Know Better, Do Better

by Matthew Ciaschini, MABA President

There’s a phrase I keep coming back to lately: when you know better, you have to do better.

Simple, right? Six words. Fits on a bumper sticker. Sounds great at a conference. Then you’re actually standing in your shop – torque wrench in one hand, OEM procedure in the other – and some portal is flashing red because you dared to bill for a calibration that the vehicle physically requires. Suddenly, that bumper sticker starts to feel a little thin.

But it’s still true. So, let’s talk about it.

Being a repair expert is not just a title on your door or a line in your marketing. It is an obligation. In today’s collision world, the old “looks okay to me” standard isn’t just dead – it’s dead and buried with a strip mall built on top of it. Modern vehicles are rolling super-computers wrapped in high-strength steel with sensors tucked into every crease and corner. Cameras. Radars. Ultrasonic sensors doing God-knows-what behind a bumper cover. If you know that – and you do, because you live it every day – then you own it. And once you own it, you are obligated to repair the thing correctly. Not the convenient way. Not the “let’s just get it out the door” way. Not the way that makes somebody’s spreadsheet feel warm and cozy. And definitely not the way the insurer wants to reimburse the insured/claimant.

That sometimes means protecting customers from their own confident wrongness. We’ve all heard: “I just tapped a pole, I don’t need the blind spot monitor re-calibrated.” Sure. Maybe. And maybe your vehicle’s radar is now looking slightly left of where it thinks it’s looking, and someday, that gap is going to matter at 70 miles an hour. The radar does not care how minor the story sounds. If the OEM says check it, you check it. If the OEM says aim it, you aim it. If a damaged cover is sitting in a radar zone and the OEM says replace it rather than fill and paint it – well, there’s your answer. The vehicle gets the last word. It always has.

It also means pushing back when an insurer leans on a third-party matrix, a canned table or an outsourced opinion that declares a required procedure “not necessary.” If the service information says it’s required, that is the standard. Full stop. The owner’s manual, OEM repair procedures and position statements do not lose an argument because some portal turned a line item red and played an error sound. That’s not how engineering works. Shops across the country continue to report carrier friction over OEM procedures, and some programs now try to funnel calibration decisions through preset pricing tables. Efficient on a spreadsheet? Sure. Correct on the vehicle? That’s a completely different question, and the answer is often no.

And while we’re on the subject of things that are useful tools right up until somebody starts treating them like divine revelation, let’s talk about estimating systems.

A wheel cover does not leap out of the box, line itself up and torque itself or even snap onto the car. A bracket does not transfer itself. Clips do not organize their own little reunion and reinstall themselves. I feel like this should not need to be said out loud, and yet here we are. The estimating guides themselves – the ones insurers love to wave around – explicitly state that not-included operations were not considered in published times and should be added when required. That’s not me editorializing. That’s the database talking. So, when the database misses labor, a human being who actually understands the work needs to correct the repair plan. Until parts develop sentience and start doing their own installs, labor still exists. Charge for it accordingly.

This matters more than ever because too many necessary operations still live in the land of supplements, arguments and “we don’t usually pay for that.” The answer to that cannot be for shops to quietly absorb the work and stop billing for it. That path leads nowhere good. The answer is better documentation, better procedure research and – I’ll just say it – a better backbone. The payment data bears this out: pre- and post-repair scans are usually paid when shops actually negotiate for them. Reimbursement drops sharply for in-process scans and OEM research labor, which means if you never ask, someone has already decided it was free. Don’t let them make that decision for you.

Here in Massachusetts, we don’t have to theorize about labor rate pressure. We live it. Shops in our own market consistently rank labor rate suppression as the top issue they face, and more than half report balance-billing when insurer payment doesn’t cover the actual invoice. The state’s labor rate review found insurers reporting body repair rates in the $43 to $55 range, while shops reported average charged body labor around $68. That is not a rounding error. That is not a personality conflict. That is a gap that has real consequences for real shops trying to hire skilled technicians, invest in equipment and stay in business long enough to do the next repair correctly.

And when the reimbursement consistently fails to reflect the skill, tooling, training and time required to repair modern vehicles, the temptation creeps in. Skip a scan. Assume the calibration isn’t needed. Pretend the software covered a step it didn’t. Each one feels small in the moment. Each one is a quiet compromise. And that is exactly how safe repair dies – not in a dramatic collapse, but in a long series of “close enough” decisions made under financial pressure.

That is also why this association exists and why it matters. For our members – and for the shops that ought to be members – this work is bigger than one estimate or one argument on one file. It’s about defending a standard. Helping each other with information, documentation and legislative advocacy. Building the collective confidence to say, “No. That’s not enough, and here’s why.” And if you’re not a member yet, but you’re tired of fighting the same battles alone every single week, take that as your sign. The vehicles are not getting simpler. The administrative pressure is not easing up. Going it alone stopped being a viable strategy somewhere around the time radar sensors started hiding behind painted bumpers.

Our job has never been to deliver the cheapest repair. Our job is to return the vehicle to the road the way the manufacturer intended – safe, calibrated and correct. That takes judgment. It takes honesty. It takes morality. It takes some conversations that aren’t fun to have. And yes, occasionally it takes telling a customer or an insurer something they really don’t want to hear.

But that’s what professionals do.

When you know better, you have to do better.

For the customer. For the vehicle. For the future of this industry.

Want more? Check out the June 2026 issue of New England Automotive Report!