INDUSTRY EVENT CARSTAR North America held its first combined conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. The conference served to unite the US and Canadian divisions.
The Stars
Align
CARSTAR North America comes together as ‘1NE’
By James Kerr
I
n the driver’s seat of a race car at the annual CARSTAR conference, I found myself turning sharply around a NASCAR track at 200 miles per hour. The engines were roaring, and the wind was tugging my car into the sidewall. It only took an instant to turn just too sharp, and I spun out on the track. For a moment I thought this conference would be my last. Fortunately, there was no fire, no real danger at all. CARSTAR brought its conference attendees this year to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, and made available to us a “track simulator”, a kind of video game inside a car. You get inside a real race car on rails, mounted on a conveyor belt, and video game magic takes care of the rest. Still, that’s as close as I want to be to that side of collision repair. It was a good tone to summarize the whole of the conference. It was energetic, exiting, and put everyone on track. This year’s conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, was named “1NE CARSTAR”, as a reference to US and Canadian operations coming together as one. The conference had over 1,000 attendees, making it the highest attended CARSTAR conference ever, according to the company. As with any unification of US and Canadian branches, there is always the fear that the bigger economic powers available to a US company means it will swallow its Canadian counterpart. This is not the case, according to Michael Macaluso, President, CARSTAR North America, who says that the Canadian business being lost among American concerns is an “impossibility.” “It’s not a Canada or US thing, it’s a CARSTAR thing,” said Macaluso. “Our strength is our community connections. The core foundation of our program is that we’re locally owned and operated.”
The insurance discussion panel at CARSTAR 1NE. The conference served as an educational opportunity for franchise partners, as well as a networking event.
Mike Piper of CARSTAR, Gloria Mann of Collision Repair magazine and Michel Gagnon of Mitchell. October 2017 collision Repair 41