larrybloodworth
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, we stay busy. We have 2 builders and 3 R&R techs. We cross the $1M in sales last week. While that may not sound like much to most people, what’s amazing to me is that we did it all out of 4-bay 3K sq. ft. shop in only our 3rd year of business.
The reason transmission shops go into GR work is that they are poorly marketed. They don’t have enough qualified leads, including the larger chains. They simply don’t know how to make the phone ring or get people to come in the door. Often they make the mistake of hiring an “expert” that knows less about the automotive business than they do.
Personally, I don’t like GR work because it’s too many small tickets that has everybody in the business running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. 25 or more tickets a day is normal for them whereas 20-25 tickets a WEEK is normal for us.
It’s a more sane pace and easier to keep track of everything and what’s going on. Less stuff falls through the cracks. I’d rather have one $3K ticket than 10 $300 ticket.
Check out our website and YouTube channel when you get a chance.
P. F. Infante wrote:
> since you only do transmission work, have you been able to get a enough
> of it to stay busy/profitable? I ask because many trans shops have
> taken on general repair too, and some wind up doing more general than
> trans these days.
>
> What has been you experience with that?
> How many techs/builders do you have in the shop?
>
> Thanks.
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__80__% Internet (website, email, internet ads, etc.)
__20_% Traditional
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OK, I get how it’s done now.
_X___ I have it done.
_____ I am working on it now.
_____ I plan to do it soon.
_____ I have no plans to do one.
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Gary,
I’m here to tell you, you’re being victimized. Somebody that knows what they are doing can have a webpage up and loaded in minutes. An entire website in less than an hour with a template. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can do it that fast with QuickBooks, or several other popular programs.
And writing your own content? That’s just an excuse to string you along. You need to put the name of this con artist out in the open so he can’t take advantage of any other unsuspecting people.
Lastly, I hope you were paying him with a credit card. If you were, back-charge him for failure to render services.
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We rebuild all repair or rebuild all in-house.
Many of vehicles that come in are something that can be fixed in the vehicle like a VSS, solenoid, ect. We don’t see as many low fluid complaints as we used to because the sealing technology has greatly improved although restricted filters are still a problem.
We get a lot of referrals from general repair shops that don’t want the hassle of getting into the blame game if something doesn’t turn out as it should and knowing we only do transmissions so we won’t steal their customer. However, we are still looking for a good G/R shop we can send electrical work to.
We get a lot of alleged transmission issues that are really electrical problems outside the transmission and we have not been able to find a shop that is really good at that type of work.
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We specialize in transmissions and transmission related repair only. Our gross profit margin is normally 66% (parts cost X 3) however, that’s not always the case on all parts.
What we really look at is total cost of parts as a percent of sales which should be 20%. Some ROs have parts much less than 20% while on others, there’s no way in the world we can keep parts any where near 30%. As long as our overall batting average is 20%, we’re on target.
