flacvabeach

Had our first training session today in an AV webinar. Good start. Also had a long phone conversation last night with the head man that left me feeling god about their commitment to support their users. Tonight I went into our AV web portal and configured one of our shops. Lots of options that we will need to become familiar with. A pleasant surprise was the acceptance we heard from our techs and SWs during and after the training. I think they see this as beneficial for their daily lives.

Nice job! Lots of satisfaction in doing your own web site and content. I would suggest that you put people in your pictures. Smiling, clean techs, and happy customers I need to do more of that on my site. I gather you are performance oriented, but if you are doing general service, you better appeal to women. They are the service buyers and they aren't generally interested in pix of cars in a state of disassembly. If you take plastic, put the logos up there. Got a warranty? Brag about it. A warning - you can work on SEO 24 hours a day and still feel like you haven't done enough. Keep up the good work!

Sounds like you are well grounded in the business. We went the other way and started a shop them added the car lot. I would strongly advise getting some business coaching. You can learn the fine points the hard way or have a coach tell you what is working well for other shops. Attending training with other shop owners is a real eye-opener. For technicians' pay, you need a system that lets you retain your labor margin if they go into overtime. This has been by far the most complex issue we have faced in our ongoing education.

Mike - I'm glad you are participating. Competition is a wonderful thing! It keeps us all on our toes and improves the breed. i lay awake at night wondering how to do better than the shop down the street and I'm sure you do the same. We all need to keep honing that edge. I plan to hold nothing back on my eval of AV, so you will have the benefit of my critique.

We have a shop practices manual that covers safety and standard processes for doing the defined services that we perform. It is an evolving document, but every time we make a major change to it, we print it out with a receipt form they have to sign and turn in. Do they actually read it and learn from it? Follow-on observation and training are required, but they can't say they didn't know the rules. Vin Waterhouse is big on documenting shop procedures and he offers tools to help you get started. Google him.

ATI has an owner's marketing class that is very heavy on internet and SEO and it will boggle your mind. We went from doing our own web page to letting Kukui do it for us and they are big on landing pages for specific searches, so now if somebody searches for BMW service, they land on a page of ours that tells them we are BMW specialists (true). Suddenly we are finding we are getting a lot more Euro work. We do a lot of Facebook and really like the "boost your post" option. It really works and you can throttle how much you are spending. ATI monitors Google's ever-changing rules for who gets top search billing and keeps us posted. Google+ has a small share of the social market, but it's very important to, guess who, Google, so it's important to you. Don't ignore it.

At a recent NAPA Autocare symposium, we got an in-depth look at Auto Vitals. At that same show, my son won a hefty door prize which we asked to trade in on a "starter kit" for AV. NAPA hooked us up with two Ipad Minis with Otterbox covers and a gift card to cover a big chunk of the install. My plan is to document our experience here in this topic. This is NOT a sales pitch as we have no idea how the system performs in daily use. They guarantee it will raise your ARO. As I have documented on the forum previously, we have used an automated courtesy check program for the past seven or eight years, but it's not a StarWars grade system with tablets, cloud, cameras, etc. Plus AV will give our writers a "command console" that interfaces with ROWriter and feeds work to the techs on their tablets. So far, I have set up the two Ipad minis. Like a dope, On the first one I also upgraded it to IOS 8. Guess what? AV is not compatible with IOS yet, and will not run. On the other mini, that I didn't upgrade, it loaded and runs fine. So I have to figure out how to back the first one down. We will eventually need at least four more tablets and I plan to mix it up between androids and ipads. I have actually run the Digital Vehicle Inspection on my Samsung smart phone, but the added real estate of a tablet is helpful. The app is available out on the Apple store and Google Play store for free. AutoVitals Paperless Back shop. Yesterday they remoted in to our servers and loaded up their program that interfaces with RO Writer. I not only pulls history but it puts techs' findings back into ROW. On the tablet, the tech sees vehicle history and current maintenance requirements. This should prevent us recommending services we performed last month! For some reason, it takes a week to ten biz days to get us set up to actually turn on the console, so we are in wait mode. They have a series of webinars that take users down a progressive path to learn the system. More to follow...

We use Hot Rod like Tires Too suggested above. Great rates, free machine. They ship you the machine, you plug it in and start swiping. They are a preferred provider for the Virginia Automotive Association.

We have a sales coach working with our writers - not automotive sales, just sales techniques. Our SWs are great at presenting maintenance issues the techs find, but they have a hard time closing. For instance, they will say "Mr. Jones, your transmission fluid is discolored and, if ignored could cause some serious problems in the future. Next time you're in we should plan on taking care of that." Easy out for both the writer and customer - no commitment - probably won't ever happen. How about "Why don't we take care of that today so you don't have to worry about any longer?" Sounds simple, but it takes guts. In general sales terms, it's called ASK FOR THE ORDER. The next part is overcoming objections. Customer says they're thinking about selling the car, but we all know they'll be driving that thing three years from now. Our sales coach started with phone skills and we sound a LOT better now. We started using the Courtesy Check Wizard about eight years ago and it's part of our DNA now. We have a close relationship with the developer that allowed us to steer the evolution of the product, but the developer has no plans for incorporating images, which seems to be the main selling point of the new breed of digital vehicle inspection programs. I'm still not convinced that a soccer mom wants to see pictures of her SUV brake pads, but it's not a bad capability to have. My main attraction with the AutoVitals program is the workflow capability that allows the SW to feed work to the techs. As far as being "top tier" there's a lot of competition for that honor, but I would put us among the most improved. I'm fortunate to have a generation under me that is TOTALLY devoted to employing best practices and process orientation to running our shops. We put aside our egos and listen to what our coach tells us and what we learn from our 20 group. When that group gets together, we rank top notch in some aspects of the business and not so hot on others, but we are tackling the issues one by one. Best part is that in spite of the demands we put on our staff for constant improvement, we enjoy working together. Some day I'll tell you about the hard times and dark days we endured to get where we are.

Wow, bstewart, I wish we were hitting the kind of numbers you mentioned, but the reality for us is closer to ten percent. I've got a very professional (female) writer in each shop with an assistant doing the grunt work (cores, parts expediting, paperwork, blah, blah). In the past, I have had writers who were higher pressure sales people, but I couldn't stand to be in the same room with them. Our current writers are involved in long-term training for sales technique (ask for the order). Trying to hit a happy medium. The Courtesy Check Wizard is meant to be a no-frills "record the findings and present them to the customer" product. It's currently $295/year. They have no plans to take it to the web or add images, video, etc. You can download it and use it free for a few weeks. We are test driving AutoVitals to see if it's a good fit for us and if their claims about increasing ARO are true.

ATSAutomotive is right. One mail blast will not work a miracle. You have to get in the public's face repeatedly and over a long period of time to get lasting value from a campaign.

Whatever you do, keep accurate attendance records (a formal system that requires employees to sign off on their hours) and pay overtime. Don't kid yourself into thinking there is some workaround for overtime. One angry employee filing a wage/hour complaint can make your life miserable and you are guilty until you prove you are innocent. We have put an amazing amount of time (and our coach's time) developing tech pay matrices that let us determine if a tech can work overtime and keep us within our labor margin targets. Hope I didn't spin this off topic.

New techs are trained up front in how to perform high quality checks and the results are recorded in the program available at courtesycheckwizard.com. It stores check results and lets your SW recall them any time. It also calculates an approximate value for the issues found in the beta version we are testing. In addition, it give you stats for each tech i.e., number of checks performed and the average value and depth of checks. Techs need to have access to a computer to enter their checks.

In Virginia, we had to qualify as SWAM (small, woman owned and minority) business. We qualified as small - under 25 million a year. We also get a lot of business from GSA (federal Government Services Agency). The SWAM thing lets us do the local parks and some police vehicles. Each of these brings unique problems, like right now we have waited 30 days to get paid 7 grand for an engine in a parks vehicle, but they told us up front it would take that long. GSA won't let us do tires and they have some constraints on what they will pay for services. Look at the big businesses in your area. Some of them have a process for becoming a "provider" of goods or services.

I've been wrestling with a question about how much technician-recommended maintenance a good service writer should be able to sell. Let's assume a writer who is just an "order taker" (just writes what the customer asks for - no upsell) does $10k a week. Our courtesy check program tells us the approximate value of all "issues" found by techs during their inspections. At our busier shop, it is usually about $95,000 each week. How much of that $95k should you expect a good writer to sell?

.5 for oil change with courtesy check. My guys have learned that a good courtesy check creates the work they will be doing tomorrow, next week, next month.

http://courtesycheckwizard.com/images/cc_report_.pdf

Ha! My personal restoration projects include a 1970 Land Rover series II, a 1967 Daimler V8 250 and a 1968 Morris Minor sedan all lined up waiting for my attention. Somebody remember to ask me in a year or two if I've made any headway.

Exactly right, Tires Too. These are tools that are supposed to provide a return on investment. First, it has to be a good tool, second, you have to commit to use them as they were intended. Labor profit management requires that you have techs punch in and out of each job, each break, etc to effectively track where their time is going. Used to its fullest, both you and techs see the inefficiencies in their day. If you can measure it, you can manage it.

Unfortunately, the "you touched it, you own it" principle applies here. If you are dealing with a reasonable customer, you should be able to work out a compromise, but it doesn't sound like you are in that situation. Do you want to keep this customer? Will they trash your reputation if they aren't happy with your solution? Most shop owners have had to bite the bullet on similar situations just to make them go away. The problem is knowing when to back away from an ugly vehicle that may have multiple problems, but nothing offends a customer more than telling them you don't want to work on their car. There is no correct answer here. You have to cut your losses and move on to profitable work.

We currently employ a local sales consultant to work directly with our SAs. He observes their interactions with customers, monitors phone calls and helps them hone their sales skills (ask for the order!). It was tough at first and not well received, particularly by the older hands. Some of them would "poison the well" for the younger folks, bad-mouthing the process, but that has passed and we have complete buy-in. They hear the improvement in how we sound on the phone and how we sound and appear to customers in general and it seems to give them some more pride in what they are doing.

Mudlick does a great job on postcard design and will help you tailor the demographic you want to hit. They have helped us target hybrid owners to develop awareness of our capabilities in that specialized market. They are very good at what they do. You need to establish goals before you invest and then track results.

Our advisors are paid based on a matrix that increases their base pay based on sales and gross profit. They are evaluated on ARO, parts margin, and labor margin, which is a factor of how effectively they are using the labor resources available to them. They are expected to adhere to a fairly strict routine on the phone, including getting the customer's name and phone number up front and addressing the customer by name while addressing their issues. We monitor phone calls and listen to recordings of them as a group. They are expected to go the the vehicle with the customer at the drop to look the car over and develop a relationship. We are not perfect at any of this, but we work with them to get buy-in and establish goals and, to a large degree, it's working.

Let's face it - the guy who goes to the corner auto parts store for a free "diagnosis" is never going to be a good quality customer for your good quality shop. Let them struggle with the misdiagnosed problems and you continue to provide great service to your customers who are interested in professional service for their cars. How many counter guys at Advance are aware that the PCM now controls battery charging on modern cars? They just want to sell a battery or alternator rather than establishing a relationship with their customer.

Welcome and best of luck. This is a challenging and rewarding business. What are your plans for the future?