How B Street Built the Systems to Scale From 1 Shop to 15+ Locations

Most trades owners think scaling is a sales problem. Get more work, open another location, and the rest sorts itself out. Tony Wiese would tell you it works the other way around.

Tony is CEO of B Street Collision Center, the second-generation family business his parents started in a single rental bay in 1978. It now runs more than 15 locations across multiple markets. After their father's unexpected death, Tony and his siblings stepped in, learned the traditional body shop model, and then set out to build something different. Their team-based repair system pays technicians well above the industry average. It also lets a technician's team vote them into the next spot on the career path, and it gives the most experienced people a real reason to train the people coming up behind them. The first version of that system, rolled out in 2008, failed badly. Tony stuck with it long enough to learn why, and the rebuilt version is largely what B Street still runs today.

His point about growth is blunt. If you haven't figured out your process with one or two locations, adding more won't fix it, and the problem only gets harder to change. That's what resilience looks like in a growing trades business: systems that hold up without the owner or a few key people carrying everything.

If you own, lead, or help run a trades business, this episode will hit home.

What We Discuss

• Why Tony says to fix the process before you scale it, and how things get lost between store one and store ten
• How B Street's team-based repair model changed the way technicians are paid, and why it lets them fix cars faster
• A career path where your team votes you into the next position, and a pay structure that motivates top technicians to develop the next generation
• What went wrong with the first rollout of the team system in 2008, and what the 2009 rebuild changed
• Why opening new locations eventually becomes its own business, separate from running the ones you already have
• How peer groups helped Tony learn to run a business after taking over young
  
  
  

About the Guest

Tony Wiese is CEO of B Street Collision Center, a second-generation family collision repair business founded by his parents in 1978 and now operating more than 15 locations.

Website: https://bstreetcollision.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-wiese-0354a3228/

Chapters

00:00 — Meet Tony Wiese and B Street Collision Center
00:58 — How B Street Started as a Single Shop
05:26 — Taking Over the Family Business at 21
07:34 — Learning How to Actually Run a Business
11:50 — What Drove B Street's Growth
18:05 — The Playbook Behind Scaling the Business
23:02 — Solving the People and Training Problem
26:58 — How B Street Develops Skilled Technicians
33:58 — The First Team System Failed Miserably
39:28 — Why Tony Believes in the Trades
41:53 — How AI Is Changing B Street's Operations

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