Boyd Group Services, which draws a significant part of its income from Gerber Collision, on Wednesday announced its same-store sales fell 15.6 percent in 2020 to more than $1.77 billion.
The news comes on the heels that Driven Brands’ Paint, Collision and Glass segment — which contains CARSTAR, Maaco, Fix Auto USA and ABRA — reported 2020 same-store sales down 9.1 percent.
The financial data from two of the industry’s biggest MSOs — one a single-owner setup, the other a franchisor — provide a sense of how the national auto body repair industry might have fared during the pandemic year of 2020. It also provides a benchmark for individual collision repairers to measure their own performance and size up the competition.
The Driven Brands and Boyd results suggest the companies’ auto body shops were able to claw their way back and even beat the “market” in 2020 despite pandemic precautions and restrictions decimating the nation’s repair volume. CCC estimated U.S. repairable vehicle claims dropped 35 percent during Q2 2020 and ended the year down 21.3 percent from 2019.
“The COVID-19 pandemic most severely impacted car count volumes in the first half of 2020, with partial recovery in the second half of the year,” Driven Brands wrote of the Paint, Collision & Glass segment in the franchisor’s March 23 annual report. “The Company estimates a $5 million overall reduction in revenue as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
