Holmes took over the shop from his father in 2007 and over time it has grown piecemeal as he’s had to add an extra shed here or there – including a separate fast track repair facility up the road.
“I made a decision early on to grow the business as I believed that if we didn’t, then we might get swallowed up,” he said.
If anyone is doing the swallowing I'm going to say it's Holmes. He's pretty much bought out the whole street. In 2016 he finished a major refurbishment and rebranding giving the shops on both sides of the street an external makeover. This gives the business a visual cohesion. Customer reception and the offices were also remodelled.
It's not the ideal layout but Holmes makes it work and is constantly fine tuning his processes to achieve the best workflow. The parts department fair takes your breath away. It is humongous and there's a good reason for it. Holmes actually has a stock of around $25,000 of parts to try to speed up key to key time. His team have got repairing parts down to a fine art which also helps with both bottom line and productivity. They are like vultures picking at the carcass of wrecks which again helps to boost the bottom line and avoids the waste of perfectly good parts being crushed. Another nice earner are ute trays – and believe me he has seemingly hundreds of them stashed away in various locations.
Even this huge amount of space wasn't enough to perfect workflow so Holmes decided to strip out the driveable repairs and opened HSR Express, a seperate facility ten minutes drive up the road. Here he's able to house paint and panel under one roof which certainly helps with efficiencies.
It was working with business coach Sarah-Beth Cleaves who Holmes saw at Paint & Panel LIVE that helped him to break down the barriers to expanding the business. Well we’d say he's smashed those barriers. Current plans include expanding on the Express repair division with a cosmetic small repair section and gaining a manufacturer badge. There shouldn't be any barriers to this as Holmes invests in training staff, has all the latest equipment and could easily turn any of his sheds into space dedicated to one manufacture, or simply buy another one. You won't be surprised to hear that one of the big positives in the industry for him is 'the opportunity to keep expanding.'
Shop stats
Size: Enormous - difficult to measure accurately
Staff: 46
Type of repair: All types
AVG cars repaired per week: 90-100