mspecperformance

I didn't realize you guys see such small margins are tires too. I am now incorporating all of my tire sales with the tire protection integrated. You can't buy tires from me without the getting a tire protection plan. This way I am keeping around 30% gp on a tire and I charge $40+ mount and balance for 1 tire.

how does this stuff even develop...

yeah its pretty sad these extended warranties exploited the general public the way they do.

Just don't show up ever. Only about 40% of appointments actually show up. Our shop is in a poor neighborhood and we are not the work for a six pack of beer mechanic they are used to. It just bothers me and I don't want to be uppity and start asking for credit card numbers to charge people for not showing up.

I've not heard of charging people for not showing up for appointment but at the same time, if they never come to you then they will never be a customer. That is a problem, you are possibly attracting the wrong customers or you are in the wrong neighborhood. Your market may not be able to handle a shop that books appointments.

Dealers will throw u under the bus any opportunity they can.

Andre i respect your opinion on Management Success but what I left out of my comments about Management Success was that they did actually personally insult me during their one on one consultation. It was very demeaning and i care not to repeat my experience however lets just say it left such a bad taste in my mouth that i left without finishing the 2nd day and I called threatening to charge back my card. Thry eventually refunded me the weekend cost and apologized for their representatives action but it will still stand as one of the worst experiences i have ever dealt with. I am now working with Elite and hsve made great changes to my business. In closing i do stand by my experience as the Management Success experience was the worst class ive ever attended.

Do these people book appointments and never show up or just don't show up during their allotted appt time? Do you ever see them again?

Hey Andre, I think we met back a few years ago at a Management Success 1-2 day event. Worst event I have ever attended. Glad to see you are doing well.

Daily. I guess i have to plsy around with exactly what i want on it.

I am debating on using something like this to schedule out my day. Looking into creating a customer dry eraser board with columns and such. Has anyone used such a tool in scheduling?

This was a great piece of advice that I got from Joe and Elite. I had a technician looking for a job come visit us in December. At the time I did not have a position for him but I kept in touch with since explaining the exact same thing. Well that same technician I just recently hired this week. He was the most qualified out of all the technicians I interviewed/spoke to and so far he is working out well.

demandforce is terrible. I had a terrible experience with that company in the past. They have made strides to change things guy but I don't believe much has changed.

That principle is true in theory, not in practical real life. I am fully aware of the 80/20 rules, but say you fire 20% of your problem customers, now a new 20% will form from the new group. It always ends up the same until there's nobody left to get rid of. If you are in a large city with endless people and little competition by all means filter out the problem cases. If competition is tight or you're in a small town you'll be the next garage for rent if you are too selective. If anyone has succeeded in getting only A+ customers let me know.

 

I'm kind of playing devils advocate here.

I believe the idea is really not to achieve 100% pure top tier customers that give you no problems and pay what you want. It certainly would be nice but that would be fantasy land talk. The real take away is to always try to achieve a goal and work towards it. If the principle is in place and you know what you have to do which is in this case fire your bottom 20%, you will eventually get a lot closer to that 100% awesome customer base. Worse case scenario you fire your bottom 20% and you fill in with another set of mediocre clients however hopefully by then you will have put system in place to filter out the worse of the bunch and the new 20% will be better than your last 20! I have learned from experience there absolutely nothing wrong with firing crappy customers.

Bob K, I can not comment about the things you are learning from ATI however coming from the perspective of someone who has taken control of their automotive management and shop owner education into their own hands as well as the help of a consultation company coach I would like to pose to you the question of really looking at the factors as to why you are feeling the negative effects of Down business. If you are up one month and down the other you have to look into your marketing efforts both new customer and CRM. when speaking about profitability with higher ARO and a deceased car count well that is a natural occurrence. You have a finite amount of labor hours to sell so by nature if you are selling more hours per car you will have to have a decrease in car count since those sold hours are concentrated on a smaller number of cars opposed to being spread out. Also losing customers due to a price increase, that's a tricky one. In my experience I have increased prices dramatically and not felt any detrimental effects. You have #1 match the value to your price. You have to make it worth it for your customers to be paying a higher price. Also the ones you lose due to price increases may no longer fit in your mould as an ideal customer any longer. Price and money are a matter of perception. The great majority if your clientele have money to spend. I often say this to my own staff, you can spend $5 and feel like you got ripped off or spend $5000 and feel great like you got your money's worth. It all comes down to a matter of perception. The ultimate goal is to make your customers perceive that they are getting tremendous value from their purchase/investment with you. That is the golden answer.

If you don't have an incentive based system like flat rate its just basically hoping what kind of mood they are in when they start the day.

Joe, maybe to help the sales process you should document all the rust cars you see with high quality pictures. This way you can put together a bit of a visual demo for your customers. A nice way would be to put together a web page illustrating the damage rust can do and what the service can really do for their vehicle. I'm sure you could put it together in a matter of an hour if you had the pictures. Also if you use tablets as a visual aid, your SA's could easily click over to your webpage and show the dangers of rust then the features and benefits of the service.

I love it!!!!

If business keeps up like this what I would like to try is to have 5 lifts booked out with 1 lift left for the emergency situations that happen every day, LOFs, any type of quick check that is needed. Also try to assign an experienced general service technician to that sort of work. That would allow us to accommodate the needed reserve time for every day. We generally do not have any type of quick service work so most likely it would be a prelude to the vehicle being passed along to one of the main techs. It will just allow us to intake the cars and ease the minds of the customers that want their vehicle "looked at" right away. I may use my drive on alignment lift for that if alignment business doesn't pick up. Not to sure yet but I'm in the same boat alfred. I had the fact that I am turning some folks away or at least perceived to be. I also need a good service advisor lol

Same issue

Just dealt with a super a-hole representative from VehicleOne. They have 3-5 different names AllianceWarranty, Universal Warranty. SHADY! I can't stand these damn companies!

thanks for sharing!

I sent out 2 campaigns with mudlick recently. I have seen some response, less than 10 so far out of two 3,000 mailers however a few of those customers ended up being $1000+ ROs. I average high ROs so if I can convert 2-3 per mailer as regular customers I've made money. I am going to give it a real effort and see what I can get out of it. Also for me I use it for brand awareness purposes. I want to be in front of as many people as possible to the point where they may think of me and google my shop when they need service which will then bring them to all of our reviews and internet marketing pieces.

They don't benefit. What gets me is when/if the vehicle goes to the dealer and they do the job with no out of pocket to the customer just to make us look bad.

I agree. I don't know how they manage to squeeze this out of those extended warranty companies

Hey guys as well know technical training is a necessity to stay relevant in our industry. Who and where do you guys find training classes for your techs?

I frequent WorldPac's class offers as I focus on German vehicles. Lets start a resource thread.

I am having a very hard time trying to find the right candidate for a Service Advisor position.

What boggles my mind is years back I remember a bunch of my friends from high school and college scrambling around to get entry level positions in the work force with their 4 year college degree. Most of these jobs started out at 35-50k at best and topped out at 70-80k with 6-10 years in at least. I am over here trying to offer someone potentially a 50-100k+ position with competitive benefits that requires NO education only the right aptitude, attitude and ethics and I can't seem to find anyone better than ex-pep boy customer service reps with awful grammar errors on their resumes.