chasauto

Nick,

We've used Groupon pretty consistently since 2011. Back when it was a daily deal site via email, we had great success. Bringing in 30 to 50 new people a month. We offered low priced oil changes. It cost us about $10 per oil change, after our cut from Groupon. We thought, Where else could spend $300 to $500 per month to be introduced to 30 to 50 new prospects per month? We sold about 20% of the people something additional. Today Groupon is a shopping site. We find people go to their site looking for a deal when they have a need vs. purchasing a limited time offer. We met a lot of people who became customers early on. Today we meet very few people who are looking for a home. Mostly they are looking for a deal.

Good luck,
Gary M.


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In 2016 we paid 1.95%. 1.44% looks pretty good. Would save us about $400 a month. I'll email you Dave.

You can try to add a second labor line to the job. That will give you more space to add description, if you filled the space in the initial labor line.

Just some thoughts from our shop.

We don't have magazines in our customer lounge. We have a TV, bottled water, coffee and one newspaper. Magazines tend to get old quickly and add a lot of clutter. If a customer leaves one, we throw it away. We pull insert ads out of the newspaper before leaving it in the lounge. Sometimes those inserts can be from Sears, tire store chains etc. Best to try to control the message.

We generally take the customer to their car when recommending work. We try to get them away from other customers in the lounge. Show and tell works great, the tech usually is helpful and we have more privacy in the shop than a sometimes crowded lounge.

We use Alldata and Identifix. Use Alldata about 80% of the time. Identifix is great, for us, at narrowing down the diagnosis. Did a trial Motologic, found it hard to navigate.

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We use Comcast for phone (4 lines), internet & tv. It's about $300 a month for everything. We use an outside answering service to handle overflow calls durning the day, after hours calls and weekend calls. We found we were missing lots of calls because people do not like leaving a message on a machine or voice mail. The call center doesn't give the caller much information about the shop, we get an email message from them and we return the call.

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Joe, sounds like this shop is paying techs more hours than it is charging the customer. Effective labor rate is labor hours billed/sold to customer divided by labor dollar sales. 100 hours of labor sold/$10,000 in labor sales = $100 ELR. Production doesn't fit in the equation.

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