Car Services, Financial Model, Retail, Service Businesses

5-year Financial Projections, Business Valuation, Cash Flow Projections, Debt Service Coverage, Excel, Financial Model, Loans, Pro-Forma

The broker prices this collision shop at retail. Most collision revenue is priced by the insurer through a Direct Repair Program, not by the customer: the insurer pays labor at a discounted rate, caps materials, expects operations given away as a value-add, and disputes supplements. Present the shop as if every car were customer-pay retail and you overstate SDE. This is the model a searcher or ETA buyer hands the SBA lender – not a startup forecast, an acquisition underwrite for a single independent body shop.

The booth/cycle-time throughput engine manufactures revenue from physical capacity, not a typed-in number: 460 repair orders at a $4,710 blended severity (a 70/30 DRP-to-retail mix of $4,500 and $5,200). The binding constraint is the paint booth, running at 69.7% utilization; a second booth is unfunded capex, not free growth.

Two prices sit side by side. The retail pro-forma price is $1,036,414; the real, DRP-blended price is $806,452 at 2.60x SDE. Overpay avoided: $229,962, or 28.5%. At the pro-forma price the DSCR falls to 1.23x, below the 1.25x floor – declined. The DSCR is shown true versus naive: 1.54x on the cash flow a lender accepts, after hiring an $85,000 estimator/blueprinter to replace the owner who writes the estimates and negotiates the supplements and reserving $30,000 a year for ADAS calibration, scan tools and the booth, versus the 2.69x a broker’s add-back sheet implies. The gap is the owner’s own labor.

The down-case is the documented sector risk number one: the collision technician pipeline fills only about 42% of demand, turnover runs 60.7%, and TechForce counts 73,354 techs needed 2025-2029. Repair orders down 9% plus a 3% rate cut drive the DSCR to 0.64x. Severity cuts both ways – it lifts the ticket but pushes total-loss frequency to a record 23.1%, one car in four written off rather than repaired. The supplement write-off is an explicit line, not an add-back.

Inside: an 11-tab Excel workbook (Google Sheets compatible, no macros or add-ins), a parts matrix (OEM, aftermarket, recycled), labor+refinish gross-profit coverage of 5.42x, debt yield, break-even severity, cash-on-cash and a 5-year MOIC (leverage-amplified, flagged; no live IRR by design), plus a PDF guide with sources and three profiles (Retail-Forward, Balanced DRP, DRP-Volume).

Honest by design: SDE 14.3% and Adjusted EBITDA 9.0%, deliberately below a mechanical shop because the DRP compresses the margin. The first acquisition-underwriting model for collision and auto body shops – not the first collision model; startup forecasts already exist. Educational planning tool, not financial, lending or legal advice.

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