meowpox

You can read about our shop in the About section hehe. Address and phone number is on the front page. I'm really big on design and branding, and just really hate the look of a busy front page and feel it is a little overwhelming. Majority of our customers are word of mouth so if they're at our website, they already know a little bit about who we are. But I do believe it has to do with customer base. We are not a general repair shop. Our customers love a clean beautiful shop, because they have really really nice expensive cars. So our website reflects that well. We get tons of compliments on it by our customers. If you hover over About, theres a link called Services. Thats just one click. For appt, people click on Quote. I think this is good advice but also depends on your customer base. Again, we're not a general repair shop and we're in a very niche market so most people that need to contact us AND are actually in our target customer base will find it not a problem to click one extra link to contact us.

Never said reviews aren't important. Just said we don't ask our customers to leave them. We have 5 stars on yelp, 79 reviews -- been open for 3 years. 5 stars, 39 reviews on fb. In this day in age, I feel if you give crazy amazing service, they'll genuinely want to leave a review. I'm just being honest in saying I hate when companies ask me to leave a review after having a pleasant experience with them and I think a lot of customers feel that way. Just something to note.

We dont ask customers to leave reviews. As a customer of other businesses, i hate being asked that. Makes me feel like the positive experience i had was not that genuine. Not sure if I'm just not having similar experiences as you all but is it not enough to just give outstanding customer service? But I guess it also depends on type of shop you have and if you're going for volume.

I contacted Yelp to have them take down the "Request a Quote" feature that magically showed up on our page without our permission. Took them weeks to take it down, they said I was the only business in Yelp history to request this and thus they had to have engineers do back end programming to take it down. If it bothers you enough, contact them and they will take it down.

$120 Bay Area, CA and considered to be on the lower end compared to similar nearby performance shops

Interesting article, thanks! Without actual numbers, my opinion is not much. Sounds like they are onto something

As a consumer, if I cannot find information I need or an email to contact, I won't even bother. Phone calls are such a waste of time, in my opinion, because it requires two people (caller and receiver) to be readily available at the same time. If its for something urgent or is just hard to convey in an email, then I'd call but that's rare. From the business side, we try to push everything to email. We have our appointment form on our website as well as our phone number... but we get majority of our quote requests from the appointment form. It could be because our customer base is not your average car customer. Although I do not have an official way of tracking, I believe our quote form requests are more likely to turn into sales than phone calls. Phone quotes seem to be more from people that price shop and just want a quick quote. People who take time to fill out the quote form usually know they already want to come to us. Plus, I like that the history of a quote conversation is recorded in email so that we can reference back to it if needed.

A little late to the convo but we dont believe in "The customer is always right"---it simply is not always true. We hold our customers on the same level as our employees. Both are vital to our success. If a customer is wrong, we'll let them know and if we have to, we stick up for our employee. If the employee is wrong, we make it right with the customer.

We use Squarespace! Easy to manage, beautiful templates and easy to customize. I like to manage it myself because I have very particular taste, plus we have a very active blog. But that said, I probably am not using it to its potential in terms of SEO (still have to learn). We pay $26/mo for their basic commerce plan, which is $8 more than their basic business plan. We get tons of compliments. I am a strong believer in building a strong brand, and that includes first and foremost an amazing logo and a beautiful website. People will follow you if everything you put out there just looks amazing. Our Website

Yelp is great for consumers but terrible for business owners, at least for small businesses. We have a 5 star rating, and 73 reviews and we dont pay for any of Yelp's services. It does bring in business but what I hate is that it puts way too much control in the reviewers, which is unfair. One day, a button to "Request a Quote" appeared on our Yelp page (people started requesting quotes on yelp and the conversation would remain on yelp. even when we would say email us, the customer would get so comfortable and just use yelp). Didnt pay for this, never wanted it. I had to talk to Yelp several times and they said they have never once had a business ask to have it taken down. They had to get their engineers to do their thing to remove it from our page and that took weeks!! I was so annoyed because it is OUR business so we should be able to control how we are contacted. They eventually took it down. They should give us the option, not just impose it on us. Side tip: the reviews that get sorted to "unrecommended" are accounts who dont have friends or other reviews on Yelp.

Why not just get an alarm? I don't think dogs should be left at a workplace solely to guard it. You'd have to invest A LOT of time and training to have a dog be able to distinguish friend or enemy (if thats even possible without you being there). Also an intruder can easily harm your dog.

I've tried indeed, monster, linkedin...none of these options provided us with great candidates. I agree with Joe. It's all about networking. All of the applications we've received that were actually from worthy candidates were from (free) advertising that we were hiring on social media --FB and Instagram. But one thing to note is that we are extremely active on social media and in the local car community (go to /host a lot of events) so the applications were coming from people that knew about us already or knew someone who did.

You're right, we have people accidentally bump the corners with their thighs all the time.

voted! I've never been a fan of the super literal logos (eg autoshop with wrench in logo). I think you already have "auto" in your name so having wrenches or gears in it is a little overdone. BUT that being said, they all are nice logos and color scheme. And since its for your general repair shop, it definitely does get the point across that it is one so that might be exactly what you're looking for.

We still have majority IKEA furniture (Go here for some photos of our office). It's still holding up well so cant really help you with other furniture recommendations. I think the only thing I might change later is get a real reception counter just so it looks cleaner. If you're up for a fun project and have a blown engine laying around, they make interesting coffee tables! Just have to fabricate a base and paint it black

Thanks for the info!

Yeah I've been really digging Shop Boss' demo and the 99/mo is affordable, given that it comes with all those features. We only have 4 techs and it seems like it would meet our shop's needs. Couple questions for you since you've used it for a couple years now: What QB do you use with it? Is the QB integration pretty seamless? I currently use QB desktop version but want to switch to Online version. I'm guessing since Shop Boss is web-based, using the QB online should be pretty effortless, am I right? Does it sync automatically or do I have to do something to upload the data? Have you had to use their customer service? How is it? Did you switch from one program to Shop Boss? If so, what was it? We're currently using Winworks and I dont see anything about importing data? Thanks!

Business is booming and we need to become paperless, web-based, w/QB integration. Any ideas on programs? Would love any and all input! Omnique: I hear a lot of good things about it but looks like you need to pay for their most expensive package $400/mo to get QB integration. Shop Boss: looks really affordable with the features that it comes with ($99/mo comes with QB int). This is my favorite one so far. Does anyone use this? Any others?

Steve and _2080, If you want to make a difference (seems like you do if you're going out of your way to post on this forum), try to get people to understand where you're coming from. You can start with the following: Do you run an automotive service shop (not just own but actually involved in day-to-day?) If so, how many technicians do you employ at your shop? What exactly is your pay structure? What city, state is your shop located in? There definitely are things to be said and discussed about regarding the treatment, perception, and pay of mechanics in this industry. But the way you both have posted about it gives me the assumption that you don't run an autoshop that employs mechanics. If that is untrue, then please, let us know so we can have a discussion about it because this forum is about learning from each other. But if you're not interested in having a meaningful conversation, and just want to offend people by assuming we all own nice houses, we intend to screw over our mechanics, that we are "retards," that we are "greedy," that we "don't care".... then please GTFO.

Oh wow. Didn't expect to see those type of comments on this type of forum. Terrible attitude. I'm pretty sure if anyone here was just all about getting paid and trying to rip their employees off, they wouldn't be on a professional and informative forum like this. If you really wanted to make tons of money for yourself and not pay people what they deserve, we all know how to do that (which is entirely illegal) and it definitely doesnt involve spending time on a forum like this learning how to do things the right/legitimate way, and learning other business models, pay structures, etc from other professionals here. Not all business owners intend to "screw" their workers, and not all techs are great techs. The issue with pay in this industry is way deeper than that, as already mentioned by others in this thread/forum. We're all here to learn and I doubt you have things 100% figured out if you think things are that "plain and simple" in running a business. Have some respect.

We started our shop with WF (and still have their machine due to contract) but they raise their fees every year. I also know some people who work in WF and said honestly, they are not good for small businesses. We switched to 360 payment solutions and fees on average are less than 2%...usually 1.5-1.9.

Welcome! Great information on this forum

Who else went to SEMA this year?! Last year we won some small tools from an OTC diagnostics competition and this year, we won a free Hunter SmartWeight Wheel Balancer (even though not the road force, its a huge upgrade for us). All you had to do is post a photo on Instagram and use their hashtag. I think they have this competition every year.

We used to pay per hour billed only, but found out that that plan is not legal in CA if we require them to do other things, like cleaning the shop. Then we moved to base pay + bonus after certain amount of billed hours were met. Better, but a headache to keep track of. Currently we pay hourly starting at $25+ for full-time. Our shop rate is $120/hr. But we run a little differently then some shops so this pay method works for us. Our techs clean, some of them write work orders and talk to customers. We are open on weekdays only (9am-6pm) and they get paid OT for anything over. It has been pretty smooth so far. Every shop is different so you have to just find one that meets your shop's needs. Do you have techs that are just doing this to pay the bills? Do you have techs that are passionate and want a career out of this? For some people, hourly pay doesnt provide incentives to work their best. But have to also remember not everyone is motivated by money. You can pay someone well but if your shop is not a great environment to work in, that can also bring down performance. So there's a lot more to look at in terms of incentives and efficiency. Sorry if that doesnt help much!