mspecperformance

Errrrrrr..... why would it be illegal??? You can list anything you want for however much you want (for the most part). It must be really tough living life being so ignorant...

Technology moves so quickly nowadays that subscription based software is a much nore visble option. Thats just my opinion.

That would only make sense if say your loss of 30k in sales shows up as increases in business in the subsequent months.

In my experience someone who is either not organized enough to set an comfortable appt for an oil service or considers auto service as commodity will just as easily take your recs and go to another shop when its convenient for them. My personal experience is that my percentage if closing sales decreases any time a customer takes their car for later service.

20 Groups train through comparison of policy and procedures, shop layouts, and of course numbers. As far as I know every 20 group works off a monthly financial composite of all the group members. The facilitator of the group whom is essentially the "coach" sets certain benchmarks such as Labor Profit Margin, Parts Profit Margin, Hours Per RO, etc and group members get to compare and contrast how they are doing against the benchmarks and also against group members. There are usually either a teleconference once month and also meetings 2-3 times a year.

BTW this is as far as I know with the research i have done. I have never been apart of any 20 groups.

mspec,

I've thought about a situation like yours, but I couldn't think of a feasible way to make it work.

When it comes down to it, they're using your power, your lifts, your compressor, etc etc.

It might not add up to much, but what if a lift or the compressor breaks while they are using it on their time?

What if it was somehow due to their negligence? Would they pay to fix it?

 

Plus, I felt that a bigger issue was insurance. If they are doing side work and get injured or killed, would your insurance cover it?

If not, you could be personally liable for their injury/death. Especially if they are working alone after everyone leaves.

 

Another thing shop related where the risk outweigh the rewards (there's actually no rewards for this, except employee goodwill I suppose)

I can certainly see your point and it is absolutely valid. Unfortunately its not something I am wiling to pull from my techs at this time personally. I wouldn't advise anyone to allow side work to go on for their own shop though.

there are several companies that have "20 groups". The ones i have looked into specifically were RLO and Elite. RLO calls their group offers the Bottomline Impact Group. Elite has a 20 group called Pro Service. Both are excellent companies. Most consulting and coaching companies offer some sort of 20 group. There is a screening process involved and they may recommend a coaching program before the 20 group.

Another suggestion is maybe you should join a 20 group? For the more mature shop a 20 group seems like a great thing to be apart of. If you are beyond the basics then being with a group of like minded shop owners looking to improve their business may just be the ticket

message me if you want some first hand experience from an Elite coaching client

Funny thing that happened today. Had a car drop off yesterday hit a pot hole had a coolant leak. 2009 328xi. Found that the leak was coming from the waterpump. After giving the customer a price he said he wants to go through his insurance for road hazard. Today I get a call from Geico asking the vehicle to be released to another shop. At this point I am a bit confused so I call the customer up. Customer said he had a discussion with his wife and his wife wanted to bring the car to BMW. Oddly enough I think his wife mystery shopped me the day before asking what the difference was between the dealer and my shop. I went through the list of things that differentiates us from customer service, personal attention, ability to speak to the technician, longer warranty, same training, dealer level equipment etc etc. Gave her my best pitch which works 99% of the time to get "Wow, I feel really comfortable bringing my car to you." This time though she seemed super skeptical and I got responses like, "well I dont really care to speak to the technician" and odd responses like that. At the end of the 10 minute conversation she says, "well I'll have to think about it." Even after I mentioned our reputation and reviews she said, "oh yeah you do have great reviews online." So then??????????????????????

I tried to ask questions to understand why they chose to bring the car to the dealership. The basic response I got was, "well if insurance is going to cover it my wife feels more comfortable bring our car to the dealer." The only thing that was going through my head was, "Why?!?!?!?!?!!?!?" I may be looking to much into this although I guess my personality forces me to never settle for anything less than 100%. This is the first time i lost a customer to the dealership in 9 years after their car was already at my shop. Gets me thinking what else do I need to do to not have this happen again in the future. There will always be illogical strange people out there I can accept that. Still sucks though!

For shizzles and giggles I went and yelped all the BMW dealerships around and none were above a 2.5 star review. Brand has a strong pull on some people.

I allow my techs to work on side jobs at my shop. It is somewhat of a perk of employment. We work on German Cars so almost all of the vehicles are non german cars and as bstewart said these are the bottom barrel customers or friend of the techs. I know exactly what he charges as he asks me what is fair LOL and he knows as well as I do that the amount he charges to do work he could never ever open his own shop.

I will say that everyone's situation is different HOWEVER if I were open another shop from scratch I would institute a policy of no side work at the shop. Personal vehicles and family members I can deal with.

Yelp is more powerful than word of mouth in urban areas. Think about it ... You have a high density of people that don't really talk to each other. Additionally, many of them are new to the area and did not grow up with "that garage my parents have always gone to." Thus, they head to the Internet to find the best shops in their area.

 

I would say over 90% of our customers either find us on yelp or check out our yelp reviews before coming in.

 

In regards to yelp being flawed, I disagree. Yelp either keeps your review or filters your review based on the following:

-- how many reviews have you left? Just one? Filtered.

-- how old is your yelp account? Just made? Filtered.

-- how many yelp friends do you have To? None? Filtered.

-- is your yelp account linked to your Facebook account? No? Filtered.

...etc

 

Notice I did not mention "did you leave a positive or negative review." To yelp, it's irrelevant. All yelp wants to know is whether or not you are a legit user or just someone creating an account to leave one review and the moving on.

 

Our shop has 50+ reviews. 9 of them have been filtered. Of the nine, there is no correspondence to their review rating. Rather, all were new accounts with only one review left.

 

I have actually seen yelp review move from our filtered reviews to our unfiltered front page reviews once a yelp user starts using yelp more and leaving more reviews.

Not always true. If you look at my reviews, I have several 1 star no picture profiles on my unfiltered reviews page. Yelps algorithms are entirely flawed.

I looked at a competitors yelp page and there is a review from user, "Fuck Y." with a good amount of inappropriate language and slander used. 1 review no profile picture. Review has been up going on 4 months. I know for a fact that bad language is against the users agreement as I have had posts removed for that in the past. Its a wonder why Yelp's filters don't catch things such as this.

Mike it should be noted that the static cling printer that is the more expensive option cannot print out key tags. Unfortunately this was something I found out months later when I got around to asking about how to print key tags. Still love the product, just a bit bummed I was never told this before choosing the static cling GoDex printer

KMS, I agree Yelp is flawed and certainly if I could avoid it I would. Unfortunately we don't make the rules when it comes to review sites, customers do. Yelp is not going away and it grows more and more every day. Best approach is a proactive one. Try your best to get great reviews and claim your biz listing so you can respond to the negative ones.

i have found the key to successfully reducing the crazy sociopaths is to never enter into business with them. I try my best to dissuade the nutty ones to even bring their cars to the shop.

I generally use whatever is OE. I have spoken to another shop friend who runs a general repair and he gets GREAT margins on some aftermarket brand pads with no complaints. I really wish I could go that route but I feel that my reputation wouldn't withstand a customer complaining about some aftermarket no name brand pad even if they quality.

It is recommended that your yelp reviewers have complete profile and show a track record of reviewing in yelp. Yeah its convoluted BS i know but those are the rules of the game.

We also condition customers to expect discounts, rewards etc. It is always better when they aren't expecting something and get something from you. Try a thank you card and a pack of brownies. There is a service I am looking into SendOutCard.com that has a lot of promise. I have a lot of high ticket customers and sending them a customized card with a little gift like brownies or cookies is a great way to say thanks without conditioning the customer in expecting a discount of some sort. Just my 2c on that.

The problem is is that an elaborate story teller with a vendetta against a business can have multiple accounts or friends accounts and write all kinds of made up nonesense. With the amount of potential damage yelp can do, they should have an investigative team so that they can request documents, receipts, invoices even showing the customer actually frequented the business.

Also for those who have a gripe with Yelp, I also agree with you. Many times negative reviews are unjustly posted whilst positive reviews may be filtered. You can however flag negative reviews however after they are reviewed Yelp may allow them to stay on your page. It is unfortunate and one of the very reasons why I try my very best to keep all my customers happy, even the ones I don't want!

Yelp is a tricky subject and one I know we have brought up before Joe. Yelp has a tremendous impact in areas of high population and of course high usage. Years ago Yelp was not popular on the east coast as it is on the West Coast. Using restaurants as an example, I have noticed that on the west coast it is not uncommon for an establishment to have 2000-3000 reviews whilst even the most popular restaurants here in NYC may only have a few hundred. That being said even here in NYC I have had a lot of feedback from customers stating that they have found us on yelp. Whether that was there starting point to where they saw us is unknown but what is known is that my good reviews certainly helped in convincing that customer to opt in. I have tracking phone numbers on my yelp page along with my google, adwords and facebook page. Out of 413 Leads in the last 3 months that were tracked through one of my online tracking phone numbers, 134 were from Yelp.

Yelp in less population dense areas and also area where yelp hasn't caught on yet is a different story. I do however feel that for the owners out there who don't see negative yelp reviews affecting your business you may be looking at things the wrong way. Think about all the customers that you MAY NOT be getting due to some bad reviews. These are the folks that you never hear from. It doesn't matter if you have a 500k shop or a 2 mil shop we all want more customers and new customers.

I am convinced Yelp is an important and integral part of my online reputation and marketing. I am however on the fence about yelp advertising and how effective it is.

paying techs minimum wage will do it for both high turn over and lower overhead. I bet they keep everyone on part time as well.

I need to start offering Loaners. Then there is absolutely no reason to go to the dealer!

I believe that packaging the rotation of tires with other services is not a bad way to go. For instance, selling a tire protection package when selling tires would include free tire rotations. It will be unlikely in the instance that the customers comes back for just a tire rotation. Also if you are performing some work for the customer already and part of your process is to provide a thorough complimentary safety inspection you can always add a complimentary tire rotation as an added value. The small things you can do can always add value to your services and help differentiate your business from others. And of course if you are paying flat rate, always pay your technician. A good technician will be highly motivated to perform thorough inspections which will help your advisors upsell = much more money that you "lose" on a free tire rotation.

I also explain to the customer that we always properly torque every wheel which the industry as a whole doesn't seem to do. They know what I mean right away and appreciate we go the extra mile to perform the right job.

Lots of battery problems and I guess people having a hard time getting around on top of all their car problems they normally neglect lol