The Founders Fast-forward to 1976, the United States is celebrating its bicentennial birthday and siblings Claudia and Richard form a business partnership, with the purchase of a Collex collision franchise on Grant Avenue in Philadelphia. This marks the first step toward the company that will someday be known as CollisionMax.
“I had a gut feeling that this spot would do well because of the growth in the community and I was right,” said Claudia about the Northeast Philadelphia location. As the first woman owner in the Delaware Valley, she took up the challenge of running a body shop. “I don’t have a lot of finesse about a lot of things –but I’ve always been a good money manager and I attribute my success directly to the people around me who believed in me and supported me,” she explained.
The success of this first center was spectacular. “We knew it would do well, but it did much better than anyone expected,” Rich Brigidi recalls. Much of this success was directly attributed to Wayne Smolda, then a part of the Collex Collision Franchise business. “He was relentless in bringing in new business,” says Claudia.
