into the largest conglomerate in your region, the idea is that when you get older, you will have something of value that you can sell or that will remain profitable for you. If you think that this is how you will retire, you don’t own a calculator. You would do better to invest your money in the stock market with a good advisor, or create something else that will profit the Paintless Dent Repair community and yourself. 

The problem is thinking that you can scale Michelangelo, Picasso, or The Rolling Stones, etc. Sure you can make some great artists, but the vast majority will not be profitable and those that are the Michelangelo’s won’t work for you long enough to make it worth it. It can be scaled but only within the limited commercial world. As a result, at least for the retail market, it cannot be scaled, it should not be scaled, and it is wrong to attempt to scale it. If Dent Wizard has taught us anything, its that even the commercial realm isn't profitable to retain investors. It's extremely volatile, a poor investment, propped up by a weak workforce and propped up by fear and a cog police force, it's only a matter of time, before its critical failure. 

What is the solution then? The solution is to unionize the Michelangelo’s and create curriculums in an attempt to produce “first movers” faster and identify them in the world. If this were in place and you could identify them early enough, you might be able to nurture them into their craft so that they would believe it was actually you who had given them this gift. 

The answer is to create a school of thought that will benefit the current first movers and those that are coming up through the ranks for free. Give the knowledge to the world at no cost. Perhaps, this benevolence will create enough grateful technicians who will at least hold a single banner, possibly even under a single name. A guild, a union, one banner, one goal, perfection.