Marksas

Thanks for writing. I was one of those kids that wasn't a bad kid but took woodworking starting in the 7th grade and then other "shop" classes until my junior year when I could take auto mechanics. I never planned on doing it for a career, I just wanted to keep my junk running. It had its benefits as I worked on the principles and vice principles beaters. My shop teacher was a German guy that had a transmission shop and loved airplanes. I spent many hours helping win on the weekends with various projects and even went up in one of his planes a few times. He even let my fly. It was a great experience and am grateful for what I learned. I went to work as a diesel mechanic right out of school and hated it. Crap was too heavy and the smell of diesel in the am wasn't my thing. So after 2 years of being out of high school I went to a 2 year electronics trade school offered through Texas A&M (yes the greatest school in the USA). My grades in high School wasn't so great either. Funny thing is that all those classes I just couldn't do, or get interested in during high school came real easy and wasn't so hard when I was paying hard earned money to learn. I went on to work on IBM mainframes and all kinds of other electronics. Problem was I like to see outside and suits and ties just wasn't my thing. I was helping a guy in a new body shop on the side and ended going to work for him. People thought I was crazy to give up a job working on computers in the 80's to do collision repair. It was a great decision and did it for 10 years but started teaching all kinds of repair topics in the evenings and decided to start a company specializing in restraint systems and automotive electronics. Learned to write Visual Basic while developing a management system for the business then sold the business. Took off some time then went to work for a consolidator in the Collision Industry but really my desire was to learn as much as I can from them and then go open a shop in my community so I could perform my number one job of being the best father and husband I could be. Didn't need the biggest shop but wanted to be present in my children's lives and not miss any activity they were involved with. I started a small collision operation with 14 bays and then added a general service operation after a couple of years. I love what I do, I love the employees that work for me and I love our customers.. I still take lots of training, read lots of books, listen to lots of podcasts. I spend a minimum of 2 days a month out of the business doing some kind of training for my own growth. I tour at least one business a month that is not in my industry for ideas. I never missed an event my kids were involved in and still travel to watch my son play college football. I have a great staff that allows me the luxury of being able to leave at will. I encourage each employee to not miss their child's events even if they are in the middle of the day. I tell them just let us know about it and we can schedule around it. We're not doctors and nobody is going to bleed out or die on the table if they are out for a couple of hours. All of this to say I wasn't "College" material by the high school councillors. I believe in education and place a high value on it, but just not the route most councillors are pushing on all kids.. I write this on my iPad mini as my wife and I are driving back from a football game. Her driving style leaves a little bit to be desired. So excuse the typos and grammar but keep in mind I'm not a college graduate either.. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Interesting that I logged on today and checked this out. My techs listen to a radio. This week we reassigned a tech from our collision operation to the mechanical side. He likes his radio loud and when I walked out in the shop I thought what the heck is that noise? It was three radios playing different music. I actually prefer they wear earbuds, and I encourage them to listen to podcast, books and even other things other than music. Why not learn while you work? I tell them part of the reason I can do some of the things I do today is because of what I listened to while working on cars.. I could listen to a book a day working in the shop. Did I take it all in and hear every word? Nope but if it was that good I would listen to it again, if it was bad then no big deal it's not like that was the only thing I was doing. I tell them listen to podcast on how to be a better dad, husband or whatever. Got some challenges with a child? Listen to something that will give you better insight in how to deal with it. My favorites today are. Dave Ramsey's Entreleadership, they always have great interviews and I learn something from every 40 min podcast. I listen to Harvard Business review, Your move by Andy Stanley Family Life Today Ted talks And a host of others as well as a number of books I actually provide all my employees with access to Right Now Media which is filled with all kinds of audio and video lesson on all kinds of topics. I don't mind it when I walk up to a tech and I have to wait for them to pause their playlist or whatever they are listening to. The best headsets? LG Bluetooth.. No wires hanging down and they just hang around their neck with easy access to controls on the headset. I've often thought about why nobody has started to produce content geared toward techs on various topics. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

A tire is a part in my book. I would probably be more prone to install a tire from tire rack than a local Discount tire. We buy from tire rack wholesale. We have never been asked to install customer supplied tires that I am aware of. If we did it would be no warranty no phone calls or anything like that. We would be trying to sell an alignment and what ever other items showed up on the vehicle inspection.

We don't always receive a signed authorization at drop off because we rarely print anything out. If they use our night drop the envelope has an authorization on it. We do document in our system all authorization by phone or email, who we spoke to and the amount authorized. That's one area I think the management systems lack and we use RO Writer. There should be a simple authorization piece utilizing a tablet for an electronic signature and a way to send and receive authorization by email if necessary. Our management system is behind the times when it comes to utilizing electronic capture of signatures at drop off and delivery. Those signatures are vital for collection of a bad check which we occasionally get, (3 in 5 years). I have recently started to dust off some of my coding skills to develop some simple electronic forms with signature capture tied to the repair orders. Hopefully others will chime in with some viable solutions.

I had a dealers license for a couple of years and found it was too much of a headache for little return. I could have perfectly good reliable car that was in someones budget and every thing is perfect except they want a red car and not a blue one. I let my guys buy a few cars from customers that have blown head gaskets or something the customer no longer wants to repair. They spend some time on the weekend and sell them on Craigslist pretty quick. It's a perk for them and they make a little extra cash. I usually get a small cut for the use of the shop. They have to create a shop ticket for any supplies they use. I have found it's easier to broker the cars for people and get a small cut for finding the seller a buyer. I have found that you can sue anybody for anything and it takes very little work or money to do so. The times people have sued me I just let them and then I counter for all my expenses when it's all said and done. The judge is a very good friend of mine so he usually recluses himself on those grounds, but the replace is a "friend" also. It's still a waste of time as I have judgements against several people which I will probably never see. I would be happier just punching them in the face but I guess that causes other problems.

I think you have to dive into your numbers and see if your numbers would support this. What is the makeup of your current business? What percent of current cars would fit into your new profile? I would also research the area to find out how many registered owners are there. What tooling would you need to purchase to be world class in that area of expertise? I would love to work on nothing but Japanese, but I'm in Texas and a Ford F150 is the number one make we work on. Working on one line (Asian) surely simplifies some things. I know several shops that do specialize and do well. None of them started out that way. We have great relationships with them and occasionally when we have a challenge we call them. We get a number of referrals from them also so it works well in our area.

I use AutoVitals. Techs all have ipad mini's with these cases http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GAT15DQ?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00 We like them because they provide a great cushion around the ipad and have a carry handle as well as the various bright colors. We have had a few issues with AutoVitals but for the most part it has been great. We also load Identifix and Motologic on the ipads. The techs love them and it has greatly improved our efficiency. We have been using them for about 1 year and to date a tech has not damaged an ipad yet. I think on our next round we will use the larger ipad for the screen space and the overall ipad size is not really much larger. I am going to demo the bolt on to see what they have to offer. We are not currently using any of the other add on's for AutoVitals. I have run the gammit of netbooks, android tablets and a host of other products and this has been the best one yet. What we found on some of the devices was we could run one product but then another product wouldn't run on the operating system. Mainly Alldata and Identifix. We switched to MotoLogic and have been happy with it but we still also have alldata. In all this has been a great investment.

Sounds like the "specialist" might not be as special as he thinks he is but then again we have all mis-diagnosed a car or two if we are being honest with ourselves. Doesn't the specialist guarantee his findings and work? I would question the specialist skills especially if they told me to "throw parts at it". I would agree with ncautoshop in that there is to much information missing to make an accurate assessment. I think you have to go back to some of the basics and start documenting the findings. When someone tells me it's been to 2 other shops or even one, I tell them to take it back because the shop is every bit as frustrated as the vehicle owner and the techs want to fix the vehicle (at least if they are any good). We steer clear of those types of jobs because the vehicle owner already feels they have spent to much and want us to feel sorry for them and give them a break. I have also found that it usually costs us to much to be a hero.

Great Tip I like this and have talked to several others that are doing this. I always tell my guys we need to be doing a better job on the deliveries as we should always be selling the next job. They do a great job of informing the customer of future needs but we need to take the next step and schedule it. We tell them what the future need is and that we will do it at the next oil change but we don't take the step of actually scheduling it. We use the Scheduler in ROwriter and Demand Force to send our appointment reminders by text, email or postcard so we can go out several months in advance very easily. We normally keep a pretty full schedule year round. As another note. When I do the sales projections for the year, I don't make adjustments for seasonality. I look at the total work days in the month and we have a goal for the month based upon available days. We have a daily goal that is tracked every day and we know we are going to strike out some days and maybe even several days in a row. They just know they have to make up the amount. Usually they knock it out of the park in the summer and will get ahead for the upcoming months or catch up from a bad previous month. An example would be that we didn't hit our target for the 1st quarter because we had a terrible Feb which caused them to miss the qtr and the qtr profit sharing. The hit the 2nd qtr and just about made up for their deficit from the 1st qtr. I have found that when we can make all kinds of excuses for lack of sales (i.e. Rodeo is in Town, It's Fiesta, Spurs are in the playoffs, weather and blah blah blah). I don't care what the weather is or what's in town we have to hit our numbers. We just might be able to avoid some of those bad months if we can fill our calendar in advance.

We don't negotiate with the A/M Warranty companies and we let the customer know up front. We inform the customer that many times the warranty company does not pay for all the procedures required for us to properly repair their vehicle and provide them with our warranty. We will be happy to submit the claim and speak to the adjuster but we don't argue with them. We will let you know what your total out of pocket fees are before we do the job and we will need their authorization once we know what the warranty company is paying for. We also increase our labor rate by $15.50 per hour just because we have to deal with them. I don't think I have had a company ask to send us parts but I am going to check with my service writers. I like the idea of "our insurance policy will not cover parts not sold by us." I will also check with my agent on this.

If it's during the day we pay their regular hourly rate. If the training is at night we pay a flat $50. We also pay for all the training. Never thought about paying mileage but I will now. My reasoning for the $50 for the night class is that they are voluntary and I want them to be vested somewhat in the class. There is not that many of those classes sin the evening so it's never been an issue. I am one of the very few that actually pay them.

I would buy Rotary or Challenger. I have both in my shop and have used them for years. Of the 5 I currently have I think I have had one capacitor go out in the last 14 years. They cost a little more than some of the others but they are very well built. A lift has some of the best ROI in the shop so spending a little more for a good one is best.

My suggestion would be to use a company that specializes in them and cameras have come a long way in the last few years. If you are installing on your own there are several different providers. I have purchased DVR and camera's from http://www.supercircuits.com and have had very good luck and they are very helpful.

I see this also and I don't get to wrapped up in thinking about them. We have a couple of mobile guys as well as craigslist mechanics. They will almost always have customers that I am not that interested in. I do always look at our operations and wonder how can we do what we do better for less while still making our desired margin? I don't want to say i just discount them and blow them off because you have to think about some of the things we do as being commoditized and what are we going to do to compete. I can't fix every car or every customer so I want to search for customers that meet the demographic profile of our target. Those shops never last, we have to sell the value of what we bring and we must also be able to articulate the value that we provide. There will always be price and bargain shoppers, but there are also those that appreciate value and are willing to pay for it, those are the ones I want and market to. When it comes to mobile service this is something that we look at as telematics become more prevalent. I can see us in the future performing some repairs in the field because of the availability of having the vehicle data remotely. We may be able to perform most diagnostics from our desktop and dispatch a tech with the right tools, information and data needed to perform repairs at the customer home or business when it's most convenient for them. Of course there will be a charge for this. I am involved in the electric utility business also and I see how we use technology to troubleshoot remotely then look at GPS to see which service trucks are in the area and then drill down to which trucks have the required tools and parts necessary to repair the outage and dispatch accordingly. Some of it is predictive, based upon past history and it's all software driven. Think about what's happening in the dealerships now and warranty work. 60% of most warranty work is software related. The manufactures are going to start pushing the software updates remotely at night or at times when the vehicle is not in use to correct the problem thereby eliminating the service visit and revenue to the dealership. These are all things we must think about and plan for if we want to remain competitive.

Also let me add that most of the dental plans are not that good. We used to pay 100% for them but the employees rarely used it, that's why I made it optional. I feel the employees have to pay something to see the real benefit. If the employee is willing to kick in something then I want to help them also, if they don't care about it then I don't care about it for them.

We offer them and I'm sure it varies by state. It's a pain but I think to remain competitive it's a must. We pay for 75% of the employee only for a HSA (High Deductible) plan as the base plan. The employee has the option to upgrade to a traditional PPO plan or an Hybrid HMO plan as well as add their spouse or family. We also pay 100% for a LTD plan and a $30K Life & Accidental Death Plan. I use a third party company to manage it and shop the plans each year. It seems we have to switch health insurance companies about every 2 years. The forms are numerous as each company has it's own forms they want. We also offer Dental and Vision but at 100% cost to the employee. The reason we pay 100% for the LTD is that as a self employed owner it is very expensive for me to purchase a plan outside the company. It is much cheaper to purchase it as a group plan. For what it would cost me on the outside I can provide all my employees a plan plus myself for less cost. I have about 15 employees on the plan. We also offer a SEP Retirement plan that matches dollar for dollar up to 3%. If you run the numbers, or for us at least in Texas it cost me very little because of the reduced taxes and I am able to shelter funds for myself. Be ready to spend considerable time set it all up. I use a third party provider to handle all the benefits as well as payroll processing. I tried ADP Total Source but found their fee structure a little expensive and they did not have a good import for Quickbooks, I also tried another company but the people where incompetent. Now with my new payroll/benefits company I go on-line to a web portal and enter the payroll, I can delegate this to another employee now and don't have to schedule vacation around pay dates. I can also enter it if need be while away from the shop. Last year I did it while diving in Honduras. The payroll company sends me a QB import file that has it all broken up into departments that I set up as well as the QB account numbers that I want various costs to hit. Actually QB integrated payroll does this well and it's easy. But now the payroll/benefits company has all my employee numbers and is able to shop for insurance much easier without me having to send them numbers and census information. I chose an outside company for future scale-ability as we grow and open up another location.

I pay an hourly base rate with .50 increases for each ASE certification and $1.00 for L1. We also have a Profit Sharing plan that pays the service writer and the techs for efficiency. We don't call it bonus because its really profit sharing. The techs have to hit it as a team. At 75% everybody gets $100 at 80% they get $200 and it goes up from there. It's figured biweekly so they can get the extra twice a month and 3 times on those 2 months with 3 pay periods. We have slowly moved the % up each year. It encourages them to help each other and not watch someone struggle. They also look at the end of the day and they have gone through their work they will send someone home 30 mins early to help with efficiency. They may lose 1/2 hr of pay but get a bonus. The service writers monitor it to make sure they are charging accordingly and they also monitor the techs hours. We also pay a flat $50 for any after hours evening training class they attend. We still look at their effective "flat rate" just so we know where they are and we monitor overall labor margins. It's definitely not a perfect systems but it works and the guys get steady paychecks. Most of my guys work a planned 45 hr work week and we don't send anybody home more than 30 mins early unless they want to, but we rarely have that.

I'm a little late to the conversation. I have one and I spent about 35K when it was all said and done. We have a had it about 5 years. I rarely advertise specials and use it more for brand awareness. I look at is as cost per 1000 impressions and at the time we had about 8600 cars drive by on a daily basis. our cost was much less than some other forms of advertising when I looked at eyeball penetration. We post a max of 4 messages in the rotation and use it to promote various events in the community. We also post a sign quote everyday that feeds our Facebook account which typically gets anywhere from 250-450 views on any given day. There is probably not a day that goes by that someone doesn't comment on our sign or something we posted. We post stuff that is encouraging, enlightening, funny or uplifting. It has been a good investment for us. I looked at a number of signs and settled on Watchfire Signs. They have been great and we have had very few problems. I had a controller go out and they replaced it very quickly. The software is easy to use and my office girl updates it. We typically have it scheduled out about 30 days in advance. We typically have a theme for our quotes revolving around the time of year. At Christmas we have stuff related to it for the month of December. At Thanksgiving we post quotes of thankfulness. We also will post if we have a position open but were very careful not to over use that. We also direct people to our website or facebook page for specials. There are lots of variables to consider as well as local ordinances. Pole mount or monument? Traffic speed, closeness to intersection. How long does the reader have to actually read the sign? They are very durable, you can hit them with stuff throw rocks at them and they can withstand most abuse. Is it a good investment? I think so. We'll get 10 years out of it. I am in the process of planing a new shop and an electronic sign will be in the plans.

Since I also own a collision repair shop we are used to dealing with good carriers and bad carriers. We are upfront with the customer about the potential that the carrier may not pay for certain items and/or procedures that we require to properly provide them with our warranty. We inform them of what the additional cost will be over and above what the carrier will pay and they get to decide what they want to do. We tell them we will be happy to call for approvals but understand that some are good about returning calls and have reasonable response times, some do not. We will do everything possible to get your claim approved but they have the final say. We don't argue with them, we present facts. We also charge $15 per hour more for warranty company work. If we don't get reasonable response times, we just inform the customer. We didn't pick the warranty company and will do everything within reason not to alienate the customer. In most cases the customer pays the difference.

We have been using this in our shop for several months as per recommendation from another shop owner. My techs like it as a great deal of the information they need is on the first page when they pull a vehicle up. They are still not ready to get rid of alldata. I really think it's because they are so used to using alldata. I think if I was to turn alldata off that they might whine for a bit but would learn to use Motologic even better and it is a cost savings over my current alldata plan. MotoLogic has or had a 3 month trial for $49 a month for several users. I would recommend you have them do a web demo and then try it. We are running it on i-pad minis, and chrome netbooks in every stall as well as on desktops with no issues whatsoever. Mark Roberts

I'm a little late to this thread but I have had some interesting thoughts as of late. We use RO Writer and It seems like we struggle with parts margins as last year we ended up with a 42% parts margin overall and we really want to be 55-60% we improved it 4% last year after making adjustments mid year. We took the average cost of every part sold which was around $36 excluding oils and filters. We felt like we could increase the margin significantly on a certain sweet spot in which nobody would really notice. Obviously we still have a long way to go and we are continually making adjustments. I remember we we made the first adjustments one of the techs who was involved in it said "I guess we will just have to look at the reaction of the customer and if they say something along the lines of "oh sh... then we may have went a little to far to fast, but it sounds to me like our customers have been getting repair parts on sale". We also made changes to our labor pricing also but our labor margins were 60% after paying hefty EOY bonuses which I am totally good with. I have a very stable technician base. My thinking is our customers aren't going to the parts store to pickup parts to repair the car themselves so they don't know how much parts cost. I have no problem explaining to those few that want to question why they can buy a part for 50% or less than I charged them. It's no different than you going to a restaurant or bar and ordering a drink. The markup is huge. I can buy a six pack of beer for what most places charge for one beer but we pay it all the time. Even the dealers are doing away with published list prices and are using a pricing matrix. I recently had to take a vehicle to a GM dealer for some repairs to a reverse sensing system only because we were so busy that we simply could not get to it in a timely manner and it was one of collision shop vehicles. When I received the bill they had charged us 30% ABOVE list for the parts. When I questioned it they assured me that they did not charge me "inflation" on the parts. So why should we be worried about what list is? And they had the vehicle for 3 weeks and could not fix it. We ended up fixing it as we had a little more time at that point. I am still waiting for my "Inflation" rebate check from them. We would always find ourselves adjusting prices because we felt some were too expensive. That's part of the reason I don't write service as I have way to many "friends". After hiring a new Service Writer who is totally green we never told him we could adjust prices to see what the reaction would be. What's interesting is that he has no problem selling with our matrix and not adjusting prices so in essence we have convinced ourselves that we should adjust prices. We rarely adjust prices now but still need to work on the matrix. I would love to see what some shops best practice is for parts matrix because we know we can improve in this area.

We do the same with shop gift coupons for oil changes, tires rotations and such. We just make the coupons on a 8.5 x 11 and laminate them. We also give them a number which we track in a spreadsheet as to who/what we donated to and then tracked which RO they were used on as well as any additional sales it generated. I had a nephew that used to make these really cool barb wire crosses that I would buy from him and give away. I paid him $40 for each one and they would always bring $100+ at the auctions. I am working on standard language for requests and denials so we can be more consistent in our language. We have a donation request form on our website that I could make easier to fill out but I don't want it to be to easy. We point everybody to the website. My committee is sometimes just me and those people that come in at the last minute, we don't even mess with unless it's something near and dear to me. Most of the people we just tell that we plan and budget the bulk of our donations a year in advance. I am working towards just making budgeted contributions to a Charitable Trust that I have and then any request will have to go through the trust. This would just give us a buffer and allow staff to simply tell people who ask, that donations are handled through the trust which only meets monthly or quarterly. I have included the simple form from our website. I would appreciate any feedback as well. sas-donation-request1.pdf

Have never tried it with phone calls. I hate telemarketers so I would probably not use one. But we do target market by mail certain demographics within our service area. Although in insurance sales they do it all the time trying to give quotes or set up meetings. I would probably feel better if I had the list of certain demographics and have my staff call to introduce our-self and market them. i would then follow up with a letter, refrigerator magnet, calender, discount coupon, keyfob or something that puts your name in their hand. CustomerLink had some good tools to use for demographic information and customer mapping but that has gone by the wayside since they were bought by Demand Force. The information is available from other sources though.

I've used RO Writer for about 10 years and it is a great investment. I see the original cost as inexpensive but I compare it the to cost of management systems for my collision repair facility which cost twice as much and are not nearly as robust as the Repair Shop Software. We are integrated with NAPA, O'Reilly, Worldpak, AC Delco, Carroll Tire, and Alldata Online. We also use The Back Office to push information over to Quickbooks for accounting purposes. We are currently using Demand Force and Auto Vitals in addition to the SMS. I don't think there is one SMS that will do everything you want and feel that even ROwriter is a little behind in some features. We have the new RO Touch for RO writer but I see very little value in it. If I remember correctly RO writer was about $7K with the modules we purchased and the monthly maintenance contract is $177 which includes the Epicor E-Cat Parts updates. Support has always been very good from them. Most of the add on modules are about $500-800. The back office yearly fee is $229 and is a great value. I would not want to run a shop without a system as they are time savers as well as invaluable when it comes to job costing and electronic parts ordering. Personally I would spend the money for a system that can grow with you. It is expensive and very time consuming to switch systems so do your homework. I have switched systems in my body shop 4 times. The first one I wrote and then it got to the point we were so busy I had to decide if I wanted to develop software or run my shop. I had too much invested in the shop to do anything else so I purchased another system and then wrote some custom stuff to sit on top of it. One time we ran two side by side for 60 days to get a feel for it and figured out we didn't want to use it. It was very time consuming but it was better to find out like that than go full bore only to figure out we hated it later. A good management system will streamline, enhance and add value to what you do.

I didn't see where you were going to have a booth at the automechanika show. If you are going to have a booth and I just missed it let me know as I will stop by. I will have to schedule a time to review the product/s. I did visit your website and get a brief overview of the products. I did like the kisok product although I would not have my customers perform that function at this time.