J. Larry Bloodworth
Forum Replies Created
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The final product. Custom-made one-off @$30
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The Inc. link is broken, but the other link says:
>”The law provides that applicants can request up to $10,000; however, it seems that the SBA may scale the advance based on the number of employees an applicant has. Based on reports, the SBA may provide $1,000 per employee for up to ten employees. However, SBA has not provided public guidance on how it will determine the amount of the advance. Please check back for updates.”<<
Thanks for the clarification, Natalie!
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Natalie,
Your link gives me a 404 page not found error.
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Here’s a great webinar on taking great shop photos that was posted yesterday after the live webinar on YouTube.
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Thanks, Natalie. That information is nowhere to be found on the SBA website. (At least I can’t find it.) Can you give me a link to that information, please? Thanks!
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I’m sort of late to the party but I’ve been writing estimates and repair orders in QB for well over a decade. I don’t use any conventional shop management software other than QB & Google Calendar. To create a repair order in QB, you create a form template. Go to Lists>Templates. Double-click a template you want to redesign/create. I modified the invoice to be a repair order. I also redesigned the estimate to look like the RO, but it says “Estimate” instead of “Invoice”. I don’t use the word “Repair Order”. Take a look at my redesigned invoice:
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Q: >>”What do you think key fob programming is worth?”<<
A: At least the amount of a blank key FOB. Although I’ve never done it, I would charge double the price of the key FOB strictly for the convenience factor. My wife went into Karl Malone Toyota here in Draper, UT and she sat around for 2 hours in the waiting room for the key FOB programming service.
Customers don’t know what it costs anyway. The dealer has the stigma of being high-priced and few rarely check. What the dealer won’t quote is the wait time.
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We do similar to what ACOLIAJJA does. We reflash U.S. & Asian units, but hire a mobile reprogramming guy for $150 for the vehicles we don’t reflash like Euros. We charge a flat $250 fee for reflashing no matter whether we do it, or sub it out. We have yet to do key FOB reprogramming, but I’m sure our turn is coming.
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Zach,
Thanks for your Email address. If we talk on this forum instead of private Email, maybe others might find what we talk about useful.
I’ve told my story in this venue more than once. To answer your question directly, by communicating clearly and often with my customers as well as PPC advertising (Pay-Per-Click) that I learned how to do on my own was the “secret” of our unbelievable numbers.
A rinky-dink 3K sq.ft. shop with 4 lifts was doing a consistent $1.2M/yr. We had maxed out at $700K/yr. then I discovered PPC. I would work on customer communication first. What I mean by customer communication is this:
If a shop is getting phone calls from customers asking for status updates on their vehicles, IMHO they aren’t staying in contact with their customers well enough and it will cost a shop dearly and never even know it. You can buy SMSs to do this for you or you can do it yourself for free. I chose the free route.
I text customers from my desktop PC status updates constantly during the repair. I would send pictures and/or videos where necessary. I can count on one hand how many lost sales I had after I sent a customer a “Show-N-Tell” video. That’s why my main YouTube channel (I have several) has over 2,200 videos. Most of them are me showing customers 1. What’s wrong with their transmission. 2. What we’re going to do to fix it. and 3. What we are going to do to keep it from happening again.
It was my full-time job as our shop’s Chief Marketing Officer to make the phone ring off the hook and maintain constant contact with customers through texts, emails, video, and phone calls when necessary. The phone came last in the order of priority communication. To answer your question, my main YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/larrybloodworth
PPC advertising is really useless unless you have it accompanied with Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) phone tracking where you can track what keywords and search terms the callers are using when they find your website and call your shop.
After maxing out sales at $700K/yr, we started the PPC campaigns and to make a long story short, we ended up spending about $50K/yr. with Google, Bing, & Yahoo to drive an extra $500K/yr. worth of business. In essence, it cost us a 10% commission. I also learned in our small market (SLC w/1M population) we were getting ALL of the clicks available in our market. I couldn’t have spent more money on PPC if I wanted to because there simply were no more clicks (thus calls) available. Our phone rang off the hook.
There were days and sometimes weeks I paused our PPC campaigns to simply get caught up because we were a week or two out. I came awfully close to starting a second shift at our shop but decided against it in the end. Conversely, when I was doing the marketing and communicating on a part-time basis, I got part-time results.
It’s all a lot to learn, but I chose to learn how to do it myself as opposed to hiring it out. Either way, it will make you money. The busiest shops are the ones that market themselves the best. The methods of marketing vary widely. For example…
I talk about communication. Here’s a company that has a system to text customers like it’s some brand new invention but their customers think it’s the best thing in the world. Check out their website at AutoText.me
I’m currently working on our new website that’s scheduled to launch January 1st at YourTransmission.com
I’m still specializing in 10-year old and newer vehicles only which is another ingredient to the secret sauce I’ve found to work well for the last 25 years.
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Zach,
I admire you for your dedication and I am most certainly glad what you’re doing is working for you. Few shop owners have that much enthusiasm. Let me tell you about my experience in trying to train my technicians.
I built and equipped a high-end classroom for training in our shop in an unused upstairs office. I spent about $5K setting it up with all the latest technology for teaching. Then I discovered that I have ZERO training in how to teach. The curse of knowledge set in and I assumed if I could understand a concept or theory then everybody ought to get it. Not so. I had the real-life version of the proverbial blind leading the blind.
People go to college and get degrees to learn how to teach. It’s not as simple as it looks. When I finally concluded that I wasn’t qualified to teach much, I started subscribing to online training courses. Then our weekly classes consisted of watching training videos and ask questions afterward.
I would also assign certain videos for the techs to watch at home because there’s so much to learn. That’s when I learned that when they get off work, they have no desire to spend their off time doing something that had something to do with work. It was just a job. I was never successful in getting technicians to think for themselves. Like you, I would direct them as to what to do because having them diagnose boiled down to a parts throwing contest.
Trust me, I tried everything and I still ended up being somewhere between a technical librarian and a head diagnostician. I wanted to work ON the business, not IN the business. I was extremely successful with marketing, advertising, and sales but that didn’t fix transmissions. If anything, it made problems worse. I unknowingly created a record number of transmission jobs we couldn’t fix. Diagnosing a correctly assembled transmission is one thing, diagnosing one after an alleged rebuild is quite another.
I sat on this problem for 4 years after selling our shop to do study, research, and interviews trying to solve the puzzle. I finally concluded that the problem is endemic within the industry and simply the nature of the beast. Most importantly, I also concluded that it was wrong for me to think I could change it. The condition is chronic and terminal. It was killing me.
Now, I feel much better about the future. I made a very long (16-minute) video pitching my business plan on my YouTube channel. Which BTW, has over 2,200 transmission-related videos and was the secret of our success in record sales numbers. I titled it Common Dilemma, Uncommon Solution.
From Draper, a suburb of Salt Lake City.
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Zach,
Thanks for the reply. I’ve been in the transmission repair specialty field all of my adult life and here’s what I’ve learned about training for my particular specialty. Much like electrical, transmissions aren’t the type of thing you can simply take apart, figure it out and put it back together again. Those days went away many decades ago.
It takes knowledge of transmission theory and principles of operation which takes academic skills the majority of technicians don’t have or they would have gone to college. Some didn’t finish high school. What I learned by looking at the high school transcript of prospective employees is that if they were a poor student in school, they are going to be a poor student in life. The really good students in high school, virtually all go on to college.
I can honestly say that out of the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spent on training over the years, the vast majority of it was a wasted investment mainly because of the poor students, but partially because there was no testing. I’m talking about both live and online training.
The really difficult specialty areas of automotive repair (think electrical, transmissions, diagnosis) have an EXTREMELY hard time filling positions and that difficulty is what steered me in the direction of selling our shop after 40+ years in the business.
If somebody wants to be in the automotive repair industry today, my suggestion would be to pick an area, or areas, that are simple and techs are more easily found/trained. Taking my own advice, I transitioned our brick & mortar transmission shop to an online business model where we specialize in 10-year old and newer vehicles only.
We sell and install low-mileage units from insurance company totals and filter out the losses from fire, flood, or have higher mileage. It’s much easier to find somebody to install the transmission than it is to rebuild one, let alone how to diagnose and fix one.
Our business model is based on a model with the lowest liability and the greatest chance of finding qualified tech. I threw my “we can fix anything” technician attitude out the window, which was hard to do as I’ve been ASE certified in transmissions since 1975 and a master (still current) since 1980.
At my age, it’s all about a viable business model that works. To hell with the ego thing.
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We pay for our techs’ training and certifications as a company benefit that most other shops don’t offer. My main gripe about training is there are very few training programs that test the students’ knowledge of the class’ subject matter afterward. Whether live or online training, most do not test. Seminar training is the worst offender.
A CEO of a major trade organization once told me that if they tested after a seminar, it would reduce attendance. Maybe so, but it would also separate the men from the boys. IMHO, a “Certificate of Attendance” is meaningless.
If online and live automotive training courses and seminars tested students’ knowledge of the course material, maybe more shop owners would see value in the training. For most shop owners, they currently don’t see enough value to spend the money.
Just my thoughts.
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Great post. By most accounts, I hear nothing but positive things about the results of direct mail for general repair shops.
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Chris points out what most shop owners don’t do: Take on the role of Chief Marketing Officer. For me, it’s the most profitable activity I can engage in.
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You can take Bob Cooper’s advice and do windshield chip repair. I had to throw that in. 🙂
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I’ve been taking the ASE tests for more than 40 years. Started when it was NIASE. I always thought of it sort of like a driver’s license and never question it nor had anything else to compare it to. At least you’re taking the tests. Good for you.
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And just where, pray tell, do we find this VE calculator you mention and promote?
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What a great podcast! While the podcast is absolutely 100% on target, it’s my belief that many shop owners who wish to sell are selling because they aren’t making the money they thought they should. When this is the case, a lot of the podcast’s content won’t apply.
I know of a 70-year old multi-shop shop owner who wanted to sell his poorest performing shops. He hired a consultant/broker to help get things in order for the sale. He was advised that unlike selling a profitable shop, selling an unprofitable shop for the maximum profit is a 3-year process. This is because a 3-year track record of profits would be necessary. Otherwise, he had nothing to sell but the real estate, which he did not own. He was also advised that he would more than likely have to carry paper on a portion of the sale price. Because of that, he was further advised that if someone takes over the shop and continues to not make a profit, he would more than likely lose everything he was carrying on paper.
He opted for the 3-year plan. Over the course of 3 years, the shops he was selling only became profitable during the 3rd year. After seeing a steady trend toward profitability, he decided not to sell the shops. I only relate this story to motivate shop owners wanting to sell their shop to REALLY DIG for the real reason they want to sell. Sometimes age is only a convenient excuse to camouflage unprofitability.
Acid test question: “If you were making the money you think you should, would you still sell?”
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What shop DOESN’T have a 1-star review? I want to believe most consumers are like me in that they will always see a bad review(s) in virtually ANY business or industry. Because of this, I look at the review average, not the bad review(s). If any shop can maintain above a 4.0-star average, then they are doing things right, especially in the automotive repair industry.
When I think I have done everything humanly possible to avail, like Tom, I don’t lose any sleep over it. However, I DO post the event about making it right and tell a short story of what happened, just like Tom did with his original post. My edited version of the owner’s response would be something like…
>”We immediately contacted the customer and ask him to come in so we can check the issue. We fix it promptly. He asks how much and we said no charge, but we’d appreciate it if you could update the review. He said that works for him. Weeks go by. No update. We contact him and ask if the problem is still OK. He said yes it is. We asked if he could update the review. He said he thought it should stay up unedited because the event did happen.”<<
Tom should let this owner’s reply stay up as well, because the event did happen. Right? 🙂
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Yes, it is, especially at the $76.45 price point. It lists every reported fix in Identifix’s database with an Amazon link to the part for the alleged fix. How’s that for marketing strategy? I’ll try to post a short video in the coming days.
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Amazon Prime day is today and the BlueDriver is 24% off at only $76.45!
https://www.amazon.com/BlueDriver-Bluetooth-Professional-iPhone-Android/dp/B00652G4TS
Here’s the video link:
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I think shop culture will determine whether this will work or not. In our shop, everybody is paid by the clock hour although they do flag labor time hours. We had weekly 60-90 minute shop meeting every Tuesday. We had a makeshift (with pinstriping tape) spreadsheet up on one corner of our 8-foot wide whiteboard where we posted weekly flagged hours total. Remember, these numbers had nothing to do with their paychecks. It was always a friendly ‘battle’ to see who would be #1 for the week. There wasn’t any animosity or loss of shop morale as pointed out by Sherman.
I never voiced this, nor was it in our employee manual, but I cut the top producers a lot more slack than I did the lower producers. Because we are a transmission specialty shop doing the same repairs/rebuilds/replacements on a daily basis, nobody was below 100%. 125%-200% was the average range when we had enough work to go around. Below 100% wasn’t normally a technician problem. Below 100% was usually MY problems because I was in charge of marketing, advertising, and selling. Not enough work is not a technician problem and in my view, most shops simply shrug their shoulders and accept it.
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Tom,
A little off topic, but those the type of jobs you mention didn’t pay enough for us to justify a supplying a customer a ride.
I eventually came to the conclusion that leaks, noises, and vibration pay so little because the customer sees little value in the actual time needed to just diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Unlike many shops, our transmissions-only shop grew to the point to where I was afforded the opportunity of referring that type of work out to other shops willing to do it and let them deal with the hassle of trying to sell it.
I don’t want anybody to take this as advice because it’s not. It’s just one of several things we did when our production capabilities became maxed out. In a nutshell, we started accepting only high-profit jobs. aka “gravy jobs’. That’s really hard to do for most GR shops.
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Tom is correct about times are changing. However, the rideshare companies that went public recently, will have a significant increase in fare prices. Currently, it’s cheaper to use a rideshare company for most shops.
Because shops are different, I would sit down and do a comprehensive cost analysis of what would be the total investment in a full-time driver & vehicle whether you go that route or not.
Once armed with that information, simply keep track of what you’re spending for ridesharing. If and when the costs of ridesharing goes over the cost of doing it yourself, then I would consider simply using ridesharing like Tom is doing.
For me, every business decision should involve a cost/benefit analysis. Even if you don’t own the shop, it will help you plead your case with the owner(s).
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Scott, Xtime is a Cox Automotive product. Like all of the Cox products, the only way to get an actual price is to book a demo. There was an Automotive News article a while back where a dealer claimed a 29% increase in sales with Xtime, but was vague on what it was costing. Just a reference, most Dealership Management Systems (DMS) start at about $3,500/mo. & up, but you have to understand that’s running the WHOLE dealership, not just service. They have multiple modules and hence, multiple prices for what you want/need. My advice? Book a demo, see what it costs, and report back to our troops. 🙂
Here’s another article from Xtime’s website where a dealer is claiming $96K/mo. increase using Xtime. I’d pay $3,500 to gross $96K, who wouldn’t?
https://xtime.com/blog/2019/05/13/finding-opportunities-in-declined-services/
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I’ve been using schedule 40 PVC (not 20 for lawn sprinklers) for over 30 years and have never had a problem. It’s rated for 480 psi. However, as you’ll see in the video, near the point of use, I switch to a galvanized pipe. Check it out…
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Thanks, Josh.
Anybody familiar with automotive targeted lists knows you list has to be gold. I wish good luck to all that take advantage of it. When they do, it would be helpful to our members to post the results.
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Josh,
Thanks for the reply. I know what you mean about listening to call recordings. I did that for a while and to be quite frank, we were getting so many calls it was impossible to listen to them all. That was back when I was first learning to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. I knew there had to be some technological solutions, somehow.
Out of all the places on the internet, I stumbled upon a company right around the corner from our shop that was doing Conversation Analytics. The best I can describe it, is it was enhanced call scoring. It not only scores the quality of the incoming call, but it scores our service writer as well. I had finally found the solution from listening to hours of call recordings. They changed their algorithm to include my custom request. I wanted my people to say the word “appointment” at least 3 times, which is easy in normal conversation.
- “Would you like to set an appointment?” I have an opening at 8, or would 1 in the afternoon be better for you?”
- “OK, I have you down for a X:XX o’clock appointment on [day]”
- “When you come in for your appointment, ask for me, Larry.”
Long story made short, I also had to change the expiration of the cookie they dropped in peoples’ machines to match the length of our average sales cycle, which was 5 business days. (7 calendar days as far as the cookie was concerned.) Otherwise, keyword, raw search, and caller data were all wrong. That also meant I had to buy enough phone numbers for our phone pool to last 7 days. “Crap.” I thought.
I decided to settle on 104 numbers and it was a deal @$500/mo. Then, automagically, I was able to only listen to phone calls where we, not necessarily the caller, scored low. It really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff that was flying under the radar because I wasn’t listening to every single call. After a while, I was only listening to only half a dozen or so calls a week because I could look at Conversation Analytics scoring.
I don’t do this for a living in the normal sense, but I did try to help a fellow local shop owner do this himself and everything fell apart the moment they’d answer the phone. Because the owner and his son answer the phone, they went into instant denial and abandoned the whole concept altogether. That was the first and last local shop owner I helped or tried to help. I learned to leave helping shops to companies like yours.
In all, we were spending about $50K/yr. for everything. It sounds like a lot but it was a small price for admission to increasing our sales beyond the capability of our shop. I’m not kidding when I say I had to “throttle” our PPC campaigns, sometimes completely pausing them for a week or two while we caught up. In the end, it generated all the extra business we could handle and allowed us to pick and choose what kind of jobs we took in. The bottom line was sales increased slightly over 58%.
Shop owners should take advantage of you and companies like yours have to offer.
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Josh,
Thank you for your post. I enjoyed it. While what you say is true, there are also other ways around the law, specifically the 1994 Driver’s Privacy Protection Act.
Companies like yours fill a need for any shop seeking to grow and understand there are other shops that have been successful with a direct mail campaign. Many direct mail companies are built around this concept. I assume your company provides specific addresses for specific vehicles.
First, let me state that due to the nature of our business, our needs aren’t the typical shop’s needs. We target a specific vehicle age group more than a specific type of vehicle.
It is not a wholly-true statement to say DMVs don’t sell data; they do. What they don’t do is sell any Personally Identifiable Information. (PII) What I mean by that is that we purchased over 22 million records from 2 states directly from those states’ DMV that have all of the DMV data, excluding PII data fields of the owner’s name and street address. City & Zip are included. All other data fields are freely available. Total investment: less than $600.
As a side note, this is how some SMS’ acquire plate-to-VIN matching data.
“What good is it if you don’t have an address?” you may ask. Because we are a transmission repair specialist, the very nature of our business doesn’t exist unless there is an immediate need. For example, we could direct mail an entire zip code with a 50% off offer and nobody is going to take us up on that offer unless they are experiencing transmission problems. Hence, direct mail isn’t very effective for us due to the nature of our business, not because direct mail doesn’t work.
Because we target 10-year old and newer vehicles, we can create a select query for those vehicles and find the zip codes that have the highest population of the age of vehicles we target. We have learned that late model vehicles tend to congregate in certain zip codes, which most of the time, are higher income as well. Instead of using those zip codes for direct mail, which we could if we were a general repair shop, we target those zip codes in our Google AdWords and MSN Advertising PPC campaigns.
Admittedly, creating SQL select statements and reports is beyond the technical ability of most shop owners. However, it can either be hired out online on Fiverr.com or Upwork.com for a relatively nominal fee. I did like many do today, I watched training videos online at LinkedIn/Lynda.com to learn how to do it along with buying a book. There’s also the tried and true YouTube. Shop owners wishing to do as I did can pick their poison. 🙂
I learned my PPC skills from the free Google AdWords training they provide.
In closing, let me say a couple of things. In my opinion, the most positive, productive, and effective use of a shop owner’s time is to engage in the activities that make the shop phone ring off the hook. The second most important activity is to make sure those answering the phone have been thoroughly trained in how to convert a caller into an appointment, and how once at the shop, close that former caller into a sale. To me, those two activities of generating and closing sales leads are a full-time job in of themselves.
Always Selling,
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The link has been broken since I made the post. Here’s what Amazon says about the BlueDriver…
The Complete Trusted Solution
The Right Fix. Always.Using the same Identifix database professional shops use, BlueDriver will match your vehicle’s make, model, and trouble code to a specific fix from a database of over 30 million fixes. Your Repair Report will always contain fixes that have been verified by Certified Professional Mechanics, so no more googling unreliable fixes that waste your time and money.
With the BlueDriver Sensor plus the free BlueDriver App (available on both iOS and Android), you get a complete vehicle repair solution. No other scan tool or code reader offers this level of insight into how to fix your vehicle.
Unmatched Coverage
BlueDriver Offers More. Period.BlueDriver reads (and clears) all the codes the other guys read and the ones they don’t. BlueDriver’s Enhanced Diagnostics give you complete access to information normally only accessible to professional mechanics on their most expensive scan tools.
What are ENHANCED diagnostics?
All vehicles with an OBD2 port are required to output basic information when the Check Engine Light comes on. However, a lot of important information (such as ABS, Airbag, Climate Control, etc.) is left behind by other scan tools and code readers. Only BlueDriver gives you the complete set of diagnostics on a wide range of manufacturers.
Plus, BlueDriver’s dedicated team of Professional Engineers are continually providing free updates with Enhanced Diagnostics support for more brands.
Get Enhanced Diagnostics on:
GM: including Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac, Buick, Saturn, Pontiac, etc.
Ford: including Ford, Lincoln, & Mercury
Chrysler: including Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, & Plymouth
Toyota: including Toyota, Lexus, & Scion
Nissan: including Nissan, Infiniti, & Renault
BMW brands sold in North America: including BMW & Mini (2005 models and newer)
Honda brands sold in North America: including Honda & Acura (2003 models and newer)
Volkswagen brands sold in North America: including VW, Audi, Lamborghini & BentleyLastly, here’s the Amazon link…
https://www.amazon.com/BlueDriver-Bluetooth-Professional-iPhone-Android/dp/B00652G4TS
