Tips

Customers today are looking for prompt service. A shop that is well managed can normally get a car in and at least take an initial look at it the same day or the next. The most profitable shops are rarely booked ahead more than day or so. Which means they operate efficiently, they have enough staff, their prices are appropriate, and there is a lack of unprofitable customers. Shops that are constantly booked ahead several days or even weeks typically have one or more of these issues. That means less profit and all the other negatives that accompany less money to go around.

As you move throughout your shop during the day watch for anything that could be interesting to a vehicle owner. Which is not as complicated as one might think. Things you see everyday are things that many customers have never seen including almost everything on the underside of a car. Take a photo or two and load them on your social pages. Add a brief description. When you take the photos always make sure to have open or glass bay doors behind you to prevent glare. Once you’ve done it a few times you will find the whole process to be both quick and easy – and people will look at them!

Does it make sense to maintain a constant price on a service regardless of circumstances? Or would it make more sense to adjust that price related to a variety of factors? The latter is standard procedure at many businesses and we expect it. The best examples are hotels and motels.

Some shops today are doing something similar. Factors may include seasons, days of the week, weekends, holidays, weather – or any other factor that causes business to increase or decrease. Many shop management software systems allow for adjustments to be made quickly and easily making this one more option in your management tool box.

There are several low cost or free programs available that can greatly improve the communications within your shop. One of the most well known is slack.com. It’s kind of a supercharged internal system of messaging and email and forums that gives you a single dashboard where it all comes together. Simple to learn. Uses are limited only by your imagination. “Channels” for low inventory, equipment needs, training, projects, suggestions, estimating, and announcements are some of the channels that we created. You can message one person or any number of people with one message. Access to areas can be limited to certain individuals. Send attachments. Easily find anything that was discussed days ago or years ago. Integrate with Twitter, OneDrive and a host of other apps. There’s much more you can do, but those are the things we did to get started.

Some owners and managers are regularly involved with the “front counter” but others are hardly ever exposed to all that goes on. If you are closer to the latter, once every 30, 60 or maybe 90 days get 100% involved. Get up there and do everything that your advisor does for a half or entire day. Everything. Odds are that each time you will come away with multiple ideas on how you could make the process better, more efficient, more profitable – and easier on your advisor!

If I ask your technicians and advisors to explain their pay system to me could they do so accurately in less than a minute? Or would they need several minutes to show me a spreadsheet with a set of guidelines on how to do the calculations – maybe stopping occasionally to ask someone else at the shop exactly how to figure something out?

Many shop owners assume all the employees understand the pay systems as well as they do – but often they do not.

Remember that if they do not fully comprehend specific incentives you will lose most of the effect of incentives.

It’s very easy to over complicate pay systems and many shops do just that. Techs and advisors often hope the paycheck is pretty good because they don’t really know exactly what to expect once the pay period is completed. Most employees do not like overly complex pay systems. The best pay systems are ones where they can know at any point in time exactly what their pay is going to be with a handful of mouse clicks.

Among the top 5 benefits that technicians want is a “generous tool allowance”. Less than 20% of shops offer any tool allowance at all. If we consider “generous” to be $100 or more per week, the number drops to less than 5%. Need we say more.

First, all parts should always be entered into your shop management system software and all stock orders should be determined solely by your software once you have it fully set up correctly. Sales reps should never do stock orders for you.

Second, for most vendors stock orders should be done daily first thing in the morning or last thing at the end of the day by the person most familiar with your parts inventory. This will allow you to reduce inventory quantities and expand coverage if you desire.

Remember, waiting for authorizations and waiting for parts are the two biggest causes of techs being idle. The parts issue can be improved easily with this method.

Ask ten independent shops for maintenance recommendations on a certain car and you will normally get ten different answers. No wonder customers get confused. So, why do we do that? Instead, just go with exactly what the owner’s manual says, then add in anything that obviously should be serviced even though it is not yet due.

Typical results? Maintenance becomes easier to sell. Maintenance sales increase. Customer’s cars are maintained better overall. Your job is a bit easier while your profits increase.

The point with any of these items is to have your name seen over and over – ideally for years to come. Think carefully about what typically happens with an item. Does it get used once and thrown away? Is it likely to get thrown in a glove box or drawer? We want something that has a good chance of ending up in a visible place on a desk, on a dashboard, or in a kitchen or similar location. Examples for a desk might be letter openers and cell phone stands. Another thing to consider – does it have a good size area for imprinting? Once you’ve chosen an item, your shop name in letters as big as possible is all you really need. The rest of your information should be seconds away on a device.

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Ask yourself how often do you write down a phone number or website or other information off a sign that you see (other than for the used boat for sale at the end of the street)? Me too – almost never. Most people are going to enter the name they saw on your sign into their device, locate your website and then look for the information they want. So, use that space for something else. Make your shop name as big and easy to read as possible and skip all that other stuff.

Whenever a question arises about what occurred or may have occurred with a repair at another shop the correct answer is: “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” Because you weren’t there, and you don’t know.

Add this question to your interviews and make it mandatory – “Are you concerned that this job will interfere with your life?”

Don’t hire them in the first place. With the increasing amount of information available today you can predict with a great deal of accuracy whether someone fits the profile. Make this one of your top considerations. Just like the best way to manage anything at your shop don’t figure out the best way to put out fires – figure out how to prevent the fires from ever occurring in the first place.

This doesn’t mean you never let someone go or that no one ever quits. If you hire carefully you can be reasonably sure that when an employee leaves they will have another job a week from now. You can be the shop that is forever paying claims. Or the shop that has a great won loss record of fighting them – a great feeling but can be time consuming. Or you can be the shop that says: “Can’t comment much on this since no one has filed on us in years.”

Sooner or later you will likely get back or wrist pain among other issues from keyboarding all day. If you haven’t done so already, put a first-class chair or stool at the top of your office equipment buy list. Advisors and other office employees are usually not as physically worn out at the end of the day if they have great seating. Some of the best ones are made by Herman Miller, but the price can cause sticker shock – typically in the $800 to $1,500 range per chair. Used and reconditioned ones are available, however be very careful as some of these are too worn to be dependable. After you make your purchase be sure to watch the videos on how to set it up properly. As time goes on you may find this is one of the best equipment purchases you ever made.

Lifting various items during a repair has always been an issue for technicians. As wheels and tires became larger and heavier the issue has become more significant. The good news is that equipment is available to greatly reduce the problem. Several companies offer folding arms attached to the lift arms, so wheels can be moved a short distance to the left or right onto the arm without placing them on the floor and having to lift them back up. For wheels that need to be serviced or moved away from the vehicle there are special carts (or dollies) that can hold one or more wheels again preventing the need to place wheels on the floor. Most techs love both items – odds are that techs at your shop will, too.

Have you ever thought of menu pricing your testing and diagnostics? This would prevent the need to call for additional authorization in many cases and allow you to quote quickly and easily.

Make an educated guess at how much time and money, on average, you believe will be needed to cover costs and make a decent profit on a specific type of testing. Don’t worry if you are off – you can change it in a few seconds at any time in your software. Sometimes you will be close, other times under a little or even a lot, and sometimes come up short. Track it over several jobs and adjust it as needed. Just make sure the average is close. Work with the technicians to come up with something that is fair to the customer, to the tech and to you.

The trick is to not to give in to temptation to reduce the price when it goes very fast and easy. You will need that to offset the ones that take a while to nail down.

In many shops advisors spend much of their time dealing with parts. It has been established that parts acquisition has a very large effect on technician production. See survey on the topic: https://www.automotivemanagementnetwork.com/surveys/slows-production-shop/

If your shop is big enough to have two or more advisors you might consider having one advisor deal primarily with sales and have the other split their time between estimating, parts acquisition and assisting the other advisor. As the need grows for more people up front expand the parts role accordingly. If you have three people up front it might be best to make one full time parts. At four people it’s no longer a question.

Having all advisors be partial sales, partial estimating and partial parts person is generally very inefficient. Also, the cost of a great parts person is typically less than a great advisor.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with not having a shop supply charge at the end of your invoice. Instead, some shops itemize every little thing. In some areas a supply charge at the end of the invoice might be illegal.

But, are you taking advantage of what you are not doing? Do you have written in large capital letters near the bottom of your invoice:

***SHOP SUPPLIES – NO CHARGE***

Whenever the contact information for a technician – or possible future technician – is made available to you in any way, record it.

Include the following:

Name
Email
Phone
Date

If applicable, also include:

Is there a resume on file?

Do you have background check results?

Did you perform an interview?

Do you have the results of any testing?

Record this information about every contact regardless of whether you believe they are a possible future hire or if there is no way on earth you would hire them (of course, note this accordingly). As time goes by you will have hundreds, if not thousands of names.

You are building a lifetime database. When you are ready to hire, you will have a list of contacts who are technicians and who undoubtedly know others who are technicians. You can quickly email or text some or all of them to announce that you are looking.

You will come across some techs multiple times, yet years apart. A quick search of your database which finds information about them from the past can save a lot of wasted time and effort.

To start, search your computer for every piece of data as described and enter it into this new single document. Do the same with your email. If you still have paper resumes and applications in a file, add those, also.

It’s only a matter of time before you will be searching for a tech. In today’s climate, anything that makes that process a bit easier can be a huge asset.

You’d like to send customers something, but asking for their birth date just doesn’t work for you. Our service advisor was thinking about this one day and thought: “We have copies of driver’s licenses for everyone who uses our loaner cars – why not record those!” Of course, this won’t cover all your customers, but over time your birthday mailing list will grow into one more solid marketing tool.​

How much should you pay your techs? What should your labor rate be? Many variables can affect each of them individually. But, the relationship between them is a bit clearer. A range often mentioned is 25% to 30% of your labor dollars can be paid to technicians – most of the highly successful shops today are in or very close to that range. A wider range might be 20% to 40% to accommodate for the exceptions on the edges. However, numbers outside of this range typically cannot go on for long before there is a shortage of money or technicians. So, do you lower your tech pay or increase your labor rate? That is something each shop must carefully consider. It is worth nothing that precious few shops close because their prices are too high while large numbers of shops close because their prices were too low.

Lots of people do. The one from the accountant. The one that the software produces. Sure, the numbers are all there, but in a different layout than how your mind grasps them.

Some people solve this by creating their own statement. It can be as simple or in depth as you want it to be. It doesn’t get used for official purposes – taxes, P & L’s, etc. It only gets used by you so you see the numbers arranged the way you would like to see them.

Try it. It just might give you a whole new (and better) outlook on your business finances.

One huge time saver that is available when hiring technicians and service advisors is an online assessment test – often available as a subscription allowing unlimited use over a certain period.

Keep in mind that such tests are just one of several things you should use when determining whether to hire. But they can be an excellent screening tool to prevent hiring someone who will likely never be very good at the position.

Example (true story) – you receive a resume, cover letter, application and so on. It looks reasonably decent – better than average. You send the applicant a link to a technician assessment test. Potential score is 100. He scores 7 (yes, seven). He may well be very smart, highly educated, and talented in many areas. But he probably was born with next to nothing in natural mechanical ability.