Transmission Repair

https://www.ratchetandwrench.com/shop-life/shop-profiles/article/33003329/write-job-ads-that-excite-techs

I don't like QuickBooks Online either. I call QuickBooks Online "QB Lite." Desktop Pro is the only way to go.

You sound like a body man. $100 bucks and you're done.

Well, I admire you for owning your own real estate. That's going to be your retirement. Conversely, we didn't own our own real estate until 35 years of business. I wish you well in finding out how to use QB and QB Payroll without a subscription. Have you purchased a new car that requires a subscription to have all the "extra" bells and whistles work? Good luck on that one, too.

Software companies learned early on that the "old school" business model of software sales, like you grew up on, wasn't a sustainable business model. Many software companies moved their app to "the cloud," where they could better manage a more sustainable business model. In the dot-com boom and then bust of 2000 were largely driven by software companies that didn't have a sustainable business model. Try to wrap your head around the idea that the software subscription model is just another cost of doing business, like uniforms, shop rags, rent, and other fixed costs.

If you think QuickBooks is expensive, check out Intuit's Pro Series at $2,100/yr. Before my wife retired, she was an accountant and tax preparer with about 60-70 clients. Intuit's Pro Series is made for accountants, tax preparers, and CPAs. She thought the high cost of Pro Series was just a cost of doing business. We need to think the same way about QB.

There are numerous reasons they all export to QuickBooks.

There's a reason the other programs "dump" into QuickBooks. In most shop programs you can "under-report" income. With QB you can't. If you fully report income, there's no reason to look for another program than QB. I'm just sayin'.

You're not "stuck" with QB. It is by far the best program around. Cheaper, too if you compare it to other SMSs. I'm not trying to be a rah-rah QB fan. It's simply the best in my opinion. I have run my business strictly on QB since around 2000-2001. Wait until you design estimates, RO forms, and reports. It's fun stuff. Or at least it's fun to me. I can pull up stuff by VIN, plate, or even phone number. QuickBooks is written in C++ and uses a Sybase back end. It's not as complicated as it seems, especially for a 68-year-old dumb person like me. 🙂

Here's a good example of a shop owner biting their tongue. The most exasperated I ever got with an employee was when my tech forgot he was driving a stick shift into one of our bays. "How can somebody forget that?" you may ask. The really bad part was the customer was about to go to a family reunion and this was the only vehicle they had access to with a 5th wheel setup in the bed of the truck. Assuming it was an automatic transmission vehicle, my tech merely depressed the brake to stop forward movement. This was a 3/4-ton Dodge Ram diesel...not a chance. The clutch tore right through the brake holding power and kept going forward. It was only after the vehicle almost knocked another car off the lift did the tech think, "Oh, shit, this isn't an automatic" and depressed the clutch pedal. Heck of a time to suddenly realize you have a clutch pedal. They say a picture is worth a thousand words... here's a video worth a million words. The customer missed the family reunion and goes, "I don't like hanging around those people anyway." https://youtu.be/uavCR9f5QME

Yeah, "quiet quitting" may be the newest catchphrase, but I have to admit the behavior hasn't changed. Reminds me of a former employee named "Mario" that I once had. I wrote a warning letter to him that basically said I'm keeping an eye on him. The final straw was when one of my other employees mistakenly filled a recirculating parts washer with hexane (bulk brakleen) instead of Stoddard solvent. I would buy both by the drum and the employee merely got them confused. Lo and behold, hexane is extremely flammable and that's exactly what happened. The parts washer caught on fire with 20' high flames. I thought Mario was running to get a fire extinguisher but instead, he went to grab his phone so he could take pictures/video of the calamity. After the fire, I fired Mario and he's been unemployed ever since. Nobody will hire him.

I have probably invested around $500-$600 in eye exams and glasses for my employees. It is really a thinking error to believe that 20/20 eagle vision is not needed in this line of work. More recently, I had my hearing tested and invested in hearing aids. If glasses make you think you're old, hearing aids make you think you're about to kick the bucket. About 6 months ago the FDA approved Over-The-Counter hearing aids. The days of spending thousands on hearing tests and hearing aids are long gone. I paid $350 for my current, high-quality, 8-band hearing aids. I paid $25 for the hearing test that gave me a direction for adjusting each of the 8 bands in the hearing aids. For less than $400, it was money well-spent.

When we were young, we had 20/20 vision. Somewhere around the age of 40, our vision unknowingly began to deteriorate. It’s such a subtle change it goes on with little to no obvious signs. Just the thought of wearing glasses is very uncomfortable to me. It makes me think I’m getting old. Not everyone can afford an eye exam and glasses, either. I’ve been wearing glasses for the last 27 years. I’ve noticed a gradual decline in my eyesight for those 27 years because every year, a new prescription gets a little bit stronger. But that’s OK because I still have 20/20 vision with my glasses. Without them, my eyesight is really poor. I once had a middle-aged builder who would miss little things like bad bushings, thrust washers, and ring lands. It finally dawned on me one day that I never saw this middle-aged builder with glasses. He had none. One day I offered to take him to Costco for their $1.50 hot dog and a drink. My ulterior motive was to get his eyes examined and get him fitted for glasses. It worked. He already knew his eyesight was poor yet chose to do nothing about it. Here I was footing the bill. For a mere $125, he got his eyes examined and a new pair of glasses. The best investment a shop owner could invest in… their staff. The moral of the story is to have any employee 40 or older get their eyes examined. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. You’ll also have fewer warranty jobs as a result.

ChargePoint supplies EV chargers to typically dealerships and repair shops. Tomorrow, Thursday, March 30th at 12:00 noon, MST they are hosting a training webinar. Here's more... Installing EV charging infrastructure can be a challenge for some dealerships. While DC fast charging is typically the most convenient solution for customers, it can present significant roadblocks, including power constraints, building remodels, and high installation costs. ChargePoint has developed a product that will offer dealers the ability to: Install DC fast charging today, while renovating the property or applying for required or recommended new services Reduce make-ready costs by tens of thousands of dollars Deploy with a flexible, non-permanent installation that can be adjusted as needed Finance, for the lowest out-of-pocket DC fast charging deployment option in the industry Join ChargePoint on March 30th at 11 a.m. PST or 2 p.m. EST to learn more about this charging solution at your dealership.

They make QuickBooks look cheap, don't they?

For more information on the class action suit, go to...

Never advertise without tracking numbers. That's the only way to measure your advertising effectiveness. https://www.convirza.com/

Specializing depends wholy on your market and business location. We were a transmission-only shop. Big Ticket City. However, our location enabled that thinking. We were down the road (1.5 miles) from a huge 12-new car dealership group Auto Mall. No matter the brand, people would go into the dealership only to hear from a dipshit service writer a return call that they needed a transmission for $XXX,X.00. The car still drives and all 4 wheels are on the ground. The service writer hears "let me think about it" or "let me talk to my husband" or some variation thereof... and the customer starts to call around. We're the closest transmission shop around, so they call us next. The rest is history. We've paid thousands, over the years, to our towing company to tow vehicles out of new car dealerships near us. Bottom line: service advisors can't sell big tickets. End of report.

I used QB 100% and didn't have an SMS because it was way cheaper. It took a lot of hours to figure out how to design estimates, invoices, reports & more, but after I got a grip on QB, it was all downhill from there. I ran QB in parallel with our SMS for 2 years just to get the hang of QB. It took me almost 2 years of learning (part-time.) The learning curve is atrocious but pays off in the long run. At least I'm not married to some mega-buck SMS program for ungodly monthly payments that never end. Screw that. We were paying (2015) around $700/yr. for annual updates, including payroll files. That's less than $60/mo.!!! BTW, QB did all of our payroll, too. No matter what you pay, just figure it in with the cost of doing business.

There are multiple reasons for the seemingly high productivity. We would do the same repairs day in and day out. A technician can't help to get more proficient over time. Unlike G/R, we didn't do very many 1-off repairs. I trained my counterperson or manager to spot difficult jobs and 1-off repairs. It was a collective mindset of everybody in the front office. The most 1-off repairs we would get were the HD/High-Performance jobs in a chipped vehicle. Some novice would chip their truck/car and the first thing it affects is the transmission because it can't handle the extra power. Those types of jobs took much more time and had a high probability of us seeing the vehicle again under our warranty. I would increase billed hours by 2 or 3 times to cover the extra time and risk involved. A "nearby competitor" on jobs like those was ATS in Colorado. They sold a lot of units that would occasionally come into our shop. Their prices didn't include installation or fluid. Check out this unit for a Dodge Ram diesel: ATS 68RFE Diesel Another, but less apparent reason was our production contest. We had a shop meeting during the lunch hour every Tuesday where we supply lunch. During that time, I would write hourly labor totals on the whiteboard for each employee. Although they were paid by the clock hour, we kept a total of billed hours for each employee. There was no "prize" for winning other than the prestige the winner would enjoy for the week. Lastly, we had a very well-equipped shop. The three high-performance pieces of shop equipment we had were 1. Nustar car pusher. 2. Ten FWD car dollies. 3. Ten FWD engine hangers. Other small things increase productivity, but their impact was too small to mention.

I have to add about our labor times. In a transmission shop environment, it was really unusual for somebody not to beat the billed hours time. That goes for both the build time and the R&R time. As an example, if a technician works 40 clock hours, the billed hours usually ran somewhere in the range of between 50 to 60 hours. That's between 120% and 150% efficiency. Technician efficiency was not something I worried about and rarely checked. New recruits were the only technicians who couldn't do better than billed hours. The biggest problem I encountered with technicians was attitude-related. One bad apple can turn into a cancer. That happened to me once with two new hires. Perhaps I'll post the letter I wrote to one of them sometime.

You're right, 60% gross profit is what we're after, and 20% net profit. We didn't have a problem paying taxes because we included it in our overhead expenses to keep from spending it on something else. Nothing produces stress like unknowingly spending tax money on something else. We were $125/hr. on labor (2015, highest in our market area of SLC, UT) and 100% markup on transmission-related parts. Very few general repair parts could we do 100% markup. Lucky for me, my wife is an accountant and business partner. One year she "rat-holed" $125K unbeknownst to me. Another year, the state of Utah put us on monthly (not quarterly) sales tax payments because we went over the $15K quarterly threshold limit. We were experiencing explosive growth at the time. We were a very small (3K sq.ft.) shop with only 4 lifts, but we produced the most work of any transmission shop around. ($1.2M/yr.) This was mainly due to the fact we didn't do general repair like the other transmission shops did. We stuck to the big ticket repairs like transmissions, transfer cases, and differentials. Minor work to us was transmission service jobs and most leaks. The other variable was the high traffic count of our location. We were right on I-15 with a daily traffic count of 235K/day. Our front property line was only 90 feet from I-15. We didn't have a big problem with production and efficiency mainly because I was a tool and equipment junkie. One year I bought a valve reaming station for valve bodies. Everybody was concerned it would slow down shop production. Some really griped and complained loudly because it was a lot of extra work and didn't understand why I wouldn't buy valve bodies. Three months later, everybody had warmed up to the idea. Yet nobody complained when we installed an overhead ATF reel with a 50-foot hose or started buying ATF by the 330-gallon plastic totes. I paid everybody hourly so that they would have a steady income they could depend on. Everybody liked it that way, especially the employee's wives. (Happy wife, happy life.) I've since retired but occasionally miss the shop. I thought I'd never make enough to fully retire. Speaking of retirement, I'm like Joe in that I never made enough to retire with the sale of just the business ($330K). I only semi-retired. It was only after the sale of the shop's real estate ($2.3M) did I make enough to fully retire on. I first learned this from Joe and he's absolutely correct, at least that's my experience.

I find it amazing that nobody specifically mentions a P&L statement. For our shop, we would look at the Profit & Loss statement to not only know our profit margin but to also calculate labor charges and markup on parts. We are a transmission shop that has only 4 numbers to tell us if our labor & parts are priced correctly. For us, it works like this... 20% of sales should be parts, 20% of sales should be labor, and 40% of sales should be overhead, leaving 20% of sales as profit. If any one of those 4 numbers is off, we either need to adjust our pricing, look at the number of warranty claims, or shop efficiency/productivity. Those 4 numbers tell me everything I need to know about our prices and profit margin. To me, it's not as complex as some shop owners make it out to be. If anything is below target, we adjust our prices accordingly, start looking at shop efficiency, or look for underpriced estimates. It's only as hard as 4 numbers and being able to rationally diagnose problems that affect our numbers. Just look at your P&L statement.

For most shops, the shuttle driver position is underrated. Nothing else could be further from the truth. The shuttle driver needs to know and feel he/she is an integral part of the shop operation. The shuttle driver’s job is to both make the customer feel comfortable and to glean information and snafus about our business operation. The pluses, and the minuses, if you will. Don't make it sound "forced" or like "you're just doing your job." Use regular conversational English. At no point should the customer feel like he/her is being pumped for information. That would destroy the value of any information we do collect. All of these talents can be taught in-house. However, training time for this training should be set aside, more than just general conversation. To reiterate, make the shuttle driver feel he/she has an important part in the operation of the shop/business. That is key.

The author of the article is Editor Chris Jones. He did not provide a link to the survey. I'm guessing that's an internal document for Ratchet and Wrench magazine. All I have is a link to the article. https://www.ratchetandwrench.com/articles/13071-numbers-preferred-social-media-platforms