Several years ago, Jim Young, 55 of Memphis, TN began a startup called My Business is a Wreck, a company he has described as a small team of passionate industry professionals delivering robust, reliable applications to the automotive industry.
35-year collision veteran Jim Young started My Business is a Wreck, a company that has created four applications that help body technicians, painters, estimators and service advisors to be more effective and productive.
The company has developed four applications for different sectors of the automotive repair industry; iTechnician, iPainter, iEstimator and iAdvisorâ, to act as electronic assistants with the goal of helping them to do a better job and ultimately providing improved customer service. All four are currently available and free at the App Store for iPhones, iPads and Google android devices, according to Young.
It's fitting that every app he's created starts with the letter 'i' because Young has put much of his heart and soul into each one. Employed for more than three decades as a body technician, service writer, shop manager, instructor, coach and consultant for BMW and Toyota in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, Young also owned his own shop, Young's Collision in Memphis for several years. He has also been an I-CAR instructor for the past 15 years and is a business coach and mentor for automotive-related businesses throughout North America.
Young's father, 88, is a former body tech and managed a Pontiac dealership for 17 years and that's part of why his son developed these apps to help other collision professionals with daily tasks, he said. My dad told me to always think about the people who helped you along the way, because he said sales numbers are important, but in the end the ones who helped you will be the people you'll remember. These apps can make peoples' lives easier and that's the main reason why I invented them.
It's truly a labor of love for Young and his new company. "I've invested approximately $10,000 into these apps without a dime in return, he explained. Eventually, I should be able to get some revenue from advertising, but in the meantime I'm more focused on getting these apps into the hands of the people who need them to make them more effective and productive."
Unveiled last November, Young first developed iTechnician, followed by iPainter, iEstimator and finally iAdvisor, an app that can be used in both mechanical and collision industries. "We're covering pretty much every role that exists in a shop," Young said. "We've heard back from users all over the world and currently we have people using them in 12 different countries, including Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Spain, to name a few."
Convenience is obviously one of the key features of these apps, Young said. "Everything is in your pocket, so you don't have to walk over to your laptop or iPad and stop what you're doing. Before we released these apps into the market, we gave them to service directors, estimators, techs and painters all over the country, in order to get their feedback during the modeling stage. We started tweaking them almost instantly, to make them better and stronger. By telling us how they were using them, we were able to make them better. It was a valuable process, because they saw things we might not have discovered on our own."
Here's a brief description of what each app can do:
iTechnician: Enables users to log their assigned ROI numbers; record rates for flat rate technicians; track weekly or bi-weekly pay cycles; track paid and unpaid hours; calculate expected pay and record a weekly or bi-weekly work history report.
iPainter: Enables users to establish and maintain a spray-out inventory; record favorite formulas and custom lists; create a verified paint variances list and do all of the same things offered on the iAdvisor and iEstimator apps to track jobs, calculate hours and calculate expected pay.
iEstimator: Enables users to log customer information and ROI numbers; create a personal daily customer arrival and departure calendar and record important information, including a customer inventory form documenting all of the belongings left in vehicle; existing AM and FM radio pre-set stations; a vehicle old damage check-in form; a maintenance upselling opportunities form and a tires depth gauge form.
iAdvisor: Enables users to perform all of the functions also featured on the iEstimator app.
Ed Attanasio