How the Referral Network Works, for PDR Shops

If you run a paintless dent repair shop and you have had a call from us, or you are looking at this page before deciding whether to bother, here is the whole model in plain terms.

What AHN actually is

American Hail Network is a matching service. We do not own a bay, we do not employ technicians, and we do not repair vehicles. A driver with hail damage finds us, tells us what happened and where they are, and we route them to a local shop that can look at the car in person.

That is the entire business. It means our interests and yours line up in a specific way: we make nothing from a repair, so we have no reason to push a driver toward work they do not need, and no reason to send you a lead that cannot convert. A referral that wastes your morning costs us a shop.

What a referral is, concretely

One driver, one vehicle, their contact details, their location, what they say happened, and whatever they have already told us about their insurer and their claim status.

It is not a shared lead. It is not blasted to four shops in your market to see who calls fastest. One lead goes to one shop. Sending the same customer to three shops is a broken promise to all three and an irritating experience for the driver, who then hears from three strangers in an hour.

What it is also not: a booked job. It is a person who has raised their hand and expects a call. Whether it turns into a repair depends on your response time and your estimate, the same as any other lead you have ever bought.

What it costs, and why you pay first

You pay a flat fee per referral. No retainer, no monthly minimum, no percentage of the repair. A quiet month costs you nothing because a quiet month contains nothing to pay for.

The fee is prepaid: it is collected before the customer's name and number are released to you. That surprises people, so here is the honest reasoning rather than a policy statement.

The alternative is invoicing. Invoicing means a receivable, a follow-up, and eventually a decision about whether chasing a small amount across a state line is worth the administration, which it never is. On a one-off referral into a market where we have no other work, there is also nothing structural making anybody pay afterwards, because there is no future volume for either side to protect.

So rather than build a collections process neither of us wants to be part of, the fee moves first and the obligation ends there. No receivable, no follow-up, no chasing, in either direction. You know exactly what a lead costs before you own it, and we never have to send you a reminder.

There is one exception, and it is deliberate: a referral can be marked waived. Goodwill cases and partner-terms markets are real. The point of naming it rather than just not charging is that a waiver is a recorded decision instead of a forgotten invoice.

What vetted means, because it is the only thing we sell

The single claim AHN makes to a driver that a shop cannot make about itself is that the shop on the other end has been checked. If that word is decoration, we have nothing to offer anybody and the drivers would be better off with a search engine.

So it is a real check. Before a shop receives anything we want to confirm:

• A permanent business at a real address. Not a PO box, not a hotel for the season.

This is the same test we tell drivers to apply, and it would be strange to apply it less carefully ourselves.

• Insurance billing experience. Most hail work is a comprehensive claim. A shop that

cannot bill a carrier directly turns a covered repair into an out-of-pocket argument.

• A warranty you will actually honour, which in practice means a business that

expects to be reachable when a panel needs looking at again.

• That you are who you say you are, which is the least interesting check and the one

that occasionally matters most.

A shop sits at unvetted, then in review, then either vetted or rejected. Nothing is released to a shop that has not cleared it. If something does not line up we will tell you what it was rather than going quiet.

What we are not going to pretend

Two things, because you have heard the pitch before and you can tell when a number has been invented.

We are not going to quote you a lead volume. It depends entirely on whether a storm hits your market, and nobody knows that in advance. Any network that promises a monthly number is either guaranteeing something outside its control or counting leads in a way you would not.

We are a growing network, not a national incumbent. Coverage is real in the markets where we have partners and honestly thin where we do not, which is exactly why we are having this conversation. If you are reading this because we approached you, it is because your market matters to us and we do not currently have it covered properly.

A network that oversells its size to a shop owner gets found out on the first invoice.

What we want back

Three things, none of them onerous.

Answer quickly. A hail lead is perishable in a way most work is not, because a driver who has just been through a storm is calling several places and the shop that picks up gets the car. Speed beats almost everything else here.

Tell us when a lead was junk. Wrong number, damage that turned out to be a single door ding, somebody who was never going to claim. That is a refund or a credit, and more usefully it is information. We would much rather hear it than watch a shop quietly stop working the leads.

Keep the driver's experience straight. No deductible offers, no pressure to sign in a driveway, no promises about a payout. If a shop does that on a lead we sent, the driver associates it with us, and we would rather lose the partner than the claim.

If you want in

The shop application is on our for-shops page. It asks for the business details, where you work, and what you can take on. Vetting starts from there.

If you would rather ask a question first, use the same form and say so. We are not going to put you into a drip sequence.