hancock18

Firstly, a truly awesome article, Joe, and just the kind of material that we find pertinent to our own situation. Looking forward to many more and thank you so much for sharing your own hard earned knowledge, experience and skills. We admire you for your dedication to not only the growth of the industry, but also, that the next generation taking on this unique, profitable, yet extremely difficult industry, have the tools and mentoring to survive and thrive well into the future. Secondly, I absolutely love R+W. It is my favorite read. We (the entire family, all in this crazy business) read it from cover to cover and keep the back issues for reference. If only there were a publication like it dedicated to shop owners and managers back when my husband and I went from working in, to managing and owning the family business in 1982. Though there had already been 52 years of experience before us, from his grandfather and father,by then the economy and demographics had already started to change. Around 2005, when we finally decided to expanded,once again we found ourselves facing a new economic climate. With the opening of our second store, we finally had access to the information and knowledge from people who truly knew and understood this business. In late 2008 the new shop opened for business and the articles from R+W and ASO have made a real difference toward success and moving on to the next goal for another store. So, thanks again to Joe and to all the people here who make access to knowledge, information and resources possible!

I imagine many of us have gotten an employee who turns out to be real beast sometimes. You can generally tell when you have an employee causing disruption among others or doing bad things directed at you. We had one had the opportunity and the talent to become the perfect Service Manager. Sadly he turned out to be more of a crocodile. He was in training and given some important responsibility just because his potential and talent for one being so young, in his early 20's. His immaturity level was just too much to overcome. We actually gave him too many chances, being convinced we could change him. Some people you just can't mold into what you think they can be, no matter what. It was disappointment to have to let him go, the customers really liked him, and we had invested a lot of time and money into him, but we had no choice. He was causing chaos out in the service bays and plenty of headaches,even division among family members even between shops. This was recent and we are still struggling to fill the void with another person to train for management. The problems he caused are still fresh and we still licking our wounds on this one. We also had to let go of one decent employee and disipline another since they were helping him like a little gang. Most of the time if the employee is pulling things like this and trying to put a wedge between you and your employees, you can usually tell something is going on without anyone alerting you. I would keep an eye open and then take appropriate action when you are certain that this employee is actually doing this and using it for the purpose of causing a rift or disruption to your daily business. It doesn't take much especially, with the current economic situation and the heat of the summer to ruin the morale in the bays or the office. Even so, if you are uncomfortable with any employee then it is best to talk withnothing held back with the offender and if you are still not satisfied then you just need to cut the employee lose and save on the grief. I wish we had done this before letting him get so far into the inner part of our organization. He is one of those who, once found out, you realize he was in a position and very capable sneaking away with your customer base or other private business info. So far we have been lucky on that but I shudder to think, what he could have gotten away with.

That's great! Thanks for putting a name to this, xrac. It seems that we have been having more than the usual bouts of this in the past couple years and we have been here for 31 years. What is really difficult to deal with is when the "good deed" is put into a review as a less than stellar experience for the customer. So not only did we go above and beyond eating things that weren't even ours to eat seems we don't even get to keep the customer and we have to explain why saving a customer money was a bad thing. Oh well, such is the life we have chosen! :-)

We did a women's car care clinic last October. Usually a nice cool mild month here. It was just awesome. We all had fun. The planning is rather intense especially for the first time and it does cost money to do it right. Well worth the time, funds and effort though. Our women's care care clinic was all hands on and we gave each participant a Safety Girl Roadside Emergency Kit plus CarCare.org literature. We formed up groups of four or five and had two mechanics at each station. Starting out with the basic maintenance. We had pizza deliver from the local pizzeria and plenty of cold water and soft drinks. It was a success and is now a permanent part of our event calender. We are hoping to also organize a teen car care and driving safety clinic, still working out the details but there's tons of interest in our community especially among women. I'll post some pictures from our first clinic.

Yes insurance and rent are also our biggest expense. The rent at the older shop is much higher than the the mortgage at the new shop. We pay rent to a family member who still owns the property and so when we are having a difficult time the family member give us a break when she can. Our payroll expense included uniforms which we provide and the usual benefits such as paid sick days and vacations. We still can't afford health insurance but are working toward that goal for our employees. We pay all of our techs and service writers hourly. We cut back on advertising a few years back except for the sports and ROTC fundraising programs we sponsor at the local high school and elementary school. We find most advertising is a waste of money and so work harder in word of mouth from our loyal customers. We had a recent price increase in labor and parts that has helped and has hardly been noticed by our customers that helped. There really is not anything we can cut back on that we haven't already. The end of 2012 was really bad and so improvement on our old building have had to wait.

We use Mitchell Manager Plus with OnDemand and recently added the E-CRM program. Customers love the Auto Owner Site for access to their vehicle records. Our back office uses Quickbooks and hope to add the Mitchell to Quickbooks Integrator soon. Mitchell is great. We also subscribe to Identifix and our Techs really like the flow of the program.