Andre R

Thank you for that XRAC, now my head hurts. I'm calling my senator to demand an investigation!!!

Hi Brian, if this problem is as bad as your saying, in my mind there is only one way to fix the relation ship with your customers . First make sure your counter and tech problems are resolved other wise your wasting your time. Second, and this is the most important part either you or your GM must call each and every customer personally and apologize for your shops failures . Next ask them what you need to do to make it right and then as long as it isn't something off the wall or completely out of line, do it. If a car wasn't fixed correctly, get it in and get it fixed at no charge. If a car was returned filthy and greasy, get it detailed. Your customers won't be expecting it and this will go a long way towards building a lot of good will. You won't please them all but they will probably stop bad mouthin your shop and you can build the reputation back up. Good luck.

RO Writer does.

We did it for a year. At the end of the year we added up what we made from all Repair Pal customers and what we paid them. It was roughly the same amount. Very few ever returned because they were towed in and from a different area. We cancelled them and didn't see any drop in profits the following year, didn't even miss them.

Something I learned a long time ago is that people can't do to what you don't allow them to do. If they are there because they truly want you to work on their cars or are trying to give you business then I could see a small discount. If on the other hand they are there because they are trying to get something for free, then you should charge them . Some times all it takes is a reminder that this is how you earn your living and feed your family and the true friends get it. The rest should be overcharged and sent on their way, they don't care about you or your business. The sooner you sort them out the easier it becomes.

If you were looking for a business coach what would be some of the questions you would ask and what qualifications would you look for?

Ok , I guess I need to clarify myself. I am not advocating for ASE certifications. On the contrary, I think they are a large part of the problem, as is AAI, UTI, MMI, WIO-TECH, ITT TECH and a host of other so called schools that take peoples money and don't provide what was paid for. Thats a whole other tirade for a different post. What I had in mind was a system that Rhode Island uses to license electricians. It is an associates degree earned through a local accredited school. The person usually goes to night school and has to complete 2000 hours of apprentorship under a licensed electrician. After successfully completing the schooling and the 2000 hours they are awarded a journeyman license. That person has to complete yearly continuing education requirements or lose his license. If we were to use a system like this , as an employer you would know that the person applying for a job had at least some basic knowledge and experience. As for shop licensing how about minimum requirements for insurance, required equipment for doing certain repairs and minimum schooling for the techs that work there. These are some of the basic ideas that I feel are needed in our field. Ncautoshop, the problem wasn't that you hired an ASE tech that "couldn't find the door handle", its that ASE didn't do their job to verify that he/she had the experience for that certification. If we as an industry don't start policing ourselves then we are no better than those hack shops you all complain about because we are allowing them to rip people off and repair vehicles incorrectly or incompletely. This is just my opinion. One born of being in an industry for over 40 years and watching as the vehicles get smarter and more complex and the people that are responsible for maintaining and repairing them are falling further and further behind.

I just finished reading the post from Gonzo about diagnostics and I was about to respond and then chose to go this route. Let me give you a little background on me ; 57 years old, repairing cars for 42 of them, ase master certified with L1. I've repaired cars in Alaska, Massachusetts , Connecticut, Rhode Island and now in Arizona. I've been self employed for 29 years. The problem of no techs and more importantly unqualified techs were present in the 70s when I started. ASE came along and they were going to fix the problem. All techs were going to have to get certified to be able to work in the automotive field, i'm still waiting for that to happen. Then ASE said that if we certified on our own that we would be more attractive to prospective employers and could command higher wages, still waiting for that to happen. A couple of months ago Mitch Schnieder wrote an article about the tech shortage and that something needs to be done. Donny Sieffert from ASA has been writing articles about the connected car and all the complexities and how we are going to need very talented diagnosticians to figure them out and repair them. These same articles were written in the 80s about the new computer controlled cars and the 90s about the new fuel injected cars and the, well you get the idea. We as an industry need to come together and fix this problem. Instead we complain to each other about how hard it is to find qualified techs while we hire unqualified /barely qualified techs to work in our bays.I include myself in this ,I'm just as guilty. The reason we do this is we have no way of knowing if that person applying for the tech position has any schooling or even knows what he says he knows. I feel shop and tech licensing fixes a lot of these problems. I'm sure there will be a bunch of you that will disagree with me and thats fine. I know you only hire certified people and run the best shops except the three shops down the road or around the corner don't and it says auto repair on the front of their buildings too. If you knew that the person coming through your door had to pass a rigorous licensing requirement and that every shop had to have the same basic equipment and could only hire these licensed techs it levels the playing field for all of us. Think it can't be done? Look at the Right To Repair laws and agreements that have been forged and passed in different states. It can be done but only if we start the discussion on a national level. Using an organization like ASA and bringing together some of the leaders in our industry to work on this with our input I feel would be a start in the right direction. I know it won't be a cure all but it would be a start. We need to start some where . Thoughts, insights??

We have been using a car care club for about 5 years now and it works fantastic. We get $99.95 and its good for a year . We don't lock it to any one car or person. Let us know and I can give you the full run down on how we run our program. Our car care customers aro is over $600.

www.bellroadauto.com

Had to do an evaporator on a Saturn Vue. By the time I got it out there was nothing between the back seats and the firewall. The center console came apart in 8 pieces. Just finished a flasher on an 02 vette. Have to remove the top part of the dash because the flasher comes out the back.grrrrr

Jeff, I get what your saying but here's the bigger problem. You installed brakes that you didn't source. You tell the customer that there is no warranty on those pads. They sign a waiver agreeing to this. They go down the road and the brakes fail. They have hit a little kid that ran out in the road and couldn't stop in time. They signed the waiver and your covered right. That little kid didn't sign that waiver nor did the kids parents. Your insurance won't cover you because you didn't supply the parts. See the labor / install didn't fail , the part did and you are on your own. The way i handle these "customers" is I do know of a shop that will let them bring their own parts and his labor rate is half what mine is. I send them to him. I have helped them, they get to save money and he gets more "customers". Thats a win,win,win.

If your state has a safety inspection then the way to handle it is how we used to do it. Call local or state police, inform them that you are a licensed state inspection station and a vehicle has been presented that is unsafe and should not be on the road. They will inform the owner that they have to tow it out . If they tell you to let it go, get their name and badge #. The other way is to just have it towed to the customers house. These were my lawyers instructions to me when I ran an inspection station in Rhode Island, now I have a shop in AZ and we have no inspection. Talked to a lawyer and the cops here and was told that if I would try to stop somebody from taking their car here I could get arrested. Crazy world!

I wouldn't support or use myCarFax EVER !

I used to be in Rhode Island and they have a safety requirement to be able to drive the vehicle on public roads. When that problem arose we would call the police and they would tell the customer to tow it or repair it. Here in Arizona there is no safety requirement so all we can do is document the repair order and send them on their way.

I was with AS also . I gave them 6 months and I had the same problems. Their response was to ask for more money. I fired them and switched to Kukui and have been very satisfied with the results. We are in a large metropolitan market, Phoenix AZ, so it is harder to move up in ranking.

We are in Phoenix, if we can be of assistance let us know. If they are not in our area we could point them to a reputable shop near them.

RO Writer and Bolt On do not work together. I made the mistake of trying them and now I am looking for something else. They will tell you they integrate but they don't.

I had been going through the same up and down cycle like you described. I finally fixed my problem quite by accident. Newsletters! I had gotten a great deal on a minolta biz hub printer and I have always wanted to send out newsletters, so last September we started to send them out to our customers who had been in for any type of repair or service in the last 18 months. We do absolutly no advertising in it. All of a sudden the recommendations we were making were starting to come back and get done . Since September our sales are up 47% , our gp is up 5%, our car count is up 20%. We produce ,print it , tab it and fold it all in house. My or is $47.00/$1.00 and It cost me about $450.00 a month . We use an 11.5 x 17 sheet of paper folded in half so it is a 4 page newsletter. Email me your address and I'll send you one .

It really depends what you want the financing for. If its expansion and a new building your pretty much stuck with a bank and you will need collateral . If its new equipment, I have been very successful buying through my parts supplier (napa) . They financed my alignment machine for 20 months with no finance charge, I've done other equipment through them also. Advances on your future credit card income is very expensive. There is a company called On Deck, they lend with no collateral but your payments are taken automatically and the repayment time is very short. Try SCORE through SBA, they are a free resource for this type of information and help.

Hi Mike, I don't presently use Bolt On, I was looking to add it to RO Writer and I was told not to by RO Writer for the reasons stated in my first post. I know shops on this site use and speak highly of your product and I was just trying to prove/disprove what I was told by RO Writer.

Is anybody using Bolt On with RO Writer. If so are you experiencing any conflcts or file corrupting. My RO Writer rep just told me not to use Bolt On as their system is rewriting /overwriting RO Writer code and corrupting files and data. This doesn't sound plausible but then again I have no idea how they get that little wizard in that black box on my desk to do what it does!

Call your local zoning department and report the shop.

I just quit them and switched to Kukui . They have been very unprofessional in releasing my domain back to me, I would not recomend them at all. I bought their top seo package, moved up about 6 pages in the first 5 months and then proceded to to drop farther than when I started. When I questioned them on this they tried to get another 600.00 dollars a month to "fix" the problem. I contacted the ceo Danny Sanchez about this and all of a sudden my site started to climb again.

Our labor rate is 15.00 more per hour for warranty companies. We also absolutly refuse them supplying the parts. We inform our customers from the start that yes we will deal with their warranty company and wait to get paid from them but they usually wont cover the complete repair and they,the customerare responsible for the balance. We've never had a problem, my buisness , my rules. If the warranty company refuses we call the customer and inform them,some we lose and others have us fix it and fight the warranty company on their own.