mspecperformance

I can only comment on WP training. I ran through their Service Advisor Class years ago and it was great. It gave me a lot of insight on something I had no idea about. Even a seasoned service advisor/owner can get a lot of out refreshing on the material. IMO one of the best parts is the whole workshop/class is not meant to be a giant sales pitch on further services. I would love to go to some of their other offers however none ever seem to be in my area.

Joe, would you have any recommendations for a shop management course for shop owners. Most I see are 1 day workshops designed to get you to sign up for coaching which I don't think a lot of business are willing to do or can afford. WorldPac was putting on some nice classes for service advisors that touched some of those subjects. I rather liked the WP classes since there is not pitch for more sales.

I have experienced issues similar to this. While the customer may agree and "understand" that you did not diagnose the car they still end up leaving bitter due to their car not being fixed like it was your fault or it could have been avoided if they brought their vehicle to another shop.

Many times due to what parts the customer may or may not have brought can slow work flow down to a crawl. Then explaining the customer that you need to order this additional part becomes a chore because you have already established the "you can bring your own parts" and the customer will not want to pay your parts mark up.

Now that we are getting very busy I am sticking more and more to the rules. Biggest rule I am trying to follow is NO OUTSIDE PARTS. Just got off the the phone with a phone shopper, asked for a price on some stuff installed and then when told he couldn't bring his own parts I got a swift, "o, ok thanks." Definitely not sweating it but just wondering how many of you guys out there allow customer provided parts? For those who don't, how many of these do you turn away?

I've read E-Myth before and it is great. Looking for something either industry specific OR along the lines of E-Myth. I will read E-Myth again as well. thanks for the suggestion guys please keep them coming.

Been looking to get into some sort of class/seminar that would be helpful is getting me back to center. I feela bit clouded about the direction of the business and where I want to take it. Anyone have any recommendations on Business organization/management books? I am also interested in any business motivational books anyone has found particularly helpful.

I wish running a shop would be as simple as scheduling patients at a family physicians office.

To be honest I am personally a lot more afraid of pushing the buttons of women. I find that once they feel like you are insincere or trying to take advantage of them they go beast mode LOL. Its a lot easier to deal with men because we are more cut and dry. The other side is I get a lot of women that overly show off their knowledge of cars or go out of their way to make it known, "Hey I'm not stupid buddy don't take advantage of me!" The flip side is these types it is very hard to build trust with and a lot of them seem to get outside counsel (father, friend, brother,boyfriend etc) on if we are ripping them off or not. So I guess I am trying to say I think I am more careful with my words and estimates with women!

Wow sounds terrible Jeff! I think your more of a product of your area unfortunately. For the kind of pay you were receiving I should have probably shipped you up here to work for me!

I have taken deposits and cars and have had people disappear on me many many times.

Thanks Heather. I have tried the disclosure portion of the bill and have had customers sign and verbally agree to my term however they still leave sour OR try to not pay the bill because "their car isn't fixed." This can be very frustrating... almost as frustrating as customers who try to negotiate the bill after they have authorized all repairs and repairs have been completed.

ANYONE??

Is anyone here familiar with Mudstock by Mudlick Mail? It is a 3 day training event that seems rather interesting. http://mudstock.mudlickmail.com/ I went through the agenda and a lot of the seminars appeal to me. I've been looking into some training/seminars to kind of get my motivation and organization skills back. My shop has seen an upswing in business however I think I've been personally lacking a lot of concentration lately. Anyone have any thoughts or experience with this event? I believe this i the 4th or 5th year they are doing this.

Wanted to get your take on this... We seem to get a lot of decently tough diagnostic work. This ranges from Engine issues, electrical, unknown collision damage etc. We are more than capable of finding out most issues however with diagnostics there never is a flat rate. As we know, people HATE HATE HATE buying something that isn't tangible. Repairs alone are something they can't necessarily feel or touch. Diagnostics is a step lower on the ladder where us as repair shops are not repairing anything, just finding out what the problem is. We find sometimes it takes us hours maybe days to track down a problem. If we actually charged true time spent on a vehicle sometimes ROs can come out to the thousands. How do you go about selling and billing this? I've had customers authorize block times (3-5 hours of diag time) with mixed results. If we still don't find the problem within that time no matter what they agree to they are down right pissed off about paying anything even after being fully aware that there is no guarantee. Maybe they were the wrong type of customer in the first place I don't know. I find it becomes more of a burden than good business to work on these vehicles. Are these hard diag problems worth just passing along? How do you go about doing that without coming across to the customer like you don't know what your doing? I contemplate every day how I can just run a suspension/alignment/brake shop and get consistent business LOL. That would be heaven sent!

Is it possible you are lacking in inspecting for other/future repairs OR not selling them properly? I have my share of cheap customers however I also have customers that are conscious of driving safe and reliable. These are the customers you need to maximize on. You should try to sell customers on anything they NEED. I use to have this mentality that if I recommend items for repairs to my customers they would think I'm a crook however with the right approach you should be able to earn their trust and have them receptive to your recommendations. Hell everyone need windshield wipers, sell all your customers wipers! Its a start.

Management is key. A well managed shop/business whether its 1 man or 20 man operation means everything. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I'm a mess! lol

Any SB book will tell you that it will take 18-24 months before you can see real results. 6 months is too small of a sample. Believe in yourself and have a positive attitude. You seem to be on top of everything else. Good luck.

I had a bad experience with Demand Force a few years ago. The biggest complaint is their customer service. They will work like mad to sign you up, show you a really sunny picture of what they can do for you and how much they care about your business however once you have a legitimate complaint or gripe, they will shuffle you between person to person. I got so fed up I dropped them after 2 months. Personally I'd look elsewhere. We are using Kukui with decent results.

Are you flexible on your pricing? Are you willing to negotiate? If I pay cash can you do better? Oh... I was referred to by So and so... You know uhhh... I forgot his name... We've all heard it and I am just about sick of it. I have a professional website, courteous and profession manner in which we greet customers, high reputation with a niche market (German cars). What in god's green earth screams I will give you a discount???? How do you yall deal with this ? I don't receive these types too often but I had a series of them today compounded with other aggravation and I just had about enough.

Thanks for the reply Joe. I definitely feel like I could have done things a little differently however unless we are completely free of appointments, my standard procedure is to book someone for an appointment. Of course we rush emergencies into the shop as soon as a free slot opens however this seemed to be a customer that wanted it done right away without any exceptions and didn't want to pay a diag fee. Even if I had the time for such a customer, do you think it would be wise to spend time trying to educate them on how we do business or should be they just be thrown back into the ocean.

I've had a rough morning so far so maybe that may have factored into how I handled this customer... Customer calls in asks us to bring the car it for an "estimate" for a steering issue. He told me it is not fluid level and it is not the pump. I explained to the customer that we do work by appointment as we are swamped most of the time and our next appointment would be Friday or next week. Secondly we do not give out free estimates. We diagnose and inspect vehicles and depending on the time and operation we have to put into them there would be a fee attached to that. Over the phone it sounded like both stipulations (appointment and no free estimates) kind of turned him off. His response was "I'll give you a call back if I don't find somewhere else to fix my problem I need to get this done soon." The tone and the explanation as to why he didn't want to set up an appointment pointed towards he was a bit put off that we could not accommodate him ASAP and that we do have a fee for diag. I suppose I could have explained we do give free estimates however if the vehicle needs diagnostic work or tests to discover what the true problem is then we charge a fee. I could have also a been a bit nicer, I was a little shorter than I am normally. Something about this guy however made me think he was going to be somewhat of a problem (negotiate on prices, want to bring his own parts, annoying about completing repairs etc). The fact is is that we are very busy (thankfully) and if I take on more than I can handle then quality and completion times on all jobs will suffer. I also however remember the days of never wanting to turn away business and bending over backwards to do whatever my customers wanted because I was worried about not having the business. I do believe it is important for us as shop owners/manager to intake as much of our ideal target customer and to remove the ones that don't fit our target. Do you guys think I should have tried harder to convert that caller or took a softer approach?

He also claimed due to his tech friend telling him we must have done something when we scanned the car. LOL

yes absolutely. The whole time this yoyo is telling me his friend told him whatever I was thinking, "well then why didnt he fix your problem in the first place." I will most certainly not take responsibility for something we didn't cause. There is absolutely no connection between the air bag light (and seat belt receptacle) and the mirror. The only thing like someone mentioned above is that there were different people (my techs) sitting in his seat. Shit happens. We didn't knowingly or our negligence cause any issues to this guys car. I tell all my customers the same thing, we run off of a trust basis. If you want to question the work we did no problem. I am very honest when it comes to every operation we do on a customers vehicle. Hell I had to eat a 3k head job not too long ago because we accidently folded a part of the headgasket. We don' run away from responsibility but.... If after I explain exactly how we did not cause the issue and your response is, "I don't know..." insinuated that we still had something to do with your car's problem I have to walk away from it.

We have all been there and appealing to the logical side to these dummys its almost impossible. Most recently had a customer come in with a non functioning passenger side mirror on his 2006 530i. After about an hour worth of diag work which was mostly removing the door panel to access the mirror and repairing some shotty wiring work the own customer did to remedy his non functioning mirror the car left without the problem being solved. Made an appointment for the customer to bring the vehicle back for more diag work. One of those customers thats not happy to drop any money for diag and seemed to own a car he can't afford. Long story short, he drives back 5 minutes later with an Air Bag Light and seatbelt light that won't clear. Few days later calls me up says he consulted with a few "BMW dealer" techs and they told him it must have been something we did when we hooked up out scanner... Right. I tried every which way to explain to him that there is no possible way we could have done that and it could have possibly been a coincidence especially with BMWs and seat occupancy sensors going bad all the time. Of course he wanted to put on the blame on us. How do you guys normally deal with these types of situations? I can't stand being blamed for things that we didn't do and our reputation is highly important to me. Dealing with stupid people really gives me a headache.