Hands On

We fixed a car for free for a customer who was having a tough time this year, then contacted a local paper to do the story and posted it on our Facebook. Win win all around.

I write the check. If your doing all the right stuff all the time these checks will be few and far between, and they give you and help maintain a reputation that is worth more then any advertising you can find out there. Arguing with the customer gets you one or two things only, a bad review and plenty of bad word of mouth, it just is not worth it. I bought a customer a Remanufactured engine once years ago when I had no way to really afford it. He Jas paid for that engine twice now over the years and continues to refer people to me. My ROI was huge.

It is a shame that I am looking forward to getting older so I can get my social security and medicare.

Old post I know but I wanted to say Good point Mario. I do not know how many of you are in this habit, but when I start receiving advice from someone here I always Google their shop and read their Google and yelp reviews before decidiing on how to take the advice or how to respond.

I would live to get into this too but I wish they offered program pricing based on your shop size. If someone has 6 lifts and I have 3 how can I afford the same coaching program as they can. Also if I am just making the bills how to add another?

We use centric Pads and rotors an about eveything except European cars, they get oem or akebono. I charge Motor book time for the job. I quiz and educate the customer on rotor pulsation and put the decision in their hands. I let them know if the rotors puulsate after we will put them on with in two weeks for no labor, never have to so far in 6 years. If they need rotors I replace them at book time and let my parts matrix price them out. I also let my parts matrix price the pads. I get menu pricing from local parts house. With book time and parts matrix i pay 29.95 and charge about $170 on average. With rotors and added labor it is about 330

I have switched to Factory Motor Parts. They sell the same exide product that interstate is switching to. They give me 5 years free replacement and she menu priced me at $90.00 across the board. I love that I can offer my customers the 5 year free replacement.

I give them a 30 hour guarantee but they do not get it if they produce less then 30 and I have cars left over every day.

The good thing is the max out of pocket is 2k a year. With my families heart history I am basically financing in advance work I know I will need in the future. I also plan to take advantage of all of the pre care health things it offers.

I have just added health insurance. I have cut my personal pay to make it work. I am also lowering other insurance bills. I plan to call Comcast to reduce that bill, as well as cut out ALLDATA repair and use identif8x for all repair info. I will probably raise my labor rate January 1st to cover the cost. My wife and kids have been covered by CHIP and Medicaid. If they loose that coverage because I offer a plan It will cost me $1480 a month, more then my home payment. My one employee that signed up cost another $550. So this is a little over 2000 a month. If I raise my labor rate by $5 and fiddle with my parts matrix a tad it should balance out. It makes me sick thinking about the cost so I need to get it lol. I do hope this will help me attract the better techs out there. If I can get a more efficient employee out of it the costs would be even more offset.

For you guys installing Napa and O Reilly, do you Mark them up over what a walk In customer would pay for them in the store? What kind of margin are you able to get? We charge $30 to install most of the time. We include a thorough cleaning of terminals, BG treatment, and do not beat them on with a hammer. Do you guys install for free or charge?

If you have un marked spray bottles in your shop you best nip that in the bud ASAP. OSHA does not take kindly to unmarked spray bottles in the shop.

Well so much for that good run. Anyone thinking of switching brands?

Does anyone know of any non subscription services? Trying to knock down those monthly bills. I use alldata manage right now and I love a lot of the features, so would be reluctant to move away, but if I can knock another $105 off the monthly bills it might be worth it. Things that are most important to me are the ability to make generic jobs like oil changes that can be added with a click or two, and the ability to set up a proper parts matrix. Also writing and saving estimates or quotes that can then later be turned into R.O.'s if sold. Finally, I need to be able to see the monthly sales break down so I can do my sales tax ect.

Typically, on older vehicles that have not been into your shop recently, your technicians should be finding around $700-$1,200 worth of needed maintenance and repairs per repair order. Corrected that sentence for you. They will not find this inspecting a car that we did $700 to $1,200 on only 3 months ago. They will not find it on the 2016 models we have coming in. and also, a dealer I do work for drives my average R.O down, as if it needs more then 1k in work, he just gets rid of the car and I get an R.O with only an inspection fee. Other wise my techs turn in $1,200 to $2,000 tickets quite a bit and I sell them all the time. I am not trying to be a braggart, I am just saying it can be done. I am in the right market, appeal to the correct customers, pre-qualify from time to time, and only sell things that we can prove have value.

Hi Mmotley. I do not have a program that I enter things into to track this metric, though I would like to have one. I used to work with a consulting firm and they had software that would track all of these things and I really loved it, but the cost was just too much for a shop of my size, and after time I found the counselors repeating the same mantras over and over with little results. That being said I did learn quite a lot from them and good thorough inspections was one of the tips I took away from that. I hope I can attach these two pictures. One shows the list of dates, these are the estimates I wrote that did not turn into R.O.'s. Everything else I looked at I sold. There might be as many as you see here that also did not buy 100% of the ticket, so maybe 8 people total in the month of November that did not buy 100% of the ticket, and 4 total that did not buy anything. I also am attaching my sales report for November. This will show you my total car count and average R.O. I was down in November, a combination of customers that have been with me for 6 years and just need nothing, as well as reduced car count, and an employee that was not producing who is no longer with us. I suck at the percentages, so you can do the math and tell me how far off I was. For those of you that look at average R.O. do you take into account the lost sales or lost cars in that number. Since I had 4 cars at 0 dollars that technically should drive my average r.o. even lower.

I am my advisor. I am sure If I hired an advisor numbers would go down during the learning curve. I assumed OP was selling his own RO's. Through my marketing and customer pre qualification I keep my shop filled with the right customers and close them properly. I orked at Circuiit City before they closed as a salesman in the video department. One night at sales meeting the manager said we needed to sell the Monstar Cable power strip at $250 a pop. Everyone at meeting frowned, who will buy $250 power strip. I sold 2 that night. It is about psychology and sales techniques. I know you an Eskimo but do you really want the same ice you used to build your house in your 12yo scotch. My ice is purified and infused with minerals that will boost your health and keep your scotch tasting authentic.

It sounds like you may have a closing rate problem. I agree either you market to the wrong customer or need Sales training. I close over 95% of sales this year. Your reviews look good, you might change your responses a bit to the negative ones to remove even the slightest hint of customer blaming. Pre qualifying your customerrs really helps too, Some customers need to be handled a little different if you can see they might be spending the milk and eggs money on an inspection or diagnosis.

Exactly why I doubt the opposing company would take it to that measure.

This was what I was going to say too. When you get that lease, make sure there is nothing in it about giving him shop time or servicing percent of his cars. I tried this route renting a garage form a gas station owner. The longer I was there the more he tried to get his hooks into my shop. I eventually had to walk and now have my own place. Best thing I ever did. What happens when you work on one of his cars and something goes wrong, you know it is not your fault but he does not see it that way, are you suddenly locked out of a business you spent years building? What about when he realized he could hire someone else to run the shop for him? Murphey's law dictates these things will happen, just save enough cash to be ready to open your own place when that day comes.

So that is another thing to take into consideration when comparing our two statements.

Thanks for that, I hate %... Does this include your AMEX?

I imagine they all do this, its part of the PCI compliance I imagine we all have to do. I think these statements are good for the folks thinking of starting up also, this might be one of the many hidden costs of ownership that are forgotten when dreaming of all the money you will be making starting your own shop.

I have posted two to show how a rate can vary from month to month. One thing that will make it vary is average RO. Since many cards to have a cost per swipe, if you have to swipe it twice as many times in a month to make the same amount of money, you will pay more. Also, if all of your customers use some huge major rewards card for every transaction in a month you are going to pay more. And if everyone comes in with Debit you will pay less. One thing I would like is if my merchant offered a free debit transaction deal, but I have not looked into it yet. I would need a pin pad I think. I forget which is which, but one of these shows about 2.2% and the other shows about 2.1%, which puts me so close to you once your .02% increase hits that we may be dead even and I had a lower RO or more folks with Fancy cards. This does include my AMEX fees.