ATLAuto

The ability to measure how many pounds you have pulled out of the system is a powerful diagnostic tool. This will tell you if the system was overcharged/undercharged or maybe even charged perfectly and you've got a completely different issue. I do not believe that mobile tool shows that information ... but maybe you could have a scale to weigh the tank on? Some of the mobile mechanics that I know in Atlanta service a particular group of office buildings and have made deals with mechanics in the area to use their equipment and/or sub-contract to completely them for stuff requiring the equipment. This would allow you to keep your customers, still make a little cash, and not have to invest all that money on the big equipment.

Great trick ... honestly cannot believe I did not think of this. This is much easier than dying the system and looking for leaks with those stupid UV alien glasses. Thanks for posting.

Wow, what a coincidence. I clicked on this forum to ask if anyone has used the Drewtech CarDAQ yet (http://www.drewtech.com/products/cardaqplus.html). I just spent an hour on the phone with their salesperson. Very technical and knowledgeable fellow. My understanding is that the CarDAQ will interface with every J2535 vehicle (ie almost every vehicle made since 2004) for $1500. However, that just gets you connected. You still need software for it. The program that comes with CarDAQ provides links to all the OEM's allowing you to buy anything from a 1 hour to a 1 year pass to use the OEM software (most is web-based). Sounded pretty good to me. However, I am skeptical with salespeople, and this sounded a bit too good to be true. Anyone used this tool yet?

I probably did not explain that statement very well. My apologies. For auto shop owner material, this forum is the best I have found, hands down. The fact that I can come on here and ask a random question like "have any of you guys tried adding an express oil change lane to your shop?" and get some answers is priceless. With that said, I have not used this forum much for diagnostic questions. I usually use IATN for all those really tough one as 1000's of techs view that site every single day. Not saying that Auto Shop Owner cannot answer these same questions, no one has really used this piece of the forums yet. Maybe it's time to start, though?? I've had a check engine light on in my VW diesel for the past 12 years. Nobody on IATN could solve it. Dealership says "new ECM required." I've spent 30+ hours on it. Maybe I should throw that one out for the group.

What sort of areas did you cover at the clinics? I have had several female customers ask for us to do one of these. Something along the lines of, "I'd really like to know how to change my own oil." I'm guessing you keep them simple along those lines rather than, "Alright. Day One!! This is how you rebuild an automatic transmission!"

Thanks, Joe. Just ordered this off Amazon ($1.99 !!). To add to your advice and franchise comment ... it's all about setting up systems and expectations. The reason that franchises and chains have taken off so well is that they have fine-tuned systems in place on how to do EVERYTHING. How to greet customers, how to answer the phone, how to move the work order through the system, how to sell additional work, etc etc etc. One thing you may have noticed about franchises is that they rarely hire the best. Typically, they hire the mediocre. Not the best, not the worst. Just your average employee. And they make a TON of money this way. Why? Simply put, franchises have developed systems. They have expectations for their employees. They are not "winging it" every single time. Rather, they know their process and the follow it, day in and day out. This means that an owner can have 15 different franchises and only spend 10 minutes a month in each one of them. They run themselves. I know a franchise owner with 15 different oil change shops that he calls his "mini oil wells." Whether he is awake or asleep, these little "oil wells" are always pumping money. His store managers know what he expects of them, and he gives them the freedom to do it. I'll end this monologue with an example. I worked as a tech under the manager of a franchise who would go on vacations every so often. Every time he left, the front counter sales team would fall apart. The shop would get dirty. Techs would lose motivation. etc. etc. You've experienced it. Every time he came back from vacation and saw it all, he would say, without fail, "Man!! This place just falls apart without me!!" And I would always reply to him, "The mark of a good leader is how things run when you are not present." He didn't like that much ...

This is more of a statement of our entire nation, rather than just our industry. I'm 30 years old. I've grown up working on everything I can get my hands on ... house projects, electrical wiring, welding,car work, anything. This used to be normal for guys in our nation. Just about every 50-60 year old that I know does all this work himself. They build their own houses , do their own plumbing, and maintain their own engines. Not so much in my peer group of 30 year olds ... I know one or two that might tinker a bit with their engines or do some basic home maintenance ... but that is very much the minority. We've put white collar jobs on a pedestal and demonized anything involving dirt and grime. It's terrible for our nation ... but, I guess, great for our industry. Mike Rowe (from Dirty Jobs and Ford F150 commercials) said it best in front of the US Congress. "America has a dysfunctional relationship with work." (click to watch the Youtube video ... he's got a great perspective)

Good thoughts. I need to change my mindset from seeing these tool trucks as an over-priced nuisance to seeing them as an informal networking tool across multiple shops. Thanks for the idea.

I've been to ATI's seminar. It was a fairly decent afternoon. Covered the following: How to setup a good webpage, Google Plus Page, Facebook Page, Yelp Page, etc etc. How to price parts markup correctly How to breakdown your business' P&L sheet How to add a Shop Supplies charge to all your PO's Sales pitch at the end followed by them visiting each shop individually over the next few days. I'm subscribed to their newsletters by email ... great information for free. The seminar was also free and in my city, so I just drove over there for the 4hr presentation.

Weighit, could give a bit more practical advice on how to go about doing this? I know of several shops in our city with great techs. I know I could offer them a better total compensation package. However, I'm not sure how to go about approaching them. Nobody knows them directly, so I have no connections to them. I've heard of owners just strolling into competitors' bays and talking with the techs, but I'm pretty hesitant to start doing that....

In addition to your business plan, take some time to review your FAMILY'S budget. When you are starting a family business and relying on that business to put food on your table, your business finances and your personal finances will get very interwoven. I do not mean formally interwoven ... you're going to have separate checking accounts. But in reality, what impacts your family financially will impact your business financially. Practically, this means shedding every unnecessary expense you have before you start this business. Your family finances should be lean-and-mean going in. Did you just buy a new boat with $600/mo payments? Sell it. Are you living in an expensive condo downtown? Move out to somewhere a bit too small. Are you spending $500/mo on restaurants? Time to start eating beans and rice. If you can get your family's finances in order, your business finances will follow suit. I can speak from experience on this. Three years prior to starting our shop, my wife and I did a Dave Ramsey course with our church. We then lived off 12% of our combined incomes for the next three years. When we walked into the banks with our business plan and finances in order, all six banks we visited were begging to give us very sizable loans.

(dug this one out of the archives, since it's one of the few areas I can give advice on.) When choosing a location, you have two options: Cheap rent, low visibility, relies on marketing High rent, high visibility, markets itself In essence, you can save money by being off the beaten path, but you will spend that money again on all the marketing you have to do to get customers into your shop. Or, you can spend extra money to get on a busy road, maybe on a lighted corner, and then spend a lot less on marketing, because people see you every time they drive to the grocery store. Or do both ... great location + great marketing. Win-win. In choosing a location, I did a MAJOR study of our demographics. I went to Staples and printed out a 6'x6' map of our entire city and glued it to our kitchen wall. I then stuck in red pin in that map for every repair shop in the whole city. I then stuck a green pin in the map for every retail hub (grocery stores, Wal-Marts, shopping centers, etc.) This allowed me to see a high level view of which neighborhoods were lacking in repair. I identified six locations in the city. Then, I got in the car and started driving every road in these areas. Came up with about FORTY possible shop locations. Started making offers at the top and got a bite on the second one. If you find a GOOD real estate agent, he might do some of the above (COSTAR software will do a lot of that), but most of the legwork will be on your own time.

I was just speaking with my banker the other day, and he made the following statement, "Yeah, I don't go to you guys for oil changes, since I know that it will take too long. Rather, I save the big stuff for you and go to Jiffy Lube where I can get in and out in 10 minutes." This got me thinking a bit ... a ton of customers do this. We see them in our shops all the time with competitor's stickers on their windows and invoices in their glove boxes. They use us for the tough stuff but give the easy (and profitable!) work to the chain stores. Why? Convenience. Look at what most of these oil change shops do ... you drive in, stay in your car, they do the work and bring a credit card terminal to your window, and you are out of there in 10 minutes. Look at what we do ... they park, come in, talk to the service adviser, take a seat, wait .... wait some more ... wait some more. Maybe, they will be out of there in 30 minutes, but that's pretty optimistic. Many will be waiting there 45 minutes to an hour. This got me thinking ... could I setup a couple bays in the shop to do just this? Has anyone in here had any luck with setting up some express lanes on the side of their shop? ...or even dug a pit underneath a few bays to allow the customer to stay in their vehicle? Any thoughts on getting this work back into our shop would be much appreciated.

We follow this procedure: Thread the nuts / bolts a few turns by hand. Run them down with a 55 ft lb impact torque stick. Lower the vehicle to just barely touching. Find the torque specs printed on the Work Order (a lot of shop software will do this automatically, otherwise the service advisers can add it manually). Finish torquing with a calibrated torque wrench. Chalk. Sign the blank in the PO where it says that the wheels were torqued. This is the procedure that all Firestone shops in the world follow. I liked it when I saw it.

My first thought on this was axles and/or the torque converter lockup. Both can cause this issue. Plymouth has a ton of TSB's out for this issue (example: 18-05-94 SHUDDER DURING TORQUE CONV EMCC OPERATION -41TE/42LE). Worn out axle ends will cause this as well. Apparently the remanufactured axles don't get new inner tripods, making the issue continue even after replacement. This is a bit of an odd forum to post this question in. Do you have access to IATN ($15/month) or Identifix ($130/month)? Both of these services are absolute lifesavers. IATN is a forum tool for asking those really complex questions. Identifix is a massive database of searchable fixes with numerical likelihoods that your issue will be solved by a certain fix. They are worth every penny.

Agreed. Paying Yelp only places your business at the top of the Yelp search results page. It does nothing for the reviews. Here's the deal with the "hidden" reviews ... all review websites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Kudzu, Angie's List, etc etc etc) are faced with the same issue - fake reviews. Businesses are leaving fake reviews to harm their competitors. Consulting companies are leaving fake reviews to boost up their clients. On and on and on. The review websites have started to crack down on this by hiding all reviews that are not from "actual, verified members." What is an "actual, verified member?" Well, it varies site, but for Yelp specifically, it is a member that: Has left reviews over a long timespan Has left a bunch of positive and negative reviews Has reviewed businesses in multiple industries Has a bunch of Yelp friends Has participated in Yelp discussion boards Needless to say, your average reviewer hasn't done any of that. That is why Newmansauto is asking EVERYBODY to leave reviews with the hope that maybe 5% of those folks will fit Yelp's stringent profile.

These stories always get me laughing! As an FYI ... the "Reset Procedure" quick click is one of the main reasons that I like using Identifix (picture below)

Great advice on the package deals and rewarding consistent customers. Thank you again for hosting this seminar, and please keep us posted on upcoming ones.

I currently drive a 50mpg TDI, which I do love and will keep for a few hundred more thousand. This video is slighty conspiracy-theory, slightly true. I worked for the Ford diesel design team for a few months back in 2005, when they were trying to put a diesel in the F150. That would have been sweet. Anyway, a few things I remember from the program that were actually facts: 1. Americans have historically demanded big cars. Ford and GM's marketing teams have well-established this. There are brief periods where small cars are the rage, but this is a very fickle need, based entirely on a spike in gas prices. 2. California sets the nation's emission standards. Because so many cars are sold there, the auto-industry simply develops all the cars in all states to this standard. 3. There are 3 main types of emissions: Nitrous Oxides (NOx), Hydrocarbons (HC), and Carbon Monoxide. As NOx is a main contributor to smog, California hit NOx very hard in 2009, reducing the allowable NOx PPM by 10x. Naturally, this killed the small-engine diesel industry, since diesels create a ton of NOx. Europe did not make these same policies. Rather, they have hit hard on HC's, which are produced more from unleaded engines. Thus, directing US policy away from diesels and EU policy toward diesels. 4. It is possible to continue making diesels with very low emissions through the use of NOx traps (a cat for NOx, basically) or through Urea injection (spraying ammonia into the exhaust stream), but they are quite expensive ... $2-3k additional equipment on a vehicle that already has low demand in America. Not likely. Overall, conspiracy or not, I am thankful that our country doesn't look like this yet (album: http://imgur.com/a/CnXGL):

Joe ... GREAT webinar with Elite on Tuesday. Thank you for taking the time to do it. During the webinar, you got on the topic of Loyalty Programs. Right when it started getting good, the audio dropped out to near incoherence. It was probably on my end, as I was driving through rural Indiana at the time and listening in on a weak signal. Regardless, if you wouldn't mind, could you recap a few of your thoughts on what works and what doesn't work on Loyalty Programs?

I'm still making this decision myself. I did happen to stumble across a great side-by-side comparison site which looks at 30+ repair shop software packages and lists the capabilities of each. http://www.autoinc.org/archives/2011/july2011/cover.htm Scroll to the bottom and choose each from the drop down list.

I'm in the process of opening a shop up right now. In preparing for opening, I decided that I had better get ASE certified myself if I am going to require techs to be certified. So, I went out and took all 8 ASE tests at a Prometric Center and passed all but the 2 transmission tests. Through this, I came to understand what ASE tests entail. They are a mixture of "book knowledge" and "troubleshooting / practical knowledge." If a tech cannot pass one of the tests, he will typically blame it on the fact that he doesn't have all this "book knowledge." Fair enough. None of us can memorize it all, especially now that AllData and Identifix have it readily available. However, in the ASE tests that I took, only 5-10% of the questions relied on memorized information, so not a very valid excuse with the 70% to pass criteria. The other 90-95% of the questions involved "troubleshooting / practical knowledge." This is where I have a difficult time sympathizing with any tech not able or willing to pass an ASE test. Techs deal with troubleshooting situations ALL DAY LONG. These ASE questions are nothing but the paper version of their daily job. Additionally, the questions are simplified, idealized, and put in the most basic format possible. A tech could only DREAM of getting a vehicle in their bay with such a straight-forward issue. A final excuse would be the cost of the study materials and the tests. Study materials ran me around $100 for all 8. The tests ran another $300 for all 8 (I may be a bit off on this). In total, that's $400 to become a "Certified Master Technician." $400. Let's put that cost in perspective. In any other industry, certification is going to costs thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to complete. Our industry? On the job training and a few hundred bucks to take the tests. I'm not saying don't reimburse techs for this cost. I will certainly be doing that. However, just put it in perspective. In short, I'm going to agree on this one. Techs should come in the door with ASE or be moving toward it.

I'm sure Sandy gave a few shops in the NE pleeeeenty of business ... you guys shouldn't be suffering that badly!

I try to read as much as I can as well. Most of what I read could be classified as "generic leadership" material. Any recommendations on material specifically for shop owners?

Also interested in selling "intake cleaning" as a maintenance service. Since vehicles have started running EGR's, I have seen intakes becoming constricted, drastically hurting engine performance. This is not in any service interval literature that I have seen, so it makes for a tougher sell.