CARMandP

8.01% on total ticket and tops out at 39.97. Been doing it for about 5 years with no complaints at all.

Been using SE for a while. No problems.

I agree and that has been very hard for me to do this year after huge personal struggles and the condition of my shop shows it

LOL. I have heard of some of those but a few new ones. Great article.

I have been debating this myself. I use email marketing for this but if you don't have enough emails this doesn't work. I am also starting to use postcards to remind people. We will see what happens. I have considered paying someone to just make the "cold" calls and follow up with them. I don't have the time to do this but if you had someone good on the phone that you could just pay to do it for you it might be worth the time and money. In fact I thought about someone independant from me so that I would be able to get some honest feedback if I did something wrong to make them mad.

I started as a one man shop myself. I wish I could go back to it. Its a lot less hassle and stress but a lot more work.

Looks good.

For direct mail check out a company called Mudlick Mail.

As I am making changes in this area, I am thinking about the same thing. Not only for my techs but my service writer.

You have already done more work than I did for sure when starting my business. I just flew by the seat of my pants and it has lasted for 6 yrs. Sadly now I am having to really make some hard decisions because its crashing due to lack of proper management (me). My business in the last 3 yrs grew by about 100k a year in total sales but in the last 6 months we are off by more than 75k

24/24 because we are a part of the Certified Auto Network with Oreilly's. Nationwide and the few times my customers have had to use it on the road, the warranty has worked very well.

I agree with Joe on this one. I have been trying to pound this into my service writer. When people call wanting oil changes, we do them now. They normally aren't hard. We stock most of the filters and keep people coming back. Its the same reason that I added a tire machine. I don't sell a lot of tires but my most loyal customers don't want to go anywhere else and it keeps them coming to me for everything.

We have had a terrible winter. April was a little better but we are already off almost 50k from what we were this time last year. Car count way off. Doing everything that I can to get cars in but not feeling very optomistic even about staying in business this year

Reviewing a bunch of this kind of thing right now in my shop.

Welcome to the site. Its good to have you here

Since Sept 2013. 252 leads, 66 customers have used either the phone numbers or website confirmations and 24 new customers--$21k worth of revenue. We are in a very small town so these numbers won't quite give you a very good feedback necessarily. 2982 leads to website, 250 phone calls, 30 online form used which resulted in 66 customers. Not sure if that's good or bad. If it wasn't for the fact that the price includes all the website optimization, google, yahoo and bing ads and a bunch of other things I would have a hard time paying what I am. Its the most expensive thing I do every month for advertising and since business has been way off the last 6 months I have struggled with if its worth it...We run a car count of around 130 a month, at least we did

This been very cold in our area. Not any snow but I looked today and we are off 100 cars from the same time last year and almost 30k. Ouch Hope it picks up soon or we are in big trouble.

I agree strongly with what was mentioned above. I had 13 yrs tech experience before I started my own shop and I WAS NOT prepared for the business side and I still struggle greatly with that 6 yrs later. I would strongly recommend learning how the business should be run as well as working on cars.

Welcome to the site. Its good to have you here Don't be a stranger.

Brother QL-570. Comes with the program to custom make the oil change stickers. Only complaint is I considering doing the clingon verses the sticker but don't want to spend the big difference in the price of the printer and the labels.

Off 15% but the profit it better. Made almost the same amount in profit this year as last which I guess is good. Getting my margins closer to where the need to be.

We have a Branick 7400 that I bought about 5 years ago. Love that unit.

Kukui for me does all my website and online advertising as well as my customer retention. I have a dedicated customer service person that I talk two every two weeks whos job is to make sure that the google ads, bing ads, yahoo ads and facebook ads are done correctly. They do all that for me as well as the reviews, customer retention and emails. Part of what I pay every month covers the cost of these ads as well. Kukui doesn't yet do mailings but they have parterned with Mudlick Mail to do their mailers so that should be coming soon. I had customerlink and although I was happy with what they did, by upgrading to Kukui I found a company that doesnt everything for me so I don't have to be bothered. Take a look at my website and see for your self. Or google auto repair, white house, tn and see what comes up

Looks really good. Great job.

Been following and reading her things for a while. Great information and fun to read