mmotley

Curious if anyone has any experience with this company? I need to start tracking my guys since we can't seem to produce what I would call acceptable hours. Bolt on has stated that they are working on time clock software for the tablets, but I can't continue to wait. Or if anyone uses another time clock software that tracks productivity and efficiency, I would appreciate feedback.

Why shouldn't the customer have to pay for the gasoline they used? If they were driving their own car they would have to pay for the gasoline anyway. Their car, my car, the expense to them is the same. Do you pay for their parking tickets and bridge tolls too? If your customer is so petty that they complain about or refuse to replace the gasoline they used, then perhaps you don't need that customer. They aren't a customer, they are a consumer, they consume all you have to offer and appreciate none of it.

 

The loaner car that you have for their convenience is at great expense to you. Why can't you charge them for the expense you incurred specifically, exclusively, directly and solely as a result of their use of your loaner car? Depreciation, insurance, maintenance and capital repairs are a cost of ownership whether the car sits in the lot for a month or doesn't see your property for more than 10 minutes between customers. Gasoline, parking tickets, bridge tolls, parking lot fees, etc. are all expenses the customer would have incurred with their own car, so why shouldn't they pay those? It seems only reasonable.

Maybe I should have been more specific. We have them sign an agreement form that states they are responsible for gas, along with a whole bunch of other legal 'mumbo jumbo' "no smoking, insurance, liability, etc"... That being said, 90% of my customers bring back the cars with just as much gas or more than when they got the vehicle. The 10% who don't put gas back in the cars, it's usually only a couple of bucks. Gas is ~$2/gallon, I can swing a few gallons a week.

To relate this to something else, credit card processing fees. I don't charge an extra 3% when a customer swipes their card, and I don't offer a discount for cash. I chalk up CC processing fees as an expense and make it fit my budget.

We ended up getting an Autel Maxisys Pro. In our county, we have about 14,000 Toyota/Lexus/Scion vehicles. Honda, Acura, Nissan, and Infiniti only total about 5,500. The cost of factory scan tools compared to potential customers just didn't make sense. Only 10% of the time do we need a scan tool, and many times a generic scanner would do just fine. With the Maxisys Pro, you get a J2534 box, so we can always download the honda/acura scan tool if needed and take care of programming. We'll sub out nissan/infiniti programming if ever necessary and keep the couple grand for more useful stuff.

The problem with randomly varying your price from the matrix is you possibly end up with inconsistent pricing. This is especially true when you have more than one person pricing jobs. You might have one of your people quote a job over the phone at one price, then a week later when the guy makes his appointment and comes in he's told a different price by a different guy. Actually, this could even happen with only one guy quoting prices if he doesn't remember what price he came up with last week. Consistent pricing is VERY important to to the public perception of your shop. Set up your matrix that will yield a fair profit and stick to it.

Very good point!

Mmotley is right, one of our biggest problem is getting the customer to understand why we have to charge them diagnostic time.

 

Thanks Guys for all your inputs!

Farmingham, I'd highly recommend the service advisor training course through RLO and their GSM course too if you really want to get better at it. Send me a PM if you'd like and I can pass along their information

I'd be willing to bet to that your missing out on charging properly for diagnostics. When I first started paying attention to my numbers, my parts to labor ratio was about 1.3:1. This happened because one of the first things I changed when watching my numbers was properly marking up parts. When I was making the right margin on parts, my labor was too low, mainly because I was not charging appropriately for diagnostics. Now that I've been working on that, I'm down to about 1.13:1 I still struggle with it, but I'm improving and my goal is 1:1. As mspec stated, there are gonna be some jobs that are just parts heavy, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Two things I've noticed a lot on this forum: (just an observation from an outsider, so I'm speaking in generalizations)

1. A lot of shop owners complain about not being able to find good workers and

2. A lot of shop owners want to pay these same good workers a pittance (compared to other trades).

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

If an electrician/plumber/pipefitter etc makes $30-35+ an hour, why would any good worker ever want to become an auto technician when they know they will top out at $25-28/hour?

 

I'm from Canada, and our automotive technician program is different then yours, but I believe that one of your bigger problems in general is low wages.

Up here, apprentices do a 4 year program of 10 months on-the-job training then 2 months in school to become a journeyman technician.

The apprentice minimum pay scale is based on a percentage of the journeyman rate at their shop and scales up each year. (1st year 55%, 2nd 70%, 3rd 80%, 4th 90%)

Our system works well for us, and produces a good quality of technician, and I believe in general, techs in Canada are paid on par with other trades.

 

You guys have students that come out of tech schools (UTI etc) with little to no hands on training.

Apprentices are expected to do ASE training (sometimes on their own dime, no less) to get the certification.

Maybe after 3 or 4 years of this, they get enough certs to be a decent high-end B tech (equivalent of a journeyman).

There's still nothing saying that they have to be paid well by this point.

4 or 5 more years and they become an A level master tech, finally they might get paid similar to what other trades have been making for years.

 

Not trying to be rude or a jerk, but this is just how I see it.

Not saying I disagree, but I just opened an automotive repair shop that is spray foam insulated, brand new bright epoxy coated floors, crazy bright lighting, air conditioned to 75 degrees, and specialize in high end Asian vehicles so the techs see the same cars over and over again and has very little learning curve. I mark up my labor guide 21% (except for maintenance), I pay for their first ASE test (regardless of if the pass or fail), give a $200 bonus if they pass, a guaranteed raise if they pass, provide diagnostic scan tools, provide uniforms and cleaning services, 5 paid holidays a year, paid training, paid sick time, multiple production incentives, and both techs working for me got paid what they were asking for on their applications. They get parts for their cars at cost, have an employee break room with a refrigerator and microwave, free sodas and coffee, provide work gloves, donuts/breakfast for our Wednesday morning meeting, and both have brought family up here to show off where they work. That being said, the applications that I see coming across my desk are pathetic. I've advertised on craigslist, told all my vendors I'm looking for another tech soon, and I'm getting ready to fund a raffle on the Snap-on tool truck for technician contact info. I've even offered a $1,000 finders fee if one of my vendors bring me a good tech. Still, the turn out is meh.

Agree with Mspec, finding and hiring the right people is the biggest challenge. I also agree that electric vehicles are going to cause a massive shift in how things operate for us on the repair side of things. Staying ahead of the curve abd up to date on training are going to be the only way to stay in business

+1 for synchrony. It's called 'Car Care One' here. It's helped make a few sales customers may not have been able to approve at the time without it. Downside is they take a small percentage. 3% I think

I close out most tickets by the end of the week whether picked up or not so my techs can get paid on their production.

I do similar. Nothing set in stone, but this is the general rule I follow.

An exception was last week we had a car that had been sitting for 2 years dropped off at the shop. They were planning on selling it to their nephew. They agreed they would pay for all new fluids, but the nephew called on Friday to get prices for timing belt, water pump, plugs, wires, v/c gaskets, etc and said he would call back Monday to let me know if he wanted to do anything. I held it open and he called today and approved it all.

I prefer dedicated, that being said I refuse to buy from O'Reillys. The store near us is a joke, and I got ahold of one of the internal magazines they give employees, they brag about opening up stores near other ones and putting them out of buisness. Also there labor claim stuff is a joke.

I filed my first labor claim with them a few weeks ago. I'm supposed to get expedited claims since I joined their program... Nothing yet so far :/

You should charge yourself with 0% markup on your parts and labor for 2 reasons. 1) You charge yourself so taxes can be applied and paid. You don't want to get audited and the IRS find you buying parts for your cars and not paying taxes on them. Also labor, if your state taxes labor. 2) Your final invoice reflects the true cost to repair the vehicle in parts and labor. This should be filed away like a receipt for any other expense so it shows up on your P&L report.

I pay a little less than $1,000/year per loaner. I've had a customer have an accident in one car and her insurance company did cover the damages (she did not have full coverage).

To shield yourself from liability, yes, you should have them in a separate company, but loaner vs rental is a big deal when talking to insurance companies. Nothing a good agent can't navigate, but be aware that it will affect insurance rates.

For the past 3 years, my shop has been an exclusive Toyota/Lexus/Scion shop. Over the last 6 months, I've added Honda/Acura branding to our website and our signage and have slowly started to inform customers that have honda/acura vehicles that we now service them also. I'm getting ready to send out mailers to Honda/Acura owners and I'm toying around with adding Nissan/Infiniti.

My question is, as I really start to attract more of these vehicles, does anyone have a suggestion for a scan tool? We have the factory Toyota/Lexus scan tool right now and a generic matco scanner. Does anyone have any insight on factory honda or nissan scanners? Or maybe a generic scanner that focuses more on these makes/models?

You have never seen an episode of "Monsters Inside Me" have you?

Edit: mind if I use the picture on our Facebook page?

Agree, I have 1 customer who I let charge a balance and it's been an ongoing nightmare. Luckily his car broke down last week and he towed it to me. I explained to him that we could not do any work until his balanced was paid in full. It's probably gonna be 2 months before he has me paid off, but it's the last time I'll let someone charge a balance with me, including dealerships.

Whether it's in house repairs or for a paying customer, the tech should get paid the same. Unless the tech owns the business, why would it be fair any other way? If service writer is performing the job of service writing for this job, they should get paid the same as any other job.

 

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Agreed. I disagree with the the charging for gas, however. I have 3 loaners. I tell customers we operate on the honor system for gas. I fill up the cars every weekend if I have them and chalk it up as operating expenses.

Hire additional help and increase your advertising

Agreed, spend time on the mitchell forum. There is an icon along the top row in Mitchell. Create an account and don't be afraid to ask questions. Also, the search function is handy in cases like yours where you have state specific stuff. Someone has probably already asked what your talking about and there is probably 1 or 2 solutions

We do code reads for free. Diagnosis costs $90. "What's the code?" "P0430" "what's it need?" "Diagnosis".

Similar to how I explain it to my customers, just much more polite. The customers tend to think the scanner tells us what's wrong. I educate them that it really only gives us a code. That code tells us what series of tests and diagnostic procedures to perform on the vehicle to make sure we replace only what is necessary to fix the car.

I don't think anyone that has participated in this thread so far would ever consider treating a customer like they are beneath them, even if it was a cheap customer or someone on a budget. Some businesses focus on high car count/low margins, others focus on high margins/low car count. Neither is right or wrong.

My next mailer won't have any coupons or discounts. This week will be the last week I have coupons on my website, too. I run too nice of an operation and my customer satisfaction is too high to be giving away money or attracting bottom feeders or giving money away. Here lately, a majority of my new customers say they hear so many great things about the way we do business. None have said they heard how cheap our prices were or anything about specials :/

I do. I used instant checkmate.

Do you feel if you changed the offer on the mailer, it would attract better customers? Or do you feel mailers in general, regardless of the offer, tend to bring in lower value customers?

Just means more people will be holding on to their cars longer and fixing/repairing them instead of trading in for new cars. Great news for us all

This is definitely very alarming. I have heard a down turn in April from almost everyone. You guys, my parts suppliers, even my marketing manager from Kukui have mentioned a slow down.

 

We haven't seen that yet, we are still on an upward trend.

Same, same, same. Granted we just moved into a much nicer location, but everyone else is slow from what I hear. We just had another all time record month and I'm looking to hire my first SA. Haven't even had a chance to send out our mailers yet either since we're still under construction.

We had one customer who did that on a regular basis. They had us do some things but most was done elsewhere. We simply told them we did not want to work on their car anymore.

Frank, think about how you would feel if you sat down in a restaurant and the manager came over and said you weren't welcome and that they refused to service you. Maybe next time you could try multiplying the labor time by 1.5 or more. Your tech would appreciate it, your wallet would appreciate it, and you might avoid alienating a customer. I've had a few customers who I don't get excited about seeing come through the door, so I do just that. Most of the time they stop coming in. A few keep coming back.