gandgautorepair

I will respectfully disagree with what looks like you're boiler plate response. I think you're outlook will go the way of the dinosaurs. Don't have enough time to invest in a long response, but a couple of comments. The whole picture and review idea is wonderful, but the people who see it are already in the shop and so are already "new customers", does nothing to attract new customers. Sure, it can add credibility along with everything else we do to add credibility and get our first time customers back in. BTW, we have a 60% return rate on first time customers. I get constant comments from customers who saw us on Facebook, they love the info and interaction. I've made a bunch of videos, and while the dollars are difficult or impossible to track, the word of mouth response is frequent and very good. This is a social media world we live in, to say it has no value or is not worth some investment of time is to have you're head stuck in the sand. I find you're comment about branding inaccurate. Building a brand is not expensive. You include your branding in everything you do, including all those things you do that you can track. If you don't brand all those things you can track then you have a very short sighted, immediate profit view of marketing that in itself will be more expensive over time. Branding through social media is extremely inexpensive, and effective, and while it can take some time it can also be fun. While we don't have hard trackable numbers, from asking people when they come in how they heard about us, we have determined that the dollars we spend on Facebook and Instagram have the same dollar for dollar return as the dollars we spend on Adwords. I'll continue to do my periodic mailers, which work, and I'll continue to do my mailers and follow up with my existing customers, which work very well, and I'll continue to do Adwords and social media. BTW, we averaged 28% new customers in 2017, and like I said previously we're getting 60% of those to return. I'm sure if I watched your video it would be valuable and I'd learn something, but at this time, no thanks.

Yes, I include in my response to those bad reviews all the things we do, things that are our values, and hope for the best. I have actually had people come in and say that they chose us because of reading a few bad reviews, it added credibility to our many hundreds of good reviews.

Looking forward and thinking about business goals for the future, I'm wondering if there is such a thing as a sales volume, personnel, or facility sweet spot for profitability. I'm in a semi-retirement mode already, so having profits to spend is a priority over simply growing the business for growths sake. I really enjoy being in business and planning and reaching for goals, but wondering about what those goals for the business should be. I've reviewed some industry financial data without any clear conclusions, but I'm wondering what folks here think or have seen or experienced.

A little about where I'm at currently. I started this business from scratch 7 years ago. We currently have 8 employees and did 1.3 in 2017. Any wisdom from you who have been doing this longer?  

On 1/18/2018 at 5:19 PM, meowpox said:

We dont ask customers to leave reviews. As a customer of other businesses, i hate being asked that. Makes me feel like the positive experience i had was not that genuine. Not sure if I'm just not having similar experiences as you all but is it not enough to just give outstanding customer service? But I guess it also depends on type of shop you have and if you're going for volume. 

If you're going to position yourself for the long term it would be hard to make the case that you can do it without online reputation and ranking. In that way, reviews are important. If you want to grow, reviews are important in attracting new customers. If you live in an area with a lot of traveling traffic, like we do, reviews are how people on a trip find a repair shop if they have a problem. We have found that most people search "auto repair reviews", not just auto repair near me. Like it or not, I think reviews are a reality and we need to exceed or at least keep pace with our competition.

We get most of our reviews through Mitchell CRM and SureCritic. Not the best, since it's not Facebook or Google, but when people search "reviews" then the SureCritic site with our reviews shows on Google. Also, the SureCritic is linked on our Facebook page and on our website, so it's visible to people who click on us through organic search or Adwords. We also get some crossover google reviews from it. We also get more Google reviews and Facebook reviews with our MyShopManager follow up. Overall we get quite a few reviews, and it's all automated.

We're doing RepairPal. Not sure we want to keep doing it. This subject discussion pushes me to drop it. Through RepairPal we get CarMax warranty work, and we've had a decent amount of it. The CarMax work has really pissed me off. They get they're 10% fee of every RO and they limit us to list price on parts. We're right in the middle of deciding if we're going to keep doing it. At least RepairPal only gets the fee on the first visit, and if we look at it as a cost of new customer acquisition the cost is in line, and they don't limit our price as long as we can justify it to the customer, which we haven't had a problem doing. RepairPal may be outta here.....CarMax is definitely outta here.

On 1/21/2018 at 6:59 AM, JustTheBest said:

In short, if you give up your marketing strategy to somebody else, it's the same as handing over the keys to the front door of your home. Would you do that? 

Didn't think so.

The only strategy (I know this is going to sound "boring") is to take small steps and track everything. In other words, if you can't track it - don't do it. Plain and simple. 

So now the "blow back" is the simple fact that you've actually got to do a little work. I know - pain in the butt, right? 

Hope this helps

Matthew Lee
"The Car Count Fixer"

Join me on a new free training webinar
 

So how do you track brand awareness marketing. How do you track the effectiveness of social media marketing your brand. How do you track community involvement and sponsorships. Sorry, I get kind of tired of hearing the "track everything" stuff, as much as I would like to know how to do it. We talk about limiting offers and discounts, and talk about promoting our brand, and then talk about tracking everything. Which one is it?

I have also had bad Google reviews from people who I can't find the person or the situation. I filed with Google but nothing ever happened, never got any kind of response from Google. I replied that we didn't have that customer in our data base, that we follow up on every single customer (which we do with Myshopmanager), and we had no knowledge or complaint about a situation like this. All I could do. I had a string of them at one time, seemed like an attack. In the comment I also pointed to our other review sites like SureCritic. Google+ and Google reviews are a PIA but not much we can do about it. We adjusted to get more Google reviews to try and dilute the weird reviews.

That oil filter falling off is a tough one. I agree that the oil would be pumped out and there would be a massive leak and loss of oil pressure way before the filter actually fell off. This one would be a gut call, whatever feels like the right thing to do.

I hadn't thought of the problem of paying the sales tax on those parts, right now I don't. Hmmm...

I'm not a tech, and I don't work on my own vehicles, so wondering how others in my situation pay the guys to work on your personal vehicles and how you account for it.

I'm good with my guys researching on any platform available. I agree, as a shop owner I'm continually researching and learning. I want my guys to have the same attitude, and they do. If the quickest way for them to look something up is on their phone, I will live with it. Yes, first they look at our shop resources. However, we've been standing there talking about something and one looks it up on the phone while we're talking and finds good info. This is the age and world we live in. I hate seeing the guys have their phones handy, but so far I've put up with it because it can also be productive. I've also seen each guy is different, and I believe it's best (for me) to allow some flexibility with how my guys want to do things.

I would love to see more participation in this forum. Can this forum, or has this already, been mentioned/promoted on the Facebook group? 

Wondering how you all handle repair work to your own vehicles. How do you pay, how do you handle parts costs, write an RO or not, how does it affect gross sales.

I currently write an RO, pay the guys time just like any other job, but cost the parts to myself. The RO is for zero sales but has tech time charged to it. Wondering how others do it. I also have too many vehicles...

I've valued all the advice and views I've seen here. Some of the stuff on the Facebook group is not so good, but some is. I hope that group, which is considerably less focused than this group, does not replace this forum. On Facebook, you have to spend some time weeding through the junk to glean the good stuff.

You can still give a bonus based on hours billed per week, or month, or pay period. Even if it's a custom job they still have to stay busy and get the hours billed. I admire guys who can make a 4x4/repair shop profitable. We started out as both, but over a few years we walked away from the 4x4 stuff. No margin in the parts, and not that many people would pay the labor charge that it takes for it to work for us. We still work on a ton of Jeeps, but no fab work anymore, and no accessories, and we haven't done a lift kit in awhile. It's hard to spend 1/2 hr or longer at the counter talking to someone about a potential build, or what gear ratio or shocks to run, while the techs are waiting on parts and approvals so they can keep busy on profitable repair work. 

As far as possible pay plans, my techs get a $2 per hour bonus if they hit 80 hours in the 2 week pay period. Just one way of doing it. This could be on flat rate or hourly.

Ask him what he would like you to do. You might have already asked that, but you didn't say what the customer wants in your post. Thankfully, windshields don't cost much, so no point spending a bunch of time figuring out who's fault it is and who's going to pay for it. The thing about paying for stuff like this is to do it quick, without a bunch of process. If they have a sense that they had to work it out of you, you just spent money but aren't getting anything for it. If you give freely, or at least with very minimal investigation and/or resistance then you earned a bunch of good will. No good will if the customer has to work for it.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

If you fade at all from your original price, for whatever reason, then they ask if you have a military discount, tell them you already gave it to them. Also, if price is presented as an objection, ask them if they have any coupons or are military before giving up or discounting anything, and try not to discount if they don't have any. Also, don't know how you'd give a military discount on tires. You could price other services so you could give the discount then if they ask say that on services you do but on tires you can't.

Here's our website. It's a work in progress. Next step is to get our videos linked to the website in appropriate places.

http://gandgautorepair.com/

I'm spending $675 for someone to manage Adwords and $1200-1400 a month to Google for Adwords clicks. Our CPC is in the mid $5. I'm wondering how much we need this because we come up at the top of the listings organically in a couple top categories. It's a tough call because the Adwords gets us at the top in categories we don't rank well in, and I hate to drop the top categories because that's where we get the most response. I still need to grow car count to pay for the extra service advisor and tech I hired in May so I'm not yet willing to back off.

This is a very open subject for me going forward.

On 10/22/2017 at 8:00 AM, PherBag said:

We use Opt Soc Media too. Only use the facebook plan. Cost is $150 per month. They do 1 post per day Monday thru Saturday. Working great! Worth the money for the time you save. I still post too. You can tell which posts are mine. Check it out at Facebook.com/RiversideAutoCovingtonLA


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I looked on your Facebook page and saw a lot of posts, but very little response. Are you also doing ads? I didn't see any boost on your posts, do you boost sometimes?

Anyone else using this company also doing ads on Facebook? And if so, what is your budget?

I'm using someone local to place my ads but not sure it's worth what I'm paying them. Wondering about other options or just going back to doing it myself.

Currently, our normal oil change is $29.99, which is 5 qts, filter, inspection, and battery test, and alignment test if there is any slight indication that it should be done. My goal was 50% of cars getting alignment check, but we are far from reaching that goal. Full synthetic is $59.99 and includes the premium filter. We also have a special price on diesel oil changes, $79.99 for Duramax, $89.99 for Dodge Cummins, and $109.99 for Powerstroke. This is what we do, FWIW.

I admit we seriously struggled with ARO, hanging around $300, with 30-40% of our RO's being oil changes. Going to digital inspections and higher expectations from me to be consistent in our processes has moved it to over $400 most of the time.

Individual shop and personal goals are a big part of why we do certain things. For me, I had two goals. First, I wanted to quickly grow the shop to have enough personal that I didn't have to work in the shop. I started from scratch 7 years ago, and I haven't worked in daily operations for over two years. The second goal is to get my customers in the habit of coming to us for everything, not just when something doesn't work. The inexpensive oil change has been an element for us reaching both of those goals.

We also reduced the cost of an oil change, which helps. And, we do a complete digital inspection on every car and regularly do alignment checks. It has to be part of an overall strategy.

All these comments aren't making it easier to decide. No doubt lifestyle and quality of work environment are why I didn't open Sat from the beginning. I'm not active in the shop, so it won't change my schedule, but will it provide enough extra business to allow another tech with my limited space and deal with challenging schedule issues. Hmm.....

We have a matrix based on parts cost, but we menu price things we call comparables, like oil changes, brake jobs, trans service, flushes, initial testing. We keep a few things that people are likely to be able to have a comparable price in mind at a market or below price, then price everything else according to our matrix. We have the highest labor rate in town, but still get reviews about how reasonable our prices are. Seems to be working ok.