AndersonAuto

No worries, it's right there in my post. I pay her $20 an hour, and she has flexible hours. She pretty much comes and goes as she pleases, and as long as her work gets done that's just fine with me. Generally she works from open until about 3 in the afternoon.

I'm fortunate to have enough biz to have a full time bookkeeper/admin. Life would suck without her here. She takes care of my Quickbooks, HR, tracks my marketing, does my tech time management spreadsheets, pays the sales tax on time, does payroll, and generally keeps my guys in line. All for only $20 an hour. I can pull a P&L or balance sheet and know it's always up-to-the-minute up to date. When I had an outside bookkeeper/cpa, he would pick up receipts and the check registers once a month, then return a P&L the following month when he picked up the next batch. My P&L was always 6 weeks behind, and honestly I didn't understand it back then anyway. If I did understand it, it was 6 WEEKS OLD. What am I going to do to fix a problem that was half a quarter ago? Even before I could afford to hire Terri I started doing the books myself, and it was the best thing I ever did. There's no better way to understand where your profitability is going, either in gross profit or expenses, than being able to see it in real time. Besides, if you don't understand your books (P&L and balance sheet), you don't understand your business. Terri and I go over all of the numbers line by line once a month to make sure everything is on track, and it helps provide the checks and balances we need. Of all my employees, Terri has the greatest ability to steal from me. I trust her implicitly, but as the old saying goes, trust, but verify. All of that being said, I still use a CPA for my taxes. Once a year, Terri, my CPA, and myself get together and work through any issues to make the tax prep smooth and easy.

It's easy to know if your labor rate is right. Simply take the flag hour wage of your highest paid tech and divide by .3. My techs make 31 an hour so the minimum correct labor rate is $103. We use coupons to attract new customers, so my rate is higher to compensate for the discounts. If you're getting 55% on parts (part cost divided by .45) and your labor rate gets you 70% margin on labor, then don't worry about P/L mix. A 4.5 HPRO tells me you're not likely giving away much labor. It's probably due to selling lots of high dollar parts, which is a good thing at 55%.

I don't disagree, you could do it all yourself, and I used to. After moving into my new building and working hard to expand the shop, I found that I lacked the time to manage it. Now that things are running smooth for me, I do have the time, but not the desire. So I pay Kukui to do it for me. As far as the tracking goes, you have to go into it knowing that there will be overlap. I don't know about counting old customers as new, and I suspect that may be due to the way Kukui and your shop management system interface with each other, but I don't look at the new vs old all that much. I know for a fact that people who get my mailer are going to be driven to my website. The mailer will get credit, and Kukui will get credit, and I don't care. What I care about is whether people are being driven to my shop. Some people would say that I should care very much if dollars spent by the customer gets counted by both my mailer tracking and my website tracking. It's true that if you want to know the exact ROI on each of these, you'll have to assign the dollars to one or the other, or split it. What I want to know is, are people seeing my mailers and my web site, and are they influencing people to come to my shop and spend money? Since people are calling both the tracking number on my mailer and the tracking number on my web site, and they're using the mailer coupons, and to a lesser degree the coupon on my web site, I know for a fact that both are working. The combination of a relentless mailer campaign and a good web site have allowed me to take my shop from 700K in 2010 to 2 Million last year. I do some marketing to my existing customer base, but it's small potatoes compared to the revenue generated by the mailers and web site.

I had a great conversation with Todd Westerlund yesterday. He's working hard to improve some of the problems that he's been having of late. I think a lot of it may be some growing pains that anyone who's been through a rapid expansion knows about. That doesn't relieve him of the responsibility for some of our experiences, but it does give me great hope that things are on the upswing. We also talked about some of his future plans for expansion into better shop management for our shops. I'm sure it will be a couple years for him to implement some of the things we talked about, but it could turn into some really great things for us as shop owners.

Thanks Todd. We'll chat, and I'm sure all will be well. Congrats on the partnership with NAPA. Hopefully that will be a good thing for your company.

In about 2002 I was in a pretty tough spot. I was losing money hand over fist. We had taken over a larger space on Sept 1, 2001 and ten days later the world fell apart. Then to boost new car sales, the dealers were doing no down payment, 0% financing, if you could fog a mirror you qualify. People were literally trading in their car if I told them it needed a set of tires. It was unbelievable. I finally took a few minutes and calculated my break even point. I made a nice little graph with my fixed and variable expenses. The long and the short of it was that I needed a substantial labor rate increase to be able to survive. Not to make a profit, just to stop losing money. I raised my labor rate $15.25 in one day. I only had one complaint, from my service advisor. Not one customer said a single word. Not a new customer, and not a long time customer. From that day on, I have never feared increasing my labor rate, and I certainly never felt guilty about it. A couple years after that big jump, and another rate increase or two in the mean time, I had a lady just beat me up until I would give her my labor rate (we try not to talk about labor rate, only the bottom line job cost). She was mortified to find that my labor rate was higher than the Chrysler dealer a mile away from me. Two weeks later that Chrysler dealer went out of business. I wonder what her warranty was worth on the work they did for her? BTW, the service manager from that Chrysler dealer has been writing service for me since a couple months after they closed.

I've been using Kukui for about 4 years. I love all the back end info I get from them. I don't know of any other source for the kind of data they provide. I can know just about exactly what my ROI on the website and other online advertising I do. Which is not to say that you can't get the same results from any other web site or SEO or pay per click program, but how do you know what's working and what's not? I just had my daughter sign up with Kukui for her new shop, and I will say that her design experience wasn't as amazing as I had expected. Also, the monthly marketing updates they do were not great. I had begun to just ignore the phone meeting request. A couple weeks ago I requested a new rep for myself and my daughter, and he seems to be doing a better job. He's been more responsive to her requests for changes to tweak her website. I got an online survey from them in which I skewered them for my daughter's experience, and the fact that it seemed their entire staff had been replaced with valley girls over the last couple years. By chance, I had received a facebook friend request from Kukui's CEO just days before my survey. I got a follow up call from Kaitlyn at Kukui that did result in my new rep, but I wasn't super excited about her attitude when I discussed my daughter's experience with them, and my recent experience with the seemingly airheaded valley girls. During the call, Kaitlyn tried to tone down the valley girl uptalk, but she was clearly annoyed that I had brought it up. Afterward I decided I would have a chat with Todd, the CEO. I sent him a message on Facebook messenger. I know he saw the message, but it went ignored. No call, no response. Bottom line is that it's still a good service, and still worth the money. But I'm not as excited about them as I once was.