[Steve Wootton]

This really is a “loaded” question. It encompasses so many factors that you really need to break down each factor and determine what is acceptable and what is not.

We are currently scheduling about 2 weeks out and were almost 4 weeks out during the summer months. We are turning vehicles around same day, next day or two days depending on what work we are performing.

Just this week alone, three new customers came in, we did inspections and found $3,000 on one, $4,000 on a second one and $3,200 on the third. We normally schedule about 75-80% of our daily workload and fill the holes with the upsells. Due to jobs like this which are very normal for us we have been scheduling only 40-50% of our daily workload which now pushes our scheduling out further.

This is all while hiring two new techs in the past 3 months. Most weeks our entire crew is 110-130% efficient with the exception of the “rookies”

We are limited by the capacity of our facility and the available parking. One thing that does help is our fleet of 8 loaner cars which are out nearly every day.

If a customer cannot “wait” till our next available appointment they are either “not our customer” not good at planning when their car needs service. We have very few tow ins/break downs(Maybe 1-2 per month) We also try to always have 1-2 loaners on reserve just in case a regular customer has a breakdown and needs transportation.

[Steve Wootton]

Tom,

I disagree with the notion that specializing is on it’s way out. When you can’t even reset the maintenance reminder let alone get diagnostic information without having the factory Scan Tool you can never be successful being an all makes/all models shop. Focusing on specific brands allows you to spend money on all the needed tooling for that brand and you use those tools on a regular basis. Spreading the same dollars across the entire spectrum of vehicles leaves you with lots of holes in your tooling. Our techs become way more efficient at working on limited brands. Also by specializing you become the local expert, even more so than the dealer. Maybe it’s due to our choice of brands that help with that. We specialized in Subaru, Honda and Toyota in that order on the light duty side. People seek us out especially with Subaru vehicles. On the HD side we are mostly an all makes/all models shop but it is becoming way more difficult there as well with all the exhaust emissions equipment and the need to do flash updates 2-3 time per year on some applications(Isuzu).

[Steve Wootton]

We are up 13.6% in the month of Novemeber.