CARSTAR Impact 2026 brought together collision repair franchise partners, suppliers, and industry leaders in Halifax to address shared challenges including AI, ADAS, EVs, recruitment, and succession planning, demonstrating that the real value of industry conferences comes from networking and peer-to-peer learning rather than formal presentations alone.
- Event Focus: CARSTAR Impact 2026 gathered collision repair professionals in Halifax to discuss emerging technologies (AI, ADAS, EVs), operational challenges, and business succession.
- Core Insight: Collision repair shop owners discovered that competitors thousands of kilometres away face identical staffing, profitability, and management challenges.
- Key Topics: Insurer scorecards, technician training, recruitment strategies, data analytics, OEM procedures, and preparing the next generation of business leaders.
- Community Impact: The conference raised over $10,000 for Cystic Fibrosis Canada through fundraising events including Seaside Stride, karaoke, and casino night.
- Main Takeaway: Real business value comes from peer relationships and informal knowledge-sharing, not conference agendas—owners leave inspired to approach their businesses differently.
For centuries, Halifax Harbour has welcomed people from around the world. Ships came and went, ideas travelled with them and the city grew around the connections made along its shoreline.
It was a fitting place for CARSTAR Canada to gather its own community.
Impact 2026 brought franchise partners, team members, suppliers and industry leaders from across the country to Halifax for three days of presentations, conversations, celebrations and plenty of East Coast hospitality.
But the real value of a conference like Impact isn't necessarily found on the agenda. It's found in the room.
Collision repair can be a surprisingly isolating business. Every owner has employees to manage, vehicles to move, customers to satisfy, insurers to deal with and numbers that have to work at the end of the month. It's easy to become consumed by what is happening inside one collision centre.
Bring hundreds of repairers together and something interesting happens. They discover that shops thousands of kilometres apart are often wrestling with many of the same problems.
The agenda certainly gave them plenty to talk about. AI, ADAS, EVs, insurer scorecards, training, recruitment, profitability and succession were all on the table, along with sessions on operational performance, marketing and the changing way customers find collision repairers online. Keynotes from filmmaker and storyteller Mike Downie and family business expert Tom Deans approached the Impact theme from different directions, looking at storytelling, leadership, family businesses and what gets passed to the next generation.
Taken together, the discussions demonstrated just how much the business of collision repair is changing.
Repairing vehicles remains at its heart. Running the business around those repairs has become much more complicated.
Owners and managers are increasingly expected to understand data as well as dents. They need technicians capable of following increasingly complex OEM procedures, people who understand performance measurements and teams prepared to keep learning as vehicles change. At the same time, they have to find those people, keep them and prepare another generation to eventually take over.
A presentation can introduce an idea. A statistic can cause an owner to question the way something is being done. But often the most useful information comes afterwards. Another
franchisee has already dealt with the same staffing problem. A manager has found a way to improve a process. Someone tried something that didn't work and is willing to explain why.
That sense of community was perhaps best illustrated by CARSTAR Oakville West owner Lorenzo Pellicciotta, who arrived at Impact after riding more than 20,000 kilometres across Canada on his motorcycle, visiting CARSTAR locations along the way and raising funds and awareness for the CNIB Foundation.
Giving back was a recurring part of Impact. CARSTAR's Seaside Stride raised $10,050 for Cystic Fibrosis Canada on opening day, with fundraising continuing throughout the conference through swag sales, karaoke, casino night and the closing gala. By the time Impact wrapped up, the event had raised more than $10,000 for Cystic Fibrosis Canada.
“Impact is more than just a conference. It’s an opportunity to come together as a network, learn from one another, and leave inspired to make an even greater difference in our businesses and communities,” said Dave Foster, senior vice-president of operations and development for CARSTAR Canada.
Those moments aren't separate from the business of a conference. They're part of what makes getting together worthwhile.
Relationships aren't built through emails and video calls alone. People need opportunities to talk shop, trade stories and get to know the person they may call six months later when they run into a problem.
There is no shortage of challenges ahead for collision repair. Technology will keep changing. Insurer relationships will continue to evolve. Skilled people will remain difficult to find. AI will create opportunities and likely a few headaches. And an entire generation of successful collision repairers will eventually have to decide what happens to the businesses they spent decades building.
Halifax Harbour became successful because it connected people with a much larger world. Impact offered a similar reminder.
Getting people together matters. Not because everyone leaves with the same answers, but because they have a chance to hear how others are approaching the same questions, challenge their own thinking and perhaps come away looking at their business a little differently.
The presentations eventually end. The booths come down. Everyone flies home.
What they take with them is the part that matters.
