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Coming up in March in Kansas City is the March 6-9, 2025 VISION Hi-Tech Training & Expo. All of these training conferences I note below are great resources in addition to the R&W conference. Make sure that you sign up as soon as early registration begins as the classes fill up fast. Be ready to act to get the classes you want. I'm sending my GM and one of my techs to Vision. These conferences generally have Management / Service Advisor classes and Technical Training Classes. You should be attending the Management track. You'll learn more than you can digest and you'll be able to network with other shops as well.

About 6 years ago, someone drove to my store in a minivan filled with filters from a closed store. Gave me an inventory list and said "Let's make a deal". I bought the whole lot for about $300, knowing that about 25% of them were not likely saleable. In this case, I was already selling that brand of filters. If you approached me with the Champions, I'd need to see an inventory along with an application guide (e.g. CAP80?? - Air Filter for 2015 CRV's). Would make it really easy for me to see if I could use these.

I've got a brother laser printer HL-2340 that looks terrible, but has been a faithful workhorse in the shop for about 6 years, not lots of use but continuous use. I use the same 6 year old printer at my desk, which gets even more work. I also have 2 LaserJet Pro M404 laser printers just as dusty that have been in daily use for 3+ years. One just started feeding extra pages and needs some TLC. They each go thru 1-2 reams of paper monthly. I use Brother Laser HL-6200 at the counter and it goes thru about a case or more of paper monthly. I've tried just about every brand printer. Brother has been very reliable. These 2 LaserJets are not far behind. The HP InkJet on my Hunter machine has always been a dog (unreliable / ornery). When these printers start acting up, I just replace them. The one up front is replaced about every 2 years. The best part is that you can repurpose a failed printer into an emotional support printer. Next time you are having a bad day, take it up to the roof and throw your troubles to the ground!!! 🤬 -> 😬 -> 😁

Thanks! This is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT. This filing is due by Dec 31, 2024. Penalties start on Jan 1, 2025 at $591 / day for not filing. By Jan 17, you will have hit the maximum penalty of $10,000.

and part 2:

Yes, but it depends. If you set the expectation that it will be a T&M's job, then you just add in the time. Otherwise, you have to ask for more time, add it into the part estimate or eat it. I struggle with getting paid for all of my time and we're doing our best to not let this happen. As someone said last week, in another forum, don't let their problems become your problems. Offer to solve their problems for this many $'s or move on. A lot of shops refuse to work on anything older than 20 years for this reason alone. Heck, we're working on a < 20 yr old, 07 4Runner, and were having a hard tracking down a suspension bolt. I had to make a 20 mile drive for another purpose and decided to do that today to pick up a bolt at a dealer along the route. I get there an it was not in stock. Now, it showed in stock there by my normal Toyota dealer, so we went for it. Shame on me for not calling ahead. Finally found one at a Lexus dealer. I didn't charge for this trip, but we doubled his bill due after finding multiple cross threaded bolts such as this one. Even still, we should have billed more. But, we have a beautiful '70 Chevelle SS that we're working on and for this one, we're charging Time and Materials, but also at $30/hr more. We have a higher labor rate for Classic cars. I also have a 68 Chevelle here too. Sigh. Love them and hate them. If we work on these, we "try" to limit them to 1 at a time. For these types of cars, you have to charge more because they nibble minutes daily until their gone.

The business owns full responsibility for tech errors. At best, you dismiss the employee if the errors are too much or egregious. I've had people offer to pay for their own mistakes, but I refuse this. Council them and move on. CEL on after repair: I want my techs to dig in and at least get a head-start on the fault. If there is something new, we need to bill for "peeling the onion" and finding a new problem. If it's our fault, back to previous statement above. I pay hourly + flag bonus. I don't dock flag hours for them taking more time. We hope for more wins than losses in the shop as a whole and per tech. If the tech is not a consistent winner, well now.... (I just let a non-winner go 2 weeks ago). If we have a new problem, we go back for more time. Accurately billing customers for time has been the hardest problem for me to solve. I have one tech that always wants to "know" what is happening, regardless of whether we're getting paid. Just this morning, I was thinking that I'll adjust his flag bonus up (to give him a COL raise) and remind him that he gets paid more when we get paid more! We'll see if it helps.

In an attempt to understand this junk fee ridden business, I did quite a bit of analysis. In the end, I found that the Interchange fees are the biggest factor. They will eat, let's say about 1.5% and rising. Can't duck or hide from these fees. The CC Processor will then tack on an addon to pay for their services. This can range from a low of about .20% to 1% or more. This is the fee that you want to manage. Now, just like us, if you have a provider that is giving you good service, it might be worth a few more pennies. To further add to the Interchange fees, I found that my fees went up and down with the mix of Debit to Credit cards. Debit cards are practically free and CC's are costly. Usage depends on your customer mix. This can't be controlled. It's builtin to our labor rate. Charging the customer for using their CC leaves a sour taste, so most people don't do this. It doesn't make for good repeat business. Once I grasped this, I've ceased the detailed tracking and analysis of my CC's. I'm lightly tracking now.... For the past 11 months, I've had a low of 1.32% and a high of 2.08%. The average for the last 11 months has been 1.83%. What is interesting is that the low was on a big month. Must have had many debit card transactions that month. My current processor 360 Payments, does not show debit vs credit transaction counts, so this is just a guess.

Make a very conservative forecast and cut that to 1/4. You are going to burn thru cash heavily on the 1st year. Your goal is pure survival. Later, you will focus on profits that go in your pocket. Your initial goal is enough profits to pay your techs and carry your fixed expenses and operating costs. This is often a big hurdle. It was about 3 years before I transferred from managing for survival to managing for success. When hiring techs, make sure that they are good and paid fairly. Do not put the lack of car count on their backs (aka Flat Rate). Why would I work for you if you cannot feed me? I know you are new and I know you won't have cars for quite some time. It is your job to get cars in the door and your pocket that suffers if you don't. Not theirs!!! How will people know that you exist? You'll likely grow faster with a marketing budget than without. Remember, technicians are "free". I learned this at a R&W class. The 1st 15 hours pays for the technician, so anything beyond that becomes revenue. As Larry mentioned, production tops waitlists. Have enough techs for keep production up. You want to sell every hour that you can. However, too many techs will burn cash. You need to get the car count up high enough to feed these techs to keep them "free". It's your job to get cars in the door. There's no real way to forecast this, but I'd say your first goal is 1 or 2 cars / day consistently. That should be 4-6 hours of work per day, assuming the cars are repair related vs oil change. So, 20 hours / week pays for a tech, but not much else. If you have high visibility and the place is clean / freshly painted, you may take off faster. If the place you are buying has a TERRIBLE reputation, it may take you way longer to build traffic. If your current business can send you work, it'll help you get moving faster. So many unknowns. Using your favorite podcast player, find the "Changing the Industry Podcast" and start listening from the beginning. It starts a bit rough, but quickly gets better. Also, locate Hunt Demarest's "Business by the Numbers" podcast (accounting) and start listening. Trust me, he's more interesting than the subject! The next big training event is Vision in KC. Make sure that you sign up for this, close the shop if you have to and attend every Service Advisor and Management training course you can. I cant stress this enough! There are industry coaches out there that can help you, but you may not be ready to afford them. They will all be at Vision and give you big tastes of their offerings and allow you to meet them in person.

Great catch. I'm going to bet that you weren't their first call, yet you were the one with the biggest cojones to get them caught! Congratulations and Thank you for making it happen!

$300 service call to show up plus 1 hour labor. And I'd tell them that once we figure out what it wrong or find it needs tools still at the shop (e.g. a lift) to continue, it'll likely need to be towed to the shop for the repair. This should net you $500 for a simple diag call. Or you talk sense into them to tow it to you. Or, they looked on Craigslist and saw great rates, but would rather have you work for such "great" rates because you have a shop and would be a better value. Now, I've done this for free as well. We recently put a new ACDelco fuel pump in good customers work truck and it wouldn't start. We drove to his house, got it to start and brought it back to the shop and installed a 2nd new fuel pump. And we drove it back to his house when done. I do have a $85 very-local emergency assist fee. This is a try to jump-start fee. If it won't jump, it's a tow. I do give them $25 credit towards a new battery if purchased same day. I use GS techs for this. However, I get frustrated when my guys do repairs in the parking lot. There's no need for them to work outside in the weather. They will eventually need multiple trips back inside for random tools, thus wasting time. Mobile techs have a leg up on you doing this as they already have all of the tools in the truck. And the best mobile techs tow this gem to the job site.

The AST detects hydrogen. For this, you are using the detector in the Robinaire LD9TG. These are similar units - they both detect combustible gasses. The Stratus detects 134a and 1234yf. So, you use forming gas during service, but if it does return, use a regular refrigerant leak detector to check for leaks if needed. I learned of the Stratus from Tom Lech's youtube page. He says the top dog of sniffers is the Bacharach H-10 Pro Refrigerant Leak Detector. However, he also says that the D-TEK Stratus is almost on par with the H-10. He uses the Stratus for leak detection on Auto AC. Tom's page: https://www.youtube.com/@coldfinger459sub0 He is a great learning resource and makes no money on his channel. He does this to help the community.

When I first acquired my tank, they were up in arms over the Hydrogen. It seems that 5% Hydrogen is not flammable and is an industry norm. Maybe press them on this. But they did make me put an oxygen valve instead of a nitrogen valve and I had to install a Nitrogen adapter. My battle was over the valve. No mention of a fee, but then again, I'm in Texas, not Florida. I purchased from AirGas.

It's good to hear your results and process. I too have this setup. I purchased the Inficon AST100FG Forming Gas Leak Detector. The N2H2 mixed gas is also called Forming Gas. Those squirrelly little hydrogen molecules are great escape artists and thus are good for leak detection. I also upped my game and bought the Inficon D-TEK Stratus Refrigerant Leak Detector up from my previous D-TEK 3 for refrigerant leak detection. It can find very small leaks in an already charged system, but not the same as the N2H2.

Oil changes using repair technicians is a losing battle. Oil changes using highly trained GS techs is profitable. It's all about overhead. My QL is very profitable and we run it straight. No gimmicks. No unneeded sales. Of course, I could be making more if I wasn't honest.