Abigail Downey

I've been in the collision repair industry for 15 years, and it's been quite a journey. My background is actually in psychology - I have a bachelor's degree from Georgia College and State - but I also worked in advertising and the rental industry before this. While working in rental, I saw a need for shops to be able to scale up for larger fleets, so I wanted to try to create something that was able to handle that volume. I started mobile with just me and one other partner with a box truck, painting bumper corners on the rental company's parking lot. Now I'm shifting gears a little bit and going towards the audience where everybody is so busy these days, so I'm catering more to business owners, still fleets, and individual customers who simply don't have time to deal with vehicle repair. We're doing mobile estimating, we're picking up, delivering, and just trying to be as helpful as possible. My main area of expertise when you run a shop with this number of people ends up being people, but certainly keeping up with the latest technology is crucial. Vehicles these days are just huge computers, so keeping up with the OEM standards and training and quality takes quite a bit of time. No day is ever the same in this industry - every day is different, and it's always hopping, so it's really fun and very fast-paced. I'm by nature a very energetic person, so it works well.