Shop Foreman/lead Tech

[Jon]

I have never worked at a shop that had a shop foreman or lead technician. I am now in the postition where I need a shop foreman to help releive some of my duites in the shop for solving hard problems, training the younger technicians etc. so I can spend more time with customers and growing the business. I feel my current master tech is quailfied for this postion and very capable, he also on board with the idea. My issue is trying to find a way to compensate him for the time he spends on the other technicians but I still need him to be a producer in the shop to be able to afford it. I assume they way to handle this would be with a base salary (with expected number of hours to be produced) plus a fag hour rate for anything over x amount of hours. Any idea of how other shops set this up would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

[Joe Marconi]

That is a great question and can be an issue. When you take your top producer and put him in a role to oversee others, productivity can drop. It's like taking your top car sales person and making that person the sales manager. There is always the fear that car sales will drop.

 

I moved my oldest master tech to the postion of foreman a number of years ago. I felt that although he is the best mechanic I have, he was not as fast as he used to be and why put him on all the toughest jobs like clutches, engines and transmissions?

 

So, we created a plan what would have him improve the productivity of the other younger techs. It took a little time to work out the kinks to the workflow process, but it does work.

 

We pay the foreman a salary with a bonus when the shop exceeds a certain gross profit dollar amount. And he is happy with that postion.

 

One thing to be careful. Some techs use the foreman as a crutch, which may result in a younger tech not learning or going the extra mile on a problem. We now make the tech work thru a problem and created more workflow processes before he has the foreman go over and work his magic.

 

Hope this helps.