National Auto Repair Partner

When a national auto repair partner expanded its workforce from roughly 8,600 to more than 9,200 employees through acquisitions and new hires, the natural expectation was that incident rates would climb with the added exposure. Instead, the opposite happened. With GMG EnviroSafe's safety program already embedded across their locations, the company finished 2025 with TRIR down from 3.70 to 3.28, the Lost Workday Rate cut roughly in half, 71 fewer injuries, and $715,000 in direct cost reduction.

Growth is one of the most common stress points for any safety program. Acquired locations arrive with their own safety culture, their own training records, and their own gaps. New hires need to be onboarded quickly enough to keep operations moving, but thoroughly enough to keep them safe. Without coordination, injury rates often climb alongside headcount.

For this national auto repair partner, the pressure was real. The workforce grew by more than 600 employees in a single year, including teams brought in through acquisition. Each new site added its own forklift operations, eye-injury risk, lift inspections, lacerations, tire inflation hazards, and fire prevention requirements, the same recurring hazards that drive most injuries in auto repair. The company needed every new location and every new hire integrated into the existing safety program without losing ground on the gains they'd already made.

Rather than treating acquisitions and onboarding as a separate workstream, GMG EnviroSafe extended the company's existing safety program directly into the new locations. The model that had already produced strong results across the rest of the network was applied site by site, with the same coordinators, the same training expectations, and the same documentation standards.

The program continued to include these key elements:

• A dedicated Compliance Coordinator at each location, providing consistent in-person support
• Site-specific risk evaluations completed during onboarding of acquired locations
• Hands-on, job-specific training for technicians and managers, delivered before new hires took on full duties
• A centralized team managing Safety Data Sheets (SDS), permitting, documentation, and reporting
• Clear incident reporting with defined corrective actions, so the same root cause didn't show up twice
• Quarterly leadership reviews with performance scorecards, keeping safety visible at the executive level

The result was that newly acquired sites didn't need to invent their own approach or wait for a separate program to mature. They stepped into a system that was already working.

Even with the workforce expanding by more than 600 employees, both leading and lagging safety indicators improved year over year:

In real terms, that translated to 71 fewer employees injured during the year and $715,000 in direct cost reduction. The Lost Workday Rate cut is particularly significant; it means employees who would have been off the job under the old program were instead at work, fully active, with their families and their teams.

The takeaway extends beyond the numbers. Growth periods are when safety programs typically lose ground. Sustaining performance, let alone improving it, during a workforce expansion of more than 600 people demonstrates that the program is built into how the organization actually operates, not bolted on. GMG EnviroSafe continues to work alongside this client as their footprint grows, with the same goal: protecting employees, supporting managers, and giving leadership visibility into the risks that matter.