xrac

Joe, this is a great article! Good job! I am curious as to how you have your customer area set up. Do you have any pictures. We need to remodel.

Here is a little more about AAA: http://www.poststar.com/business/local/art...1cc4c03286.html

Randy, my name isn't Joe but we got our BG flushing machine through BG. There should be a BG rep in your area that will call on you if you contact them.

How about those Jets! Congratulations Joe! I guess you know I have to root against you next week! Go Colts and Peyton!

Since you are a Jets fan I hope the Jets win. Do you root for the Giants any? I have never been a New York fan except for the old time Yankees (Mantle and Maris) and the Knicks (Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe). The reason I say I would pick San Diego is it just seems that San Diego is really hot. They may actually win the whole thing.

Joe you are running more than double the volume that we run. Our typical car count is probably about 80-90 cars per week on a six day week. Joe how many bays do you run with both facilities and do you operate a quick lube.

Joe, I have no idea as to what this ratio should be. We have operated with up to five techs with one advisor. Sometimes that can be too much. Our advisor prices and sells all job and orders all parts. Ofcourse I share that responsibility with him as needed and I fill those shoes on his day off. The original franchise model was for techs to price and sell their jobs. Ofcourse that was the old muffler/brake model. Not a very efficient or effective way of doing it in my opinion.

My team (Green Bay) has went down as well as my second choice Arizona(I like Curt Warner). Of the remaining teams I will root for Indianapolis since I am in Indiana although I like the NFC better. Joe, I too am old enough to remember Joe Namath. You have suffered a long time. Maybe this will be your year. If I were betting I would probably pick San Diego.

Joe, I really haven't noiced anything. Maybe it is your area of the country.

The guy who works out of the back alley garage just surviving hurts himself and our business. If this forum can be a tool to raise the quality of our businesses and lives it will serve a great purpose.

Too many shop owners have nothing more than a job and not a very good job because they don't charge enough. They work a lot of hours and sacrifice themselves and their families but wind up with little to show for it. They have no retirement plan, they have no buisness asset they can sell or pass on, their bodies are broken down, their equipment is worn out, their location is terrible, someone else owns the property, etc. They have never understood return on investment, opportunity cost, gross profit margins verus net profit, etc. The shops my dad use to take his cars to all closed when the owner died or retired. Not a one survived. They worked all of their lives and then got to the end of their life and find that they had nothing.

There is some good wisdom in this: An Old Farmer's Advice * Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong. * *Keep skunks and bankers at a distance.* *Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.* * A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.* * Words that soak into your ears are whispered..not yelled.* * Meanness don't jes' happen overnight.* * Forgive your enemies. It messes up their heads.* * Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you.* * It don't take a very big person to carry a grudge.* * You cannot unsay a cruel word.* * Every path has a few puddles.* * When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.* *The best sermons are lived, not preached.* * Most of the stuff people worry about ain't never gonna happen anyway.* *Don't judge folks by their relatives.* * Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.* * Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll enjoy it a second time.* * Don't interfere with somethin' that ain't bothering you none.* * Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a Rain dance..* * If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'.* * Sometimes you get, and sometimes you get got.* * The biggest troublemaker you'll probably ever have to deal with, watches you from the mirror every mornin'.* * Always drink upstream from the herd.* * Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.* * Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin' it back in.* *If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.* * Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply.* *Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.* *Don't pick a fight with an old man... If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.*

I love my Ranger friend too. He is not really an employee but a friend and absolutely the best. He looks out for our shop, for me, for our guys, and for our customers. I salute him. Bizarre is the word. Someone looks at your car, doesn't charge you anything, wishes you a good day, and then you complain. People like this who worry about spending money on repairs are always driving cars that are either junk or rapidly becoming junk.

Joe, I know what you mean. If someone comes in talking really nasty to me they are going to be lucky to get anything out of me. My service manager was an Army Ranger and if your get him stirred up he is likely to toss them out on their head and he is capable of doing it. It is funny that the people who set me off he can handle and vice versa. There are not too many people who set us both off at the same time. This may be a customer you just need to turn loose and not worry with. The only complaint we received at Car-x Chicago in 2009 was from an older woman that we told had a bad catalytic converter and that a direct fit replacement was $300-$400 or so. She called and complained because she said she could buy a converter at AutoZone for $75. Yes mam! Let's see someone cut and bend and fit and weld that universal converter onto her car. Let's see how long that takes. We have a bender. We bend pipe and we do custom exhaust but this was not one we would try to do. Now here is the really funny part. We looked at the woman's car for free. She was never charged anything. She has never spent $1.00 at our shop and she called Chicago and complained because of the price! How does that figure?????????????????

Sounds like buyers remores. Someone must have told him they could do it cheaper or someone told him he paid too much. I think you handled it correctly. The only thing that maybe you could have done otherwise was to offer him a special discount on a future service or something like a free oil change. We use a free oil change sometimes if there is a complain or problem. This seems to divert some of this. However, this customer looks like the problem not you.

Good for you! You are right. Don't take anything for granted. On the subject of insurance I would suggest that those of you who deal with O'Reilly check out their Certified Auto Repair program. It costs $50 per month or nothing if you buy a minimum of $2,500 parts monthly. It offers a nationwide warranty on all of your repairs that cost the shop nothing and they will pay to have a repair done over without batting an eye up to the cost of the original repair. The program also has a shop insurance program. We are currently insured with them (the Ohio Casualty/Liberty Mutual family). It saved me money over our previous carrier which was Universal Underwriters (now Zurich). If interested email me and I will email you a contact number on the insurance. I really like the agent I deal with.

CarQuest closed their store closest to us. Now they only have one store in this market and I do not know if they will survive. NAPA is not strong either. The strongest stores here are O'Reilly and the local warehouse group I spoke of. CarQuest use to be our first call but now I rarely call them.

I do not think I would want to discuss how to be less than forth right on taxes on a public forum if I were you. You either have the choice of treating them as employees or contract labor. Unfortunately, in almost all situations people who work for us are employees. The tax situation is a little bit of a hassle but it is not really all of the bad. It is better to be legit than to get into difficulty with the IRS.

We use to order a lot of parts from Carquest but they are not competitive on the pricing. They also have poor service in our market. We buy from the discounters and quite a bit from an area jobber that is also an AC Delco and Motorcraft distributor.

There is good money to be made in suspension if you have a good fast suspension guy.

We have a very modest diagnostic charge for most basic diagnosis. This is a compromise between free and charging full price and it seems to work pretty good for us. When people ask if we charge for diagnosis I explain to them that we do because we do more than read codes and that codes do not tell you what is wrong with the car. I tell them we figure out what is wrong with the car but if they only want a code read they can go to Advance or Auto Zone. I do this for two reasons. First it shows that I believe there is value in what we provide and I make no apologies for charging. Second, it gets rid of people who only want to know what the code is and they are either going to be a DIFYer or don't intend to spend any money.

On the subject of training but with a different provider how are the webinars provided by AMI (Automotive Management Institute)? Anyone participate in those? http://amionline.org/

I picked up this news of tragedy in Vegas. How much of an issue is security where your shop is located. We are in a low crime midwest town but I wonder sometimes if I should make changes as to how we handled money at the end of the day. Ofcourse we are not open during the late night and early morning hours that most of this occurs. We have had a few cars broken into but in ten years our building has never been touched. Have any of you experienced and arm robbery? A footnote is this business seemed awful calloused by remaining open.

Nothing like a satisfied customer! I have also received warnings from other owners. Thanks for the post and welcome to the forum.

The weather here is too nasty and the meeting is 4 hours away so we are postponing attending for the present.