Transmission Repair

The art of integrations has grown into companies that specialize in nothing but integrations. Companies like zapier.com and domo.com do just that, and they aren't the only ones. Check them out and see if you find them useful. I'm currently building a website that needs integration to a parts catalog company website that will not provide me with either the data or an API for love or money. I plan on using Zapier for integration from my end via HTTP requests sent behind the scenes from my website. Perhaps you can do the same. J. Larry Bloodworth

What are you REALLY buying? Are you buying a business, or are you buying a job? For many shops, if they had to hire someone to perform the owner's job functions, one would discover that the business isn't profitable. Another test is to see if the owner claims the accounting isn't REALLY what he makes, as in under-reporting income or burying personal expenses into the shop. Businesses needs to make a profit over and beyond what the owner is paid for his job function(s) and businesses shouldn't have to under-report income to allegedly do it. The target percentage of profit is debatable, but all agree it should be something. Have you been able to look at the P&Ls for the last 3 years? If so, what's the bottom line profit, as a percentage of sales? When you answer, I'll continue.

Off and on from 1999 to 2011, our shop had a booth at various technical colleges’ career fairs. We hired several students to train as R&R techs with the hopes of moving them up to rebuilding. We didn’t have a very good experience with ITT Technical College in SLC nor WyoTech College in Laramie, Wyoming. The best employee we ever hired out of a technical college came from Salt Lake Community College. Both ITT and WyoTech are for-profit colleges. WyoTech is part of the Corinthian College system. Around 2014 or so, both ITT and WyoTech filed for bankruptcy and eventually went out of business, but I didn’t really understand why until now. The story of why these colleges failed is the subject of a half-hour documentary on PBS’s Frontline. Before you decide to get involved with a for-profit college, I would like to suggest to watch the short documentary, A Subprime Education, online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/a-subprime-education/ It will also make sense why our federal government has also instituted a “student loan forgiveness” program to help students who can’t find a job in the field they were allegedly educated in. Sad, sad, sad.

There is a little-known free service that companies charge for. Some reputation management companies are built entirely around this service. The service is that they let you know, via E-mail, if your shop gets a review, or any time your shop’s name is mentioned online. Google offers this service for free and it’s called Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to enter any name, website, company, or whatever you want to stay on top of. For example, I listed my name, my shop’s name, my shop’s website, and my main suppliers into Google Alerts. Google Alerts watches the entire internet including social media. If you do a YouTube search for Google Alerts, there’s a lot of videos showing how you can may $100/day or more with Google Alerts. I can go on about it, but it’s easier to simply go to https://www.google.com/alerts Now you know!