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Dan Ketchum spent nearly 16 years as an automotive technician before founding Lakeshore Diagnostic & Calibrations in Holland, Michigan three years ago.
The premise was straightforward: West Michigan collision shops needed a calibration partner with the equipment, expertise, and documentation to back up every job. Lakeshore operates both from a controlled facility and as a mobile service for shops where vehicle pickup makes more sense.
Today Dan's team serves 15 or so shops across Holland, Zeeland, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo.
"We're your last line of defense before you turn the keys over to the customer," Dan says. "A lot of these body shops just don't have a technical person or somebody that's been doing calibrations or electrical diag for years on cars. So when they have somebody they know and trust that is certified and able to come check out a car for them and make sure it's good to go, they feel really secure about that."
In the early days, Dan handled calibration identification manually. That meant pulling service information, cross-referencing damaged components against OEM requirements, and trying to ensure nothing slipped through.
It worked at low volume. It did not scale.
"You could spend two and a half hours trying to sort through an estimate and manually go through all the service information to make sure you're catching everything," Dan recalled.
As Lakeshore added shop partners, the risk of missed calibrations compounded. More estimates, more makes and models, more OEM procedures to track and no systematic way to catch requirements that only trigger based on proximity to damage or component removal. The manual approach was slow and a liability.
Lakeshore adopted Revv to replace manual calibration research with a consistent, VIN-specific workflow.
Dan's team now runs vehicles through Revv's automated calibration identification, which cross-references the VIN against OEM data and returns a complete list of required procedures in minutes.
What once required hours of manual service information research now takes two minutes. And because the output is OEM-sourced, any team member can produce a defensible, complete calibration recommendation.
"You don't have to have tons of experience with automotive," Dan notes. "You can pretty much have somebody go through and drop an estimate in and scrub it and see what it needs."
Lakeshore leans on Revv's output directly for customer-facing invoices.
"Usually what we do is copy and paste what Revv says and put it on our invoice," Dan explains. "So when the customer gets their invoice from the shop, they can see what system it was and why that was done. It takes a lot of argument out of it, as far as dealing with the collision shop itself and the customer."
Each custom invoice is generated in seconds based on the estimate and rates card. Each invoice includes not just what calibration was performed, but which system was involved and the OEM position statement that supports it.
For shops and vehicle owners who want to understand why a calibration was charged, the answer is already on the document they receive.
For a calibration specialist managing work across 15 or so shop partners, estimate coordination is a constant operational variable.
Each shop sends information differently, jobs involve different insurers, and getting calibration line items into the right place in the right format takes time.
Lakeshore recently added Revv's CCC two-way integration addresses this by connecting the calibration workflow directly to the shop's estimating system, reducing the manual back-and-forth that comes with coordinating across locations.
Dan is actively expanding this to additional shops and learning how the integration functions from the shop side. "It's just less email back and forth," Dan says. "It's helped a lot."
Revv expanded what was possible at their operation.
Three years in, Lakeshore has grown from a solo operation doing manual research to a multi-shop calibration partner that can process estimates quickly and consistently without deep automotive expertise at every step.
"I think any reputable ADAS calibration shop is probably using Revv or a similar service to be able to capture that," Dan says. "I don't think you could really jump into the market without it, unless you just want to do a couple a week."
The documentation piece has proven equally important. When vehicle owners question a calibration charge, the OEM position statement is already on the invoice.
"Here's the manufacturer's position statement that says this is what needs to be done," Dan describes. "It gives peace of mind."
Lakeshore recently acquired a second, larger location and is expanding CCC two-way integration across more of its shop partners. Dan is also looking at tighter invoicing integration -- right now the team copies Revv output manually into their billing system, and connecting the two would remove that step entirely.
For shops evaluating a calibration sublet partner, his advice is direct: equipment, diagnostic capability, and process all matter. The calibration is only as good as the system behind it.
"We have not run into an issue that we haven't been able to resolve or find somebody that can help us resolve it," he says. "Having a company that's going to have all the resources, and not be willing to give up after something goes wrong or doesn't calibrate, is super important."