328ijunkie

Just had to pay their 700$ cancellation fee to get rid of them. Tried everything. Extortionists. Lesson learned. Spent 5k or so with them over 7 months and brought me ~1k in revenue.

I agree Yelps 'Sorting' is all over the place and prob makes you look good when you throw them money. I still dont get a ton of leads from them. I yelled at a rep on the phone the other day and he suggested some changes to a few sections, we'll see. Thanks for everyones advice/thoughts.

Signed up for yelp a few months ago. I see alot of leads coming through Kukui and have sold ~10k or so through them. My biggest complaint currently is my SA's getting annoyed by the barrage of messages/calls from people wanting their 20" impala wheels powdercoated or their suburban seats reupholstered or a starter for a kia optima. About 1/30 leads are even worth answering. I suppose a lead is a lead at the end of the day. Were at the ~675/mo tier. Whats everyones experiences...

2 of my techs came from dealerships because they were tired of being slaves. Sans our bonus structure, their original starting pay was lower than the dealer and they were happy as can be to start. And 2 years in they are extremely happy. Are they making 50% of labor sales? No. I would love to know how you operate a legal shop and pay your techs that. Taxes, Insurance, Tools, Identifix, Mitchell, Diag computers/software, Gas/Power (have full HVAC year round), unemployment/WC, Paying for environmental grade disposal and storage of fluids, advertising/marketing, CC fees, 401K, Rent, phones, security, uniforms, etc. You drop most of that, have a hole in the wall shop, cash only, pay everyone under the table, etc. I can see them getting 50%.

Super agree. Was run just as good if not better than the huge Worldpac events I've been to and they've been doing this for a long time

For the BMW applications we buy the factory tool which is a cast alum part that has a vacuum cleaner hookup and a small hole to insert a blasting nozzle. Works great.

We use walnut blasting

I agree, website is meh... Also: https://www.semrush.com/info/www.keeneauto.com/ Look up your google analytics as well.

Whats the cost on their service?

I'm in

Do you guys charge labor time based strictly on book time? Weve raised our labor rate mainly for perception (to push some of the price shoppers away) but not really for additional gains although jumping 10/hr on labor with 3 techs doing say 2000hrs of labor a year is 60K...

Working on BMW's solely here, generic OBD2 codes are most of the time completely worthless. Alot of scanners and what not dont even have definitions for all BMW codes and you are simply left with "Manufacturer specific DTC" as the description to the code. In alot of other cases BMW's LOVE throwing O2 sensor codes (when read with generic scanner) only to have the problem be something like Vac leaks. Weve sold ~9 02 Sensors the 3+ years weve been in business... They fail alot less frequently than everyone thinks

I havent gotten a call back...

Took everyone on a Ski trip!

Hey mike, Called you guys yesterday for some more info!

36/hr for 40hr weeks! jeez! More than anyone (including myself) makes base salary at my shop!

We share with our 2 close long term techs for ^ That same reason. They see that theyre billing sometimes thousands a day and assume that were making millions if you dont give them some perspective...

On our customer intake form we have about 1.5 pages of 'Ts & C's'

Were luckily down south so that isnt an issue here for the most part... The big jobs that hurt us overall are mainly the problem and we bill as appropriately for them as we can but the market will only bare so much..

We currently run our 3 techs salary as the variability/predictability of our jobs coming in I don't feel is fair for the techs, some days they work 8 hours on a huge projext that we're not making a ton of money on and other days they'll bill 10-12 hours in a day. We can't really justify to them that flat rate will be better for them. On the other hand they occasionally have motivation problems when on salary....

We have gotten advice from other shops in the ATL area in our sector that says never to give a price over the phone but at the same time you miss out on some oppertuinities. From what weve found you have to have an 'elevator speech' for why they need to come to you vs anyone else when dealing with price shoppers. When we have a situation when someone asks why so much on the phone we usually dont go into alot of detail on why that is other than the elevator speech. If theyre 'price shopping' that hard and interrogating you over every little thing its just a waste of your time and you dont want that type of customer anyway. End the conversation as soon as possible so you can get to the next call

I would estimate that full builds are about 10-15% of our business, 30-60% is overhauls like cooling system/belt drives/suspension, and then the remaining is quicker routine services like filters and flushes.

We dont print on ours...