HarrytheCarGeek

Use a spreadsheet. If you print a copy of the invoice for your files put a big "$" in pink highlighter to mark those as follow up leads that needs to be called on recommendations. At check out, let the customer know you will be calling him to follow up as a courtesy for the pending work recommendations. I.e, "Mr Wilson, please don't forget you will need those tires in the coming months, I will give you a call in a few weeks just to remind you, ok. It is good to see you, thank you for letting us take care of your car."

Running a one man shop was the hardest thing I ever did in this business. I really do not like to look back at that time of my life, I was young, stupid, and naive. I did ok. Got burn a lot and left a lot of money on the table. It was really a school of hard knocks for me. For those of you that run a one man operation, you have my admiration and respect, God knows the sacrifices, sleepless nights, and loneliness you have to endure by yourself since there is no one to talk to.

Great, now multiply that x 3 and make it your sales revenue target at a minimum. $9,800 x 3 = $29,400 per month. If you focus and run efficient, you can see that sales target is very comfortable to achieve and deal with. It will also help you build a cushion for to deal with the feast/famine situations of small business life. Also, do some research on your demographics, look for your target profile customer, that is to say who is your ideal customer. If your town only has 1,200 people in it, you may have some trouble meeting your numbers, so you may have to change strategy to meet your revenue target numbers. Btw.I like your list, great job. If you notice, if you focus on your first five much of your troubles would clear right up.

Great post! So true.

I bough a high intensity LED flash light for about $85 bucks, just to lose it in about two days. I was ticked, I am sure the customer that finds it will be please with it. On another note, you left out the tools that for some reason tend to grow legs and leave the tool box on their own... Talking about that, an old oil rig guy told me to paint my tools pink and that problem would be solved, as that is how he was able to stop losing his tools out in the field.

The Greatest Salesman in the World, by Og Mandino. http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/055327757X/ref=sr_1_1_twi_mas_1_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1449323958&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Greatest+Salesman+in+the+World%2C+by+Og+Mandino. Jim Rohn - Personal Development - Living An Exceptional Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2ap6fd_sXY

I wanted to add, lot's of guys don't really understand margin vs markup. Here is a great article that illustrates how to figure margin and use markup: http://www.accountingtools.com/questions-and-answers/what-is-the-difference-between-margin-and-markup.html

Alfred that's a great point. You have to include your salary into the equation, so if you were to step out of the business you can have someone step in and paid them to do the job. It would seem that most guys are not running a business but just buying themselves a job. Spreadsheets are a great tool! I remember when I first started to use them and was hooked on them, I actually went to take a couple of night classes at the community college just to learn to use them more efficiently.

Crazy.

CarER: I would tell you to do a marketing blast, but much of the demand would be wasted if you are not ready to take advantage of it. So, get your numbers in order, know your metrics. Remember this: EVERYTHING IS ABOUT MAKING A PROFIT, YOU MUST MAKE A PROFIT. As long a you make even a 1 cent profit over all your costs and expenses you will stay in business indefinitely. You won't grow much, but you will stay in business. The larger the profit, the faster you are enabled to grow your business. Add up all your overhead cost and expenses and divide them into month, week, and day, and business hour cost. This will give you the idea of what is the revenue number that you need. For example, rent, ins., utilities, taxes and labor is $10,000 per month, that works out to about $2,500 week, $500 day / 8 hour day = $62.5 Per hour to keep the door open. Markup your parts at least 100% this is called Keystone markup. So, if the part cost you $10 sell it at least for $20. Adjust as necessary for competition and local market. So, from this example at a minimum you need to sell at least $10,000 in parts and $5,000 in labor per month to break even. For a minimum revenue of $15,000 per month, $3,750 per week, $750 Per day, $93.75 Hour. As you can tell this is way over simplified, and does not account for your expected return on capital, but will do for now. So with these numbers, you need at least 2 cars per day with an ARO of $375 in revenue for $750 in revenue per day. Or in other words, each car is costing $250 to be service at your place not including cost of parts. Let's say you service 10 cars a day without additional expense, this cost goes down to $25 per car on average. Ok. With this in mind, get your marketing stuff ready, make a list of prospects, and start calling, don't let the phone weight 500lbs, call prospects, pass out business cards, print some simple flyers and pass them out, run car clinics, anything to bring up your car count and your revenue.

You can sell four tires and an alignment and bring up you ARO, but not your GP, while also selling some brakes and do much better with your GP. Choose the most beneficial /profitable work first, and any profitable work is a better choice than no work at all.

For a smaller shop ARO and car count is very low, $230 x 55 =$12,650 if GP at 60% = $7,590 Costs of $5,060. $7,590 /4.2 = $1,807 projected cash flow per week. 55 cars month / 4.2 = 13.09 cars week. if 6 works days = 2.18 cars day! Not good.

Hardest thing for me was overcoming my greed. After losing so many valuable people, I became practical and set an expected return on my money. After that, the second hardest thing was making sure they were kept busy enough to make me the expected return on my money. Rate hour $10 for oil change tech, x 1.7 for tax and benefits = $17 cost loaded hour. = $136 cost day (8 hours x $17) = Target revenue $408 day ($106 x 3 ) If 16 cars per day 16/8 = 30 Mins each. or cost of $8.50 per car, expected revenue $25.50 So you can pay base of $400 to tech, cost of $680 loaded, expected revenue of $2,040. Then you can commission 3%-10% for anything in sales above in excess or $2,040. e.g. Tech revenue for the week $3500 - $2040 = $1,460 x 10% = $140, so Base of 400 plus commission of $140 for the week =$540. It's important to keep on top of paying your commissions right on time, and also docking them when comebacks come in if it's the tech's fault. Bookkeeping this is the difficult part if your computer system does not do it for you.

2004 Ford Freestar is towed in, transmission failure. Recalled by Ford due to torque converter shaft failure. No charge to customer for fix. Happy customer, we are happy for them although we lose a sale.

You know, the news tell us one thing yet we see another in everyday business life. About 16 years back in my frustration in growing the business, I went back to school to take some economic classes. The stuff the professors were teaching me didn't make much business sense to me, now I thought, maybe I am not too smart like these people, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Well, guess what, those professors were full of crap. We are pretty smart people in this business, don't let the media and politicians make you doubt yourself, like the cliche says, "Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining." Going further into my economic research, I came across this gentleman, he is a pretty smart guy, hard to read at times for me as his vocabulary is steeped in academia, but legible enough to make your business even more profitable if you apply his knowledge to your business: My Education as an Economist: How I Learned to Reject the Market Dogma That Dominates the Profession A personal journey through economic thought. by Michael Hudson http://www.alternet.org/economy/my-education-economist-how-i-learned-reject-market-dogma-dominates-profession?akid=13538.1118797.ZtMffX&rd=1&src=newsletter1043348&t=14 read his article if you get a change, once you understand what he speaks of, you will never let another main stream media mouth piece tell you that is raining while he pees on your leg.

We just closed November, down -9.0%. Best performing locations were the low income areas of Paterson, Passaic, Newark, and Jersey City. Up over 12% year over year.

I agree with you. Here is the thing, depending how long you had your shop at your specific location, the demographics are changing faster than before for us. Real property taxes around our area are between $8K to $20K per year. Lot of people that are retiring cannot afford the tax burden on their retirement income and are moving away. So finding that customer that you can put in your sweet spot profile it's getting much harder for now.

Yes, the initial template and training was a bit tidious, but it's a great tool once you have it up and running. Also, like flacvabeach says above, you have to have your SA's sell what's needed to the customer.

http://www.osbornauto.com/ServiceImages http://www.repairshopsolutions.com/ Use an inspection process to make your recommendations,

Yes, also, the trouble being that "transitional time" can last years. Take a look at this: Epic oil glut sparks super tanker 'traffic jams' at sea http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/22/investing/oil-glut-tanker-traffic-jam/index.html OIl price is collapsing, yet you don't see a positive response from the general economy, if you used to remember, when people had savings they could take advantage of this situations. Now people have no savings, so their optimism and taking advantage of opportunities are not happening. Maybe that's why Turkey shoots down a Russian plane. A conflict that would aid the world economy big players... USA, EU, Russia, Saudis and China...

Exactly. We are working twice as hard, for the same money. There is no pricing power, gas has gone down almost 33% in the past three months yet revenue into the stores has not increased.

Thank you, Joe! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Xrac, That's the thing, you will not see the bad news, the news comes from your own experience at the counter.

October was a very rough month in retail sales for us, across the board it came in down about -40%, yes, almost half of our average sales. Corporate accounts were down -16%. What is going on, what are we supposedly doing wrong? November is on par with the past years but not by much. We track our marketing meticulously, we ask our customers for feedback, what do we know? This is what we know, our customers are struggling financially, many are living in houses that their mortgages are not being serviced, they are in dire straights. We have gone deeper into our research, but are not happy with what we are seeing. Bottom line, social and political economic policies are broken, we are in big trouble and we instinctively "feel it" but no one in political office will point it out because it is a thankless job. I am an optimist, but even I have a hard time being positive about the present outlook.

Something I use and that I can easily measure results is Demandforce post cards. http://www.demandforce.com/product/value-added-services/postcards/ I send them out to the customers that I don't have their email addresses, for example now for the holidays I sent Halloween, Thanksgiving and now Christmas cards with a $20 off their next transaction. It cost me $0.79 per card, but the return on the investment more than pays off for the campaign.