Longtime Shop Owner Bids Farewell to Collision Repair

by Alana Quartuccio

After spending more than five decades in collision repair – 30-plus of those years running his own business – Don Roy has decided to close up shop.

“I’m 73, so the best thing was to retire for the last time,” he shared during his final weeks running Don Roy’s Auto Body & Appearance Center – a staple in the Chicopee community since the early 1990s. The shop has been closed since early December. 

“I think I retired six times, but I always wound up right back here,” he says of his lifelong career, which sure had its challenges over the years. He readily admits some of those never-ending frustrations led to his decision to close the door on collision repair for good after decades of running a successful operation. 

An insufficient labor rate – and therefore the inability to pay technicians what they deserve – are at the top of that list. 

“We did survive, until this year when we realized we were getting very limited in available help as far as technicians go. It really transpired because we’ve been pretty stagnant in Massachusetts with the labor reimbursement rate that insurance companies pay us. So, we’re limited to how much we can offer our technicians, and that was a major reason we decided to close.”

Things were very different when he first got into the industry. 

The youngest of seven children, he was exposed to automotive work at an early age as his father ran an auto repair business next to his childhood home. Being the youngest with four older brothers, young Roy was often asked to be the gopher of the team, although he didn’t care much for mechanical work. Later his older brothers exposed him to the auto body side of the business, but as a kid, “I had no clue what I wanted to do.”

He went on to college to earn a degree in business administration and spent a few years playing at colleges and battle of the band events with his band, The Midnighters. The band eventually fizzled out when members moved on to get married or attend college. Roy admits he still had no clue what he wanted to do. He wound up taking a part-time job at an auto body shop – Lou Herman Auto Body – where he “grew from the bottom of the rack. When I left there, I was the executive vice president.” 

After 25 years with the business, he decided it was time to go on his own. He started Don Roy’s Auto Body in 1992 in a 4,000 square foot shop with limited parking in downtown Springfield on Worthington Street. He leased the space with an option to buy, but after three years, Roy got an opportunity to move the business to a larger and more convenient location in Chicopee. The business would wind up calling 1416 Grandby Road its permanent home for 28 years. Being located right on a main drag most certainly helped contribute to many years of success. 

“At that point, we signed up with any and every insurance company in Massachusetts. Later in life, we learned that was the wrong thing to do.”

Roy is proud to have employed “some pretty talented people” during those early years. “Back in the 1990s, people in the industry would move from shop to shop and were able to decide where they wanted to work and where they could be happy. We grew our shop, and we had six technicians. One focused on detail and did all the finesse, buffing and cleaning the cars. We had two in the paint shop – one to prep and one to paint. They were both pretty equal in skill and could trade off. We had three or four technicians on the floor at most times, and that kept everything running pretty smoothly.” 

Roy’s wife and daughter have also been principal members of the team. His wife Irene brought her prior dental office management experience to help with Don Roy’s Auto Body’s office management for 10 years before she decided to retire. He says she “found out how different dealing with insurance companies is in our business as opposed to dentistry” but “did a great job and was friendly with everyone in the claims departments.”

Their daughter, Karen Rattell, has been instrumental in keeping the business successful over the past 20 years. She invested time into learning more about the business, even taking a master course in how to run a body shop and returning with many ideas. Roy says it was a “no brainer” that she was poised to work in the business. She always knew how to make customers relaxed and assured that they came to the right place. 

At one point, the Roy family considered having Karen take over for her father, but with insurers’ refusing to understand the costs body shops have are not just “a cost of doing business,” they made the difficult decision to close up shop for good.

“In my estimation, most of the employees who worked for us over the years had pretty large investments in their own tools. I would say that an A-Tech probably spends anywhere between $10,000 to $15,000 on personal tools that they provide for themselves. The body shops, as our shop did, would provide the heavy machinery, like the frame machines and the lifts and water powers and things that weren’t affordable to every technician. Unfortunately, the insurance companies considered that to be the cost of doing business. And as we all know, as years went on, everything became more expensive. However, the insurance companies couldn’t see that in Massachusetts as far as changing the labor reimbursement rate.”

Frustrations with battling insurers led the business to eventually move away from referral programs. “We decided that we’d still do business with [certain companies], but we would not be a referral shop by any means, and we’d have to negotiate everything that we did with them.” 

Roy was active with the Massachusetts Auto Body Association at the time and even served as president in 1997. “We tried to better the situation between the body shops and the insurance companies, because let’s face it, we have to work with them every day; they have to work with us. In the beginning, it was like there was a war going on without any bombs or anything exploding, but that’s the scenario that I always felt: that we were under attack and we were losing the war.”

Roy believes things got “somewhat better, because some of the people that were actually technicians in different body shops crossed the line and went to the other side of the fence to work for the insurance companies. Those who did that brought their feelings with them, too, because they knew what was involved with repairing cars in the shop. Negotiations became more fair to the point where the insurance companies started listening to what we actually have to do.”

But it wasn’t enough of a change to help his operation survive long term. 

“They still limited us to what we could negotiate for the labor reimbursement rate and for cost, and it became very tight. It seemed like we were swapping eggs in one basket and putting it into the other. And at the end, our basket was nearly empty. So over the years, that drove us to ask ‘what are we really doing here?’ I couldn’t afford to pay our guys any more than $30 an hour working on a $40 to $44 an hour labor rate. And our crew started diminishing.

“And with the new revolution of the cars coming out today, the repair situations are going to go absolutely crazy,” he predicts. “Shops will have to invest in more tooling, but the insurance companies continue to say ‘it’s a cost of doing business.’” 

 With the shop officially closed, Roy intends to spend time with his wife visiting their Florida home, while Karen has decided to pursue other career interests. 

Want more? Check out the January 2025 issue of New England Automotive Report!