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Ep 29 - Coaching Call #5 | Pizza Party For The Boyz
251 Plays12 days ago
I only mention my sponsors because they have truly made a difference at my shops. I believe they can do the same for you. Visit their site below and learn more!
Today, it's coaching call number 5. This one is a bit different than the previous four, though. Why? I actually did my job! The strategy Matt and I have been working on is working well for my small shop, but it's not time to stop and celebrate. There is more work to be done. These conversations are a glimpse into what Elite Worldwide does for shops everywhere. Do you have them helping you?
00:00 Matt is bouche
08:19 Efficient Vehicle Maintenance Integration
11:10 Boosting Adoption of BG Services and Tires
19:19 "Managing Warranty Comebacks Efficiently"
25:52 Warranty Impacts on Free Labor
30:38 "Technician Pay Structure Adjustments"
33:58 Complex Repairs Undervalued in Labor Guides
43:23 Inexpensive Repair Causes Engine Failure
44:01 Ethical Sales and Repair Decisions
51:11 Customer Engagement & Service Strategy
58:04 Efficient Scheduling Boosts Car Count
01:00:50 Optimizing Consistent Car Count
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Repair Best Practices
00:00:00
Speaker
the fix for that is just don't have any comebacks. Fix it right the first time. Change it. You know, you can always pull the the dealership vocabulary and just leave yourself a loophole for everything and then nothing is a comeback.
00:00:10
Speaker
To determine where your coolant leak is coming from, we're going to have to do tires and brakes. Yes. And then from there, we'll have to retest and check and see.
00:00:20
Speaker
The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we, or our guests may say, do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have.
00:00:34
Speaker
There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along.
Meet the Host: Mike Gallum
00:00:41
Speaker
So without further ado, it's time for Confessions of a Shop Owner with your host, Mike Gallum.
00:00:53
Speaker
What's up, Buttercup?
00:00:57
Speaker
I wish I had a good reply back to that, but I don't. Well, you're wearing that that super cute pink shirt right there, so I thought that I should just come over the top rope with the with the sweetness.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, ah a long time ago, my grandfather told me, you know, if you don't feel good, look good. And so I woke up this morning, and I watched the news, and I said, man, it's 48 degrees outside.
00:01:24
Speaker
And ah in in we're in May now. So I was like, you know, that's, I need to put something on at least makes me feel like it's going to be nice outside when I go out. So. That's pretty nice right now. I put beautiful beach shirt, you know.
00:01:38
Speaker
is that ah Is that a Vineyard Vines? Is that whale? That is Vineyard Vines, yeah. Okay. You've always been kind of a bougie bitch. so ah it's It's more of my wife. I have not picked out any clothes for myself in the last 12 years.
00:01:53
Speaker
The ones that I have are buried in a and a separate closet because they're they're not good enough to be in my main closet. Well, you know what? Life goals. I just want to have two c closets.
00:02:04
Speaker
You want to have two closets? My wife doesn't mock me because actually own more pairs of shoes than she does. Right. And it's not because I've got a lot of shoes. It's just that she is not a shoe person.
00:02:17
Speaker
She's got like... Crocs and Danskos for work and some sandals and like the bare minimum of heels and a pair of sneakers and that's it. So, well, my problem is I don't throw things away. So I still have like the same pair of sneakers from like 10 years ago.
00:02:36
Speaker
that we did an entire truckload of stuff to, uh, with love from Jesus. Uh, know, Amanda had to wash and fold and sort by size and label and bag separately with labels and all that kind of stuff. But we did do a massive, uh, closet clean out across the house for the kids and us as well.
00:02:56
Speaker
Uh, little spring cleaning. So hopefully that'll be a benefit. but anyway, I don't think anybody wants to hear about the condition of my closet. Um, what's it for those of you that don't know?
Impact of Coaching with Matt Loft
00:03:07
Speaker
I'm talking today with Matt Loft and he is the director of coaching with elite worldwide. And he is my one-on-one business coach for my Hillsborough street location. This is coaching call number five. And this is a window into what it's like to have a one-on-one coach with elite worldwide.
00:03:22
Speaker
um And if this is the first one you've listened to, I would encourage you to go back and start with coaching call number one. That's how they're labeled in the podcast ah catalog. So just find coaching call number one. Start from there.
00:03:33
Speaker
You'll learn about my business and the progression that we've had over the last four months um as we go through this interview. year-long process of a monthly coaching call and trying to get the hot mess that is my business ah straightened out. And ah to be clear, anything in my business that is a hot mess is 100% on me and not on my guys. I am definitely um the restrictor plate on that high-performance motor, no doubt.
00:03:58
Speaker
So here we are. Let's talk about April, our best month ever. at Carfix Hillsborough Street. ah The team really seemed to hit their stride. We had a good car count because school's in session and we're coming into summer and it's travel season, all those things that feed into typically good good months.
00:04:20
Speaker
We've got a great team up front. We've got three technicians in the back that we have confidence in all three of them. And it's just kind of time to hit the ground running and and they certainly did that, so.
00:04:32
Speaker
What do you want to talk about, sir? Yeah, well, first off, congratulations on April. So kind of where I was going to start, we like to celebrate wins with our clients. So we've gone through the first quarter together.
00:04:45
Speaker
Here's the deal. i I like to think that I'm pretty good at running an auto repair shop. It's what I've done for 20 plus years, but I'm not good at managing a marketing budget and all the different facets of a truly well-rounded marketing plan.
Marketing and Management Strategies
00:04:58
Speaker
There's mail, there's local advertising, there's website, there's Google AdWords, there's, you know, all the different things that go into that. And it's just not what I'm good at. So what I've chosen to do is to buy myself the time to focus on what I am good at, while having someone else execute on all of those things at a way higher level than anything I could ever do.
00:05:21
Speaker
That's what turnkey auto marketing does for me. So if you feel like you could use some of that same magic, I'm going to recommend that you go to turnkeyautomarketing.com, get a free consultation, tell them that I sent you, ah tell them that Confessions of a Shop Owner sent you, you won't be disappointed.
00:05:38
Speaker
Look, when I first opened my shop, I thought my old systems would keep up, the software that I had would continue to evolve. But as we grew the slow estimates, scattered workflow,
00:05:49
Speaker
increasing downtime, really just, it was becoming a real problem. That's why I switched to TechMetric. It's not just software. It's a complete shop management system that makes my life easier.
00:06:00
Speaker
Smart jobs, instant estimates, integrated payments, integrated financing options. I mean, it allows me to focus on the work that actually makes me money and not get bogged down in the other details.
00:06:11
Speaker
My shop's repair orders have jumped over 300% since switching to TechMetric. And when I need help, their support team responds in real time. actually was online with them asking questions just this week, and I got answers in minutes rather than having to wait for callbacks and emails days later.
00:06:26
Speaker
If your system is holding you back, it's time for a change. Tap the link in the show notes and see how TechMetric can help you move your shop forward. our Our reporting averages for the first quarter, we were averaging $21,300 weekly sales.
00:06:40
Speaker
in Q1, uh, April, which is our first month there of Q2. And for the first week, uh, we're averaging $30,846 in sales.
00:06:51
Speaker
and sales So that's a massive improvement there. So congratulations. I know that, you know, some of that's we, you know, we're getting the store staffed and kind of getting everybody up to speed on the processes there, but there's just some pretty big, pretty big W's, uh, to celebrate our,
00:07:08
Speaker
hours per RO went from 2.4 to 3.1. ah three point one So those are, and that's a, that's a pretty big and improvement right there. And then probably the biggest improvement that you have have had has been in the discovered services category and are We're up about $600.
00:07:32
Speaker
So from $1,600 of average discovered services in q one to $2,300 of discovered services in Q2. um So that's that's pretty massive there. And obviously that's correlated into an improvement in our ah average repair order size as well.
00:07:48
Speaker
So our average repair order from from q one went from six hundred and twenty eight dollars all the way up to a whopping $807 in April.
00:07:59
Speaker
So those are, those are all massive in the right direction. Definitely in the right direction. And, uh, you know, those are, that's worth a pizza party for the guys. And, you know, one topping little Caesars, one topping, on why one little Caesars cheese only pay extra for your own toppings.
00:08:19
Speaker
There are five of you here. There are eight slices on the pizza. We don't need two pizzas. You're good. um So I would say that there's some technology that played into that, but mostly it's the people.
00:08:30
Speaker
um We have started using Detect Auto ah to good effect to, you know, you can kind of customize it to what your DVI standards are and your maintenance recommendation schedule is.
00:08:42
Speaker
um And then it will review your local history and Carfax service history. And since all three of our stores are integrated with Carfax, it's effectively searching all three stores history and Carfax.
00:08:53
Speaker
um and compare that with your maintenance schedule and automatically recommend those things. So that is helping to build out ah the DVI with maintenance recommendations that maybe we weren't as effective on.
00:09:07
Speaker
And then we started using HubShop solutions, which I think we've talked about for estimating. yeah um And they're turning estimates quickly and they're building out everything right that we see. And so those are the two pieces of technology. But then ah Blaine, who is our senior technician over both Raleigh locations, has moved his base of operations over to that store. And as he goes, so goes average written repair order. He's just ah really on top of that and a really good leader by example
Technology and Team Performance
00:09:38
Speaker
there.
00:09:39
Speaker
um And then, you know, Stephen has been on top of it as well. And and John, the service advisor, has been crushing it with Kit's help. So the team has really come together and meshed really well and they're using the technology really well. And, you know, I see a thousand dollar arrow on the horizon for sure.
00:09:56
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. You guys are well on your way for it, but yeah, I would, I would celebrate all those victories. Those are some pretty massive victories. um And, you know, make sure you make sure you, especially you give Steven and John some paths on the back. Cause they've kind of been there from the beginning with it. So yeahp absolutely.
00:10:15
Speaker
They definitely deserve. Deserve the attaboys there.
00:10:19
Speaker
What have you had going on in April that you feel like you're, you know, you kind of have some low hanging fruit that you're, you're looking to try to get a little bit more out of. Have you had some challenges?
00:10:32
Speaker
What do you have on the horizon to try to improve some things? I think there's some opportunity for um increasing our effectiveness. And we've talked about this for the last two months, right? um Tire sales and fluid maintenance services as needed.
00:10:47
Speaker
um The volume of fluid services that we're doing is really low. Low enough that it would be lower than the averages you would expect to see for our car count and the average mileage.
00:10:59
Speaker
So um one of the things that you have seen with our average quote going up is our closing rate has petered down a little bit. And yeah I think those two it just kind of happens.
00:11:10
Speaker
Sure. But I want to seek out – some training from BG is the chemical service that we use on just how to effectively communicate the benefits of BG services when appropriate ah so that we can get a little bit higher rate of adoption on those when they're recommended.
00:11:30
Speaker
um And as we've talked about getting a little bit better at selling tires and finding the opportunity for tires there, I've got i've got a message out to my sign guy on getting some flag signs.
00:11:43
Speaker
Uh, uh, for tires and that kind of stuff to put out. I've gotten Steven's commitment that if I get a tire rack and, and, uh, fill it full tires and they'll roll it out every day and put the flags out and put them and take them up every night.
00:11:55
Speaker
And I think as long as they're temporary signs that are moved in and out every day, the city won't get on me about signage ordinances. Right. So, yeah. Okay.
00:12:06
Speaker
Awesome. So the, the closing percentage is one of the things that I did want to talk to you about today. And again, this is, we've talked about this before. I'm not a, I'm not a firm believer in beating that number up until we have everything else kind of established and in place. And everybody's got a good habit on inspections and following the 300% rule and all that, because we can, we can manipulate that number pretty, pretty easily to our own detriment.
00:12:32
Speaker
Um, So, but I do think that there is some opportunity that you have left because you have, I mean, $2,300 of discovered services per vehicle coming in is very strong.
00:12:45
Speaker
um So like you said, I think
Challenges in Selling Maintenance Services
00:12:47
Speaker
the next opportunity there is, is trying to creep that closing percentage up to try to grab more, try to get that, that ADS, the ARO up to, you know, somewhere near closer to a thousand dollars.
00:12:58
Speaker
um Where do you feel like the gap is at the moment?
00:13:05
Speaker
think it's confidence selling ah maintenance items, right? yeah it's It's easy to sell broken stuff. It's easy to sell check engine lights and and you know vibrations and noises.
00:13:15
Speaker
um The challenge is selling and the $100,000 service related items, that that type of stuff. It's just not something that we've done a lot of.
00:13:27
Speaker
right you know our our ma Our maintenance to repair mix has always been skewed. so think that's the the next step in evolution. And our target right now is 40% closing rate.
00:13:40
Speaker
And you know I think a lot of folks say that 50% should be the standard that you aim for, but I guess it depends on your average discovered services, right? you know if if There's a lot of factors. Your your area is is going to factor into that.
00:13:55
Speaker
um What your price point is for the area is going to factor into that. Obviously the skill level and, you know, at the counter, the types of jobs you're recommending.
00:14:06
Speaker
Um, there's a lot of, that's why I don't get too terribly, um, hyper-focused on that number, but you're not doing a lot of, you're not doing a lot of heavy drivability stuff.
00:14:18
Speaker
Um, so you're not condemned. It's not like you have a high ADS, but you're, you know, you're condemning four engines a day. that are gonna have a low close ratio. um So i I can, we've talked about the mix of work that you have coming in. So I feel pretty confident that we should be able to grab a little bit more of of that number If you're like me, you know there's always hidden revenue in missed maintenance sales or overlooked customer concerns.
00:14:46
Speaker
Detect Auto helps auto shops unlock that revenue by analyzing vehicle service histories, pinpointing maintenance recommendations, and equipping advisors to confidently address customer questions.
00:14:58
Speaker
It's easy, it integrates with your existing software, and your team will love it. ah Check out DetectAuto.com and see how your shop can stop guessing and start selling better service recommendations today.
00:15:11
Speaker
And the only other thing that I see that's, I think, some fruit on the tree to be able to pull off is, and I'd like your input on what you think could be the cause of it, but your door rate I have listed at 201. Is that correct?
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah. Technically, yes. So it, uh, and our effective labor rate is pretty far down from that.
00:15:34
Speaker
Um, and that's mostly because of things like free Diag, plays into that. Uh, Discount to all changes, free tire rotations and repairs and and state inspections is what drags that down a lot.
00:15:50
Speaker
And then, you know, some of the canned jobs for maintenance items, that kind of stuff. We'll we'll pull that down a little bit. But um what is where's my effective labor rate on the sheet?
00:16:04
Speaker
There we go. OK, all the way to the left. Um, it was the last three weeks specifically, it's been really low. Uh, you know, my target for effective labor rate is 150, 160 in that range.
00:16:17
Speaker
Um, and so I probably need to dig into that a little bit and see why that has, has sunk. Yep. So, and exactly like you said, just for the listeners out there, anytime I see that number starting to creep down,
00:16:33
Speaker
I'm trying to take a look at especially the can services, like you said, state inspections, oil changes. And I mean, your, your ARO says that we're doing a good job of discovering and selling, you know, repairs off of those. But what I'm wondering is, is do we have a mix of, of heavy repairs that came in and then we lost opportunity on things like the quick services and you have some things in there that are, are dragging that number down.
00:17:00
Speaker
because your repair ticket should bring that, that effective labor rate back up. And the only thing, obviously the worst case scenario there is that we have, um, my dog coming to say hello.
00:17:15
Speaker
Uh, I think the worst case scenario is, is that you have somebody discounting labor, right? And I don't think that you would have that, but Yeah, I don't think that I have that. um You know, overall GP for the month was TechMetric was 59.5, which is, know, I'd like it to be 62, but honestly, that's better than it's been in a long time.
00:17:38
Speaker
Sure. Yeah.
00:17:41
Speaker
I don't think I have any emotional discounting at the door. i think if anything, we had some warranty comebacks that ate into it. Uh, and, and you know, that's one thing that you'll see on the reporting here is I don't have effective comeback tracking.
00:17:56
Speaker
um Um, number of comebacks and amount you have dollar amount. So how would I, let's say, uh,
00:18:06
Speaker
ah let we put a water pump on two years ago, it comes back and it's leaking. So we need to replace a water pump and ah we do that. And it would have been $1,600 water pump at retail.
00:18:20
Speaker
um Is that a $1,600 comeback or is it just our cost? Or if I file a labor claim and I get the part reimbursed, is it just the gap?
00:18:31
Speaker
How do you recommend I track that? So we put it all in This is my personal process. All of those ways that you just described are are valid. And you could make a point for all three of them. i think it I like to see it at the retail rate because I think that makes the biggest impact to the advisor.
00:18:51
Speaker
um
00:18:55
Speaker
And what I mean impact is, is there...
00:18:59
Speaker
While the technician is in control of the quality of their work, the advisor is kind of in in control of the entire process, right? So it's easy to sell sell sell, sell, sell, but sometimes there's an impact of selling.
00:19:12
Speaker
And not to say that we shouldn't sell a job, but we need to be careful about how we're selling, how we're estimating, what type of parts we're using. I like them to be able to see the impact of you know ah of what a warranty comeback could be, because the majority of warranty comebacks are not gonna be tech related if you have a good tech staff.
00:19:31
Speaker
The majority of them are gonna be part related, some some
00:19:37
Speaker
either not related to the job at all. And it was another another component in the system, but wasn't wasn't part of the repair, if that makes sense. That's why I'm a big fan of calling them rechecks and not comebacks because nobody gets,
00:19:50
Speaker
ah you don't you you don't have to walk out there to the shop like that. hand out the comeback form to the technician, you know?
00:20:00
Speaker
But we we track it as a full retail cost. And then, like you said, if there is a labor claim attached to it, then I'm going to attach i'm goingnna apply that labor claim payment to the to that open invoice. And that goes inside of our accounts receivable until we get the labor claim back. And that helps me track labor claim payments.
00:20:17
Speaker
And then when I close it out, I close it out with the gap as a write-off. into a write-off account or a warranty account. So then that feeds into QuickBooks into your pro service reporting.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah. And it goes into my other expenses or other income as a negative. So, um, in tech, so my guys are paid a percentage of gross profit.
00:20:43
Speaker
Um, and if it closes to AR at retail, then they're going to get paid on that profit.
00:20:53
Speaker
That's not real because you're not, you're not losing money to be right at all. It's going to in as an, but you're paying because you're paying off of tech metric.
00:21:01
Speaker
um Are you paying weekly or monthly? Weekly. Okay.
00:21:12
Speaker
I will tell you, i do that as well and I pay it.
00:21:20
Speaker
I'm not saying that's the right thing to do. I do.
Incentives and Ethical Sales Practices
00:21:25
Speaker
the
00:21:29
Speaker
I'm sorry, negative. I do not pay that. yeah floor I'm sorry. I do not pay that. I'm not saying that that's the right thing to do necessarily. I pay technician time on the ticket.
00:21:42
Speaker
You could make an argument that if we're going to pay technician time, we should pay service advisor time as well because they are you know they I factor that in their job, but it does come out. um So if the recheck is a result of a technician mistake, do they get paid to do it a second time?
00:22:00
Speaker
they They do not get their production bonus, but ah that my technicians are hourly with hybrid systems, so they get their hourly pay with their production bonus. A lot of times I will... um
00:22:18
Speaker
It also may not go back to the original technician.
00:22:22
Speaker
depending on who the technician was and what the concern was, you know, what the recheck concern was. um And so if it does go to the second, then I pay the production time to the other technician. Got it. Because that's just.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, because you should, because they have nothing to do with the comeback. So I feel like, ah you know, a lot of times a customer perceived comeback as a result of a failure of communication on the front counter.
00:22:50
Speaker
Um, you know, we said, yeah, you just need this muffler slide bearing. It's going to fix your problem. And that's all you need. It's going to be $800. Oh, well we got the muffler slide bearing in and then we discovered that it needs this too. Right. And then you got a problem, right? So they failed to communicate clearly and effectively. And, you know, so like if, if the store has to take a big old bite of a juicy poop sandwich as a result of that failure, I'm not sure that they should get paid,
00:23:18
Speaker
ah percentage of that poop sandwich. Right? Yeah. So I'm in agreement with that. I'm like, I said, we're, we're a, we're a true gross profit incentive. Um, so if it comes out of gross profit, it comes out.
00:23:31
Speaker
So are you paying monthly off of the P and l gross profit or? No, I pay, I pay weekly. Okay. And so what I'll do is I'll, I'll go through and do a warranty payments, you know so that's one of my payment methods is warranty and we'll subtract out warranty payments.
00:23:48
Speaker
That makes sense. Okay. It's not too hard. It's not cumbersome to track that. No. Okay.
00:23:57
Speaker
If you have, um, Ms. Jones comes back in for her regular service. And we did her water pump two years ago and we find that her water pump is leaking again and she needs brakes and tires. And she says, good ahead and take care of the brakes and tires.
00:24:11
Speaker
Oh, by the way, we're going to give you a new water pump because it's still under warranty, whatever. um Is that one ticket or do you break the water pump up on a separate ticket from the brakes and the tires? Separate ticket.
00:24:22
Speaker
Okay. All right. Yep. And that, I mean, that will affect, you know, some of your, your micro numbers there, you know, like your car count and your ARO and all of those kinds of things. Yeah. and so If it's affecting that, you got big problems.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And you would, you would rather fix your big problems that you have with comebacks than worry about it dragging down some of the other numbers. um So I,
00:24:52
Speaker
I there's no easy way to do it. I don't mean there's no painless way to do it Let me rephrase that. There's some easier way. There's some easy ways to do it but there's no painless way.
00:25:01
Speaker
But you have to know what that is. We don't have a huge problem with come back. So it's not a it's not something that's very painful to do. ah the The fix for that is just don't have any comebacks. Just fix it right the first time. change you you know You can always pull the the dealership vocabulary and just leave yourself a loophole for everything and then nothing is a comeback.
00:25:23
Speaker
Thanks for signing back to just dealerships. We're going to have to start with tires today.
00:25:34
Speaker
To determine where your coolant leak is coming from, we're going to have to do tires and brakes. Yes. And then from there, we'll have to retest and check and see. Yeah. Yeah. But no, so yeah, i mean, I think i would look into that though, because that you're one hundred percent right. Just getting back to the effective hourly rate conversation we were having.
00:25:51
Speaker
if you If you are having free labor tickets you know off of warranty services, that can definitely impact that. And that's a pretty big drop from 201 to So I would just make sure we don't have a bunch of push cars. Push cars to me would be how many how many Diag tickets are you doing for you know for the one hour free Diag and that we're not selling off of?
00:26:15
Speaker
I would wanna know that. I would wanna know our rate is what our warranty rate is at the moment. And then, you know, making sure that our, our canned package pricing is not ridiculously low.
00:26:32
Speaker
Um, I don't, your car counts, not super duper high. So I don't think you have a huge, and your ARO is strong enough that I don't think that you have a big issue with inspection. ah A lot of state inspection only tickets, but you know, as well as I do, that's ah Um, yeah, I did 54 state inspections last month. you know, you did what now? 54. So they did two a day. half Yeah.
00:26:59
Speaker
You're good. Um, but that's, those are usually the first few places that I'm looking at when effective labor rates really low. How many state inspection only tickets are we doing? Um, doing some can, can service audits just to make sure that we're not doing $10, $10 an hour all changes.
00:27:18
Speaker
Um, and then looking at warranty rate and then, like I said, push cars, especially especially with what you're your, your DAG rate strategy is.
00:27:31
Speaker
Um, so I forgot about this. I also pay the guys to do their own DVIs, uh, over there. Uh, okay. And that's, so I'm just looking at my, um, sales by job category report and TechMetric.
00:27:47
Speaker
So DVI's paid out a bunch of hours at no income. um You know, Diag paid out a fair amount of hours at no income. State inspections, 54 of them, almost 100 oil changes.
00:28:00
Speaker
So that's low labor. So yeah, you know, tire services. Yeah, there's a fair amount of bleed there, but I need to see if there's other stuff that should be going out at a good effective labor rate that's not.
00:28:13
Speaker
um And so are you guys flat rate? A hybrid. Everybody. Two guys are flat rate with a minimum guarantee and one guy is salary with bonus.
00:28:29
Speaker
Okay. Not telling you have to do this. I would think about doing this. um And this is something that you would have to go back and get some buy-in with the team on and and maybe roll it out slowly or and just let them know that you're going to check the math to make sure that it's not affecting what their production hours is or production pay is.
00:28:49
Speaker
But i've I've helped other clients and we've actually done it my store as well where we've increased the labor multiplier just a little bit and then went to the commodity services where we have a reduced labor rate.
00:29:01
Speaker
And we're like our effective labor rate on an oil change might be $40 an hour. And I'm paying a technician, you know, 0.75 to do an oil change and DVI, right? Well, that's that's a horrible effective labor rate.
00:29:16
Speaker
And so what we've done is we've reduced that down, you know, to something that's very nominal. And so they're not getting ah they're not getting a large production bonus off of that oil change, but I'm making up for it with the the labor multiplier inside of repair tickets. So when we sell repairs, um you know, and when they're doing repair work, they're getting, they're getting that absorbed into, into the repair tickets.
00:29:40
Speaker
I think the multiplier increase just has to be enough to offset whatever they're going to lose. Right. Yep. So if I did a hundred oil changes last month and I paid a half hour for each one and, you know, we did 200 dbis last month and i paid a half hour for each one of those those are not the actual numbers i pay yep but if i cut those in half but then i went from a 10 labor bump to a 20 labor bump on anything that you have to look up the labor time on because if you're looking up the labor time that's very high effective labor rate stuff yep so we're shortening the time
00:30:18
Speaker
on the low labor rate stuff and we're increasing the time on the high labor rate stuff and the net effect is a significant gain and effective labor rate without punishing the, uh, the technicians.
00:30:29
Speaker
Yes. Right. And it's a huge net gain of labor profit. Yeah, for sure. Um, I think it makes a lot of sense. And again, the, the big thing there is making sure that, because this is going to,
00:30:44
Speaker
the flatmate rate The flat rate mentality on the technician side is there no matter what the pay scale is. They still yeah you know they still relate everything back to the book says i should get paid this.
00:30:57
Speaker
um And so it just it's going to take a little bit of education and a little and and a request of a little bit of trust there to say, hey, listen, if for whatever reason this is impacting your average hourly ah performance, we're going to adjust that.
00:31:15
Speaker
accordingly until we hit the sweet spot of this being correct. The intent is not to take hours away from the technician. The intent is to change the hours from low labor produce, you know low, low labor charge services to higher labor charge services.
00:31:31
Speaker
It's just, it's just changing how you get paid. It's not, it shouldn't change how they get paid. Well, I think the way to do it is, uh, take it even a step further is just analyze the previous three months and say,
00:31:44
Speaker
here's how many oil changes you did and how many DVIs you did and whatever jobs you're going to shorten. And here's how much you were paid. And if you were paid this much less, it would have cost you this many hours.
00:31:56
Speaker
Well, here's all the, all the high ELR jobs you did. And if I had added 10% to the time on all those, that's how many hours you would have gained. Yes. So the net effect for you would be a gain of X. And that's not just this month or last month. It's,
00:32:11
Speaker
Here's the number for the last three months. I promise you this isn't going to hurt you. And if it does bring it to me and I'll fix it. Yeah. And the other thing is as the selling gets better, it, it will actually be a net gain for them.
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah. It'll be a net gain because they'll, they'll be getting more per build hour. You know, it won't be one to one anymore. It'll be one to, you know, one to 1.3. or one to one point, whatever you pick it to be.
00:32:36
Speaker
oh So they'll, the efficiency picks up, the productivity picks up, um the effective labor rate picks up. It, it winds up being a net gain across the board.
00:32:48
Speaker
What are you seeing as kind of an average across all of your clients or across elites clients for how much of a labor multiplier they're putting in place? And I know that y'all have got tire dealers and Euro guys and giant shops and tiny shops and everything else.
00:33:05
Speaker
It varies. My personal opinion is I try to get people at a minimum of 1.2. um I'm not saying that's where everybody's at. This is a very touchy subject with a lot of people because there's a lot of people that feel that it's unethical to do
00:33:24
Speaker
my My rebuttal to them is if it's so unethical, why are so many shops under 100% productivity? Right, and I know that there are some poorly run shops from an efficiency standpoint, and I get that, and I'm i'm not trying to pass the cost of the inefficiency onto the customer.
00:33:45
Speaker
At the same time though, the the repair times, the repair manual has not been friendly to repair shops over the last 10 years. it's you know the the repairs yeah Simple repairs are becoming more complex and they're not being reflected into labor guides. We do a a moderate amount of extended warranty work and you know extended warranty companies are gonna go 110% by whatever the exact book time is
00:34:17
Speaker
So they hit us for a transmission the other day for eight hours, which was fine. And, but they would not add any more time in for the programming because it wasn't specified in the, the R and R procedure that there was a separate time to program the transmission. So it must've been incorporated into the eight hours.
00:34:38
Speaker
which you know as well as I do, that's not possible, right? And then we're going to go, if you think about everything that it goes into do a job like a transmission service, after the service, hopefully we're going to go test drive that vehicle.
00:34:53
Speaker
which is an unbillable time. I dare a lot of people to go put test drive labor on your ticket and see what time. I mean, there's people out there that do it. And if you can get away with it and not get yelled at, by all means do it.
00:35:06
Speaker
so i' But I want you to get paid for those things. But strategically speaking, you may not be able to have a breakout of a separate labor line. There's a lot of labor loss in our process sometimes, I guess is what I'm getting at.
00:35:19
Speaker
So, you know, if you want your technician to look up the repair, you know, the repair procedure, he should, right? But that's part of the time, the time he gets the keys, pulls it in the bay, goes over there, types it into Identifix or all data, looks at the repair, you know, repair procedure for the service.
00:35:36
Speaker
That's not built into the, you know, the six hour job. you know, but he still has to do that. So um I'm, I am a big believer in the labor multiplier. um Especially if you're in an area where excessive rust, you know, vehicle condition, mean, the cars are getting older now. i mean, we went from having eight, nine-year-old cars a couple of years ago, we're all the way up to almost 13-year-old cars now.
00:35:59
Speaker
So the condition of the vehicles that we're working on is lower. They've been touched a lot more times before we get them. So there's a lot more problems engineered into ah general repair.
00:36:12
Speaker
So I am, a believe I'm more of a believer in 1.2 or above.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I think the above is going to be how old is your average vehicle? What is the condition of those vehicles? um What is the size of the vehicle? Right. So if we're working on a lot of bigger SUVs, bigger trucks, it's the parts are heavier. It's typically a little bit slower, you know, from, you know, it takes longer to rack them. It takes longer to do a little, you know, all of those types of things.
00:36:43
Speaker
Yeah. All the reasons. And the labor guide is a guide and it's not the Bible. And a clean shop with a clean brand new vehicle. You know, we all know the reasons.
00:36:54
Speaker
So, yeah. I don't even remember what our bump is. I'm looking it up right now.
00:37:05
Speaker
Markups, labor matrix, labor guide. Yeah, we're at 25. so yeah So do the math, see if it makes sense to you know to be able to up that a little bit more.
00:37:20
Speaker
i know I know you're rolling your eyes that 0.25 is already pretty good. um And I'm not saying that it's not, again, I'm not scared of a 0.35 bump on it, but that's a... I'm not in as affluent an area as you, man. I mean, you're surrounded by...
00:37:38
Speaker
very wealthy people.
00:37:42
Speaker
Those, those that don't know, it's the exact opposite of that. Uh, you make me chuckle, Mike.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yes. I mean, I, I know if I can get away with it where I'm at. Um, I don't think you would have an issue there. Um, it's, it just doesn't affect it as much as we think it's going to.
00:38:05
Speaker
I can tell you, it does have a big difference in the, and the profitability numbers. And again, it it made a huge difference. It did not have any effect on our technician product to pay.
00:38:18
Speaker
So, um, pushing the effective labor rate to one 50, um, to get it to 75% of our posted rate, I think is a reasonable goal. Yep.
00:38:30
Speaker
and i'm And again, I'm not saying that the labor guide is all that. So, I mean, I wouldn't go and and hero that number too far, but I think you can stand a little bit of a nudge there. and then You can get pull your labor detail report and export it to Excel, and then you can just do the math real quick on effective labor rate by job and sort the column and find out what jobs you're losing effective labor rate on.
00:38:53
Speaker
Um, and then you're going to find it's going to be a combination, you know, taking a look at things like your alignments and can we stretch another 10 or $15 on an alignment? Um, can we stretch another $5 here or there on ah you know, on an oil chain service, a brake fluid service, just making sure, I mean, you have to be competitive on the commodity services and I want you to be strongly competitive on the commodity services.
00:39:15
Speaker
Just make sure you're not giving it all away in those. Uh, and then. whatever we're losing there, you know, try to blend some of that, some of that gap back into uh, the general repair stuff.
00:39:29
Speaker
Copy.
00:39:33
Speaker
Just trying to see the best way to pull the labor detail out of tech metric.
00:39:42
Speaker
I think it's sales by job category. So, okay. Anybody who's listening knows a better way to get the labor detail report out of TechMetric. Send me a message. 704-confess.
00:39:54
Speaker
Leave me a voicemail.
00:39:58
Speaker
All right.
00:40:03
Speaker
So we know we're going work on trying to get the effective labor rate closer to 150. um We're going to work on trying to get the closing percentage up to 40% as a standard.
00:40:15
Speaker
We identified that a portion of the issue is just some training and confidence on the preventative maintenance services. and being able to sell those.
00:40:26
Speaker
Do you guys have a um a benefits list for the preventative maintenance services? No. And, uh, the advisors at that location have not been to any of the elite advisor training for the master's program or anything. So, um, you know they definitely get benefit from that.
00:40:47
Speaker
So one thing I would recommend right out of the gate is sales master university. It's built into your, um, to your enrollment. So there's no X I'm a big believer in you getting all the free stuff you can get first before you go pay for the additional things.
00:41:02
Speaker
Okay. So I would love, so that's going to be an, an online self-paced learning platform for your service advisors. It's, it's a great onboarding tool for new service advisors. If you're bringing on new advisors, 16 different modules, they can do it at their own pace.
00:41:19
Speaker
So I've had advisors that can breeze through it in a couple of days. And I've had other advisors that it takes a couple of weeks for them to get it done. um ah usually try to give some sort of a completion incentive bonus ah for them to be able to do it.
00:41:32
Speaker
And but that, that does typically help the, uh, but the other thing is it's just, that comes that sales masters university comes automatically with my coaching agreement with you guys, right? It does. Yep. That's, that's part of your coaching. Great.
00:41:51
Speaker
There's some really great phone skills training on there as well. Um, the phone skills training is incredible. um there is a, your, your client, uh, client portal is going to give you access to turn your phone into a gold mine.
00:42:04
Speaker
And then a a in-depth own skills training four-part series. ah Both of those are great classes. And again, I'm a Bob Cooper, who is the founder of Elite. He's got an audio recording on there about selling maintenance.
00:42:22
Speaker
And know it's like 40 minutes long and it's audio only and it's amazing. Yes. And I don't, if you guys out there are not familiar with Bob Cooper, I thought at one point in time I was a fairly decent salesperson until I listened to Bob Cooper's Overcoming Objections audio file and I realized how inadequate I was.
00:42:43
Speaker
But ah he, yeah so, but it it is, it's, it's great content. He does an incredible job of, not just explaining how to sell, but how to sell ethically and the ethical reasons to sell.
00:42:57
Speaker
um Jerry Vacario, who is one of our pro service members, so I'm sure you've met at some point in time. I happened to, he was at our last Eagles event and and took us out to dinner, but he brought up a really good point. He goes, you know, a long time ago when I first started as a business owner, I thought that I was helping people out by you know doing omitting certain things yeah right and or trying to do a cheaper side of the repair even though i knew the best repair was you know was this way but i knew that they were struggling with money but he said he had to he said he's got a he had a really passionate story where he had a young kid that came into a store had a coolant leak it was coming from the coolant hose where the end of the coolant hose was dry rotted he knew the kid didn't have a lot of money so he cut the hose
00:43:47
Speaker
and you know cut the dry rotted part off and then put it back on and you know clamped it back and sent him on his way. And then a couple of days later, you know the hose failed completely, lost all the coolant and the engine was blown and the guy didn't have a car.
00:44:01
Speaker
right And he goes, it it really, it bothered him as a person that he put that kid in that predicament to save him a $500 repair or a $300 repair or a $200 repair, whatever it was.
00:44:13
Speaker
And it wound up costing the kid $5,000 car. you know And so i think that if you listen to any of the stuff that elite teaches um from a sales standpoint, that's where the ethical obligation to sell really comes in.
00:44:29
Speaker
because the bottom line is you're not selling people stuff that they don't need. The car is broken. It needs to be fixed. It's our job to try to help them understand the value of getting it fixed versus allowing them to make an emotional decision that costs them a lot more money down the road. So, yeah, for sure.
00:44:46
Speaker
But yeah, all of those, all of those sales tools are great things. They're completely, completely complimentary inside your deal. I would start there. I think what you can do inside of this from an actions side of things is,
00:44:59
Speaker
In your can job services for these things, create the the benefits list and the why statement.
Service Benefits and Sales Training Enhancement
00:45:09
Speaker
So the the benefits of getting the service, you know cooling service done. What are the risks of not getting a coolant service done?
00:45:26
Speaker
and then asking you know asking the service advisors to read that out prior to and then i'm assuming you got i know you mentioned bg
00:45:42
Speaker
the other thing that i think is easier and this is it's 100 up to you as far as how you want to do this but i found it really difficult for advisors to understand all of the mileage intervals that are out there for all of the vehicles.
00:45:55
Speaker
So we created our own based off of the BG platform. um But we've done something similar. We're just not following it very effectively.
00:46:07
Speaker
Right. so And then I saw, I think that, I think bringing the BG rep in would be really good, letting them know that, Hey, the vehicles that come in that are under, under 70,000 miles, you know, they, they're part of the lifetime protection plan. If we get them,
00:46:21
Speaker
you know, if we get a service done and we explain the intervals to the customer. um And then the the best way to do that, you can go and pre-schedule those appointments. That's another great pre-scheduling tool.
00:46:32
Speaker
um So I'm a big believer in that. um
00:46:44
Speaker
I think the other thing that I would do is ask your service advisors what they think they're getting the most declines on.
00:46:58
Speaker
But I would also, would really look into those, the Diag only tickets. I would be really interested to know. Okay.
00:47:15
Speaker
We'll do that. Because that's going to affect that effective, that's going affect that effective labor rate and the closing percentage the same. Yeah. Because you're you're giving that ticket away. A diagram ticket is typically a really big estimate that like we totaled a car and they shipped it or something. It has a major effect on both of them.
00:47:40
Speaker
I should be able to find that out today. so yeah I would look into those. see Just see how many. Because if you're... I understand your... i understand your
00:47:57
Speaker
diagnostic strategy, I would just want to know what the, what the mix of that is, because if we're getting, we're getting a ah lot of push cars off of that, then there's no benefit to the business and it's just clogging up the works.
00:48:15
Speaker
Copy. Um, well, it looks like there was
00:48:23
Speaker
74 diagnostic tickets that contain diagnostics last month. Take me a little bit more to dig in and see how many of them were zero tickets on the way out. Um, but you know, it's, you get that information pretty quick. Okay.
00:48:41
Speaker
And then i guess the last thing to, um, to talk about today that we haven't already talked about is what is, cause you guys got things going in a really, really good direction.
00:48:52
Speaker
What is the the client retention plan that you have at this location? So they get a satisfaction text and email the day after the ticket is closed.
00:49:07
Speaker
And then they go into ah you know the retention funnel ah for comms via text and email ah through Shopgenie. um I don't have any targeted direct mail. All my direct mail is every door direct.
00:49:23
Speaker
Actually, that store doesn't do any Every Door Direct ah because they've got so much traffic as it is. um you know If we look back at the performance report ah on the new customer count, it was pretty high last month. it was yeah you know over 30% of customers were new customers last month.
00:49:43
Speaker
It's good because we were growing and it had to be a big number because were selling so much more than we were used to selling. um But if that maintains for long, that means we're churning.
00:49:54
Speaker
We're having a lot of one and dones. Yeah. so And i I feel like that number is probably going to be higher than some of your other stores just because of the demographic makeup that it's college students and yeah they're turning over. You're at least losing some of them every year. Yeah.
00:50:08
Speaker
So.
00:50:12
Speaker
But we still like to capture them for four years for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's be honest. It's five and a half. It's NC State.
00:50:23
Speaker
you got a factor in the ag program. That's like, that's like a year and a half to two years. That brings the average back down.
00:50:30
Speaker
I love you Wolfpack.
00:50:35
Speaker
um Okay. So we're not doing thank you cards, not doing nothing along those lines. um They're all things that we have done in the past and that we should do. Okay. Just kind of let them go by the wayside.
00:50:51
Speaker
Um, You know, my wife used to do a handwritten thank you note for anybody who spent over our average repair order every week and then go mail. I would take them to the shop on Monday and the guys would sign them and, you know, them in the mail.
00:51:05
Speaker
ah That just fell by the wayside last year. We can pick it up. Are we scheduling next appointments? No. Okay.
00:51:14
Speaker
So I would think about...
00:51:19
Speaker
we think about both of those things. Um, maybe not worry about customers over a certain dollar span. And I get what you're saying there, but maybe a new customer, uh, maybe a new customer letter that goes out with a thank you for whatever their service was. And then some sort of service declaration, and they're letting them know that you guys do things like tires and brakes and all of the things, right.
00:51:47
Speaker
Um,
00:51:50
Speaker
And then also letting them know that if they have any, if they ever have any type of issue to come back to you, you know, come back to you directly.
Scheduling Strategies for Customer Engagement
00:51:59
Speaker
And then inside of TechMetric,
00:52:09
Speaker
I would love to see you start scheduling next appointments.
00:52:18
Speaker
I'll give you a couple different, um, things to think about with scheduling it the next appointment. If you start doing packages for your oil change, where it's an oil change plus a pit stop in between, you're essentially getting two, two services off of every oil change.
00:52:37
Speaker
Um, the customer benefit behind the pit stop is, you know, the oil change intervals are now 10,000 miles. Customer goes a year without an, you know, without changing the oil. The oil and the filter and everything are fine, other than the fact that we're blowing oil through the tailpipe for that entire year.
00:52:55
Speaker
And if you ask your technicians, the dipstick is going to be low on most of the vehicles that come in. So the pit stop is a complimentary service that comes with every oil change that they get to come back in in between their intervals, you know, interval cycle.
00:53:08
Speaker
And you get another opportunity at discovery.
00:53:13
Speaker
So you're going to do your 15 minute quick check. You're not going to do your full, you know, 40 minute safety maintenance inspection. Um, but you can do a fluid top off and you're going to catch some of the small, small wear components, tie rod ends, tires, wiper blades, um, some of those kinds of things.
00:53:31
Speaker
The reason I say that it's a decent idea to start with that, because you get better buy-in from the advisor because they feel like they have something to sell to the customer for coming back in. That makes sense. to have a reason to schedule the next appointment versus for whatever reason, we have ah a huge opposition to just scheduling scheduling the next appointment that we've already put on their windshield.
00:53:53
Speaker
Well, the word track that I'd like to try with first time customers is something to the effect of, hey, Miss Jones, yeah thank you so much for coming in and trusting us with your vehicle.
00:54:03
Speaker
yeah Here's the deal. My job is to be your car guy. Anything to do with your car that gives you stress, I want you to think I'm going to call Mike. ah Because that's even if it's not something that I can help you with, I can point you in the right direction.
00:54:14
Speaker
yeah um And one of the things that we do is I know that it's hard to remember about maintenance. I've just set a reminder in my computer and I'm going to call you in about six months to remind you that you're due for your oil change and then we can get it in if it's needed at that point.
00:54:29
Speaker
So it's very soft sell. It's very, this is just a reminder. I'll call you. You don't have to do anything. And if you need it, great. If you don't, okay. um Because I've found that the few times that I've failed to launch and booking the next appointment, it's because I get pushback from customers and we're all gun shy when we get pushback. Right.
00:54:50
Speaker
Yep. So yeah. so I'm not even asking permission or anything else. I'm just telling them, you know part of my job is to stay on top of your maintenance. I'm just going to call you and remind you when you're due for your oil change or for your state inspection.
00:55:02
Speaker
So, um you know, that's something that I learned down in Houston last year is you know, book the next appointment for the oil change, but also book the next appointment for the state inspection. And if you're doing BG services and you know how many miles they're averaging, book the next appointment for the next transmission service or for the next, you know, brake fluid service or whatever it might be.
00:55:21
Speaker
Cause it's just a ah reminder call, you know? And then in six months as Amos Jones has been six months. I promised you that I was going to call you. I don't want to be a liar. You know? Yeah. I think you probably do for your oil change. I can do it for you today. Or do you want to get on the, on the books and do it later this week?
00:55:35
Speaker
You know? Yep. Absolutely. It seems easy, but getting it implemented sometimes can be more challenging. It's, and it takes some time cause these are seeds that you're going to plant today that they're not going to see the benefits from until six months from now or three months from now.
00:55:48
Speaker
If they call and remind them in yes six months. And so it it will take it will take a lot of management effort on your end. The easiest way to see that they're doing that, Mike, is to go into your TechMetric scheduler, the appointments app, and change it to the month view.
00:56:10
Speaker
So what we did in our store was is you can change the colors So our color is green for a next scheduled service, meaning that we, we scheduled that manually at your previous visit.
00:56:26
Speaker
And I take a look at the next, you know, the months in the future and I'm counting how many greens I see on there. And I know how many cars we've done in that six month prior to cycle.
00:56:43
Speaker
So like I can see you know how much of my car count we're actually adding to the schedule. So how many cars did you service in April? And how many appointments do you have on the books for October?
00:56:57
Speaker
So we do, I try to do every 90 days ah okay as a pre-schedule. um And again, that's for that's not necessarily for the oil change. That's in between services, right?
00:57:09
Speaker
So you got the oil change, the 90-day checkup, the oil change 90 day checkup. Right. Okay. um So I can tell you, we average between 200 and 300 cars a month, depending on the time of year.
00:57:25
Speaker
um And in April,
00:57:35
Speaker
me see what I got for May.
00:57:39
Speaker
I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 27, 32. I've got 97 pre-scheduled appointments how many those think will come in? 75? would say...
00:57:49
Speaker
fourteen fifteen twenty seven ah god
00:57:54
Speaker
um got ninety seven prescheduled appointments for may so how many of those do you think will come in
00:58:03
Speaker
seventy five i would say We're probably about 80% on that. yeah. good. And so what we'll do is when we do the call in, now that that may reschedule, right?
00:58:16
Speaker
it may not They may not come in on that day, but we're going to get them in that month. yeah I can tell you we've had a huge increase in car count and not all of it's been new customers. if that makes sense. When we started doing this.
00:58:29
Speaker
um So, and and Joe Marconi is the one that talked me into doing it. So, but so our, what our physical process is, is again, we, we, when we schedule it in the system, it gets scheduled and listed as the color green. And then after they do the call, so they'll call this week for next week's appointments and do the check-in. Like you said, Hey, we're going to call a week before just, you know, just to check in with you.
00:58:54
Speaker
after they've confirmed it, it changes the color ah to peachy, whatever that whatever the other color is, a peach color. let me go with fuchsia.
00:59:05
Speaker
That's a that's a confirmed that is a confirmed appointment. And so, you know, I can kind of see how we're doing there, but I can look again, I can look months ahead and see how we're doing. And what you're going to see is like you said, so I've got appointments.
00:59:23
Speaker
I've got 30 or more appointments scheduled out all the way into October. When I start getting to November, I'm a little light. um But what a huge difference that makes now. I mean, your slow times of the year, you know, November, December, January. So we started this in June, July of last year.
00:59:49
Speaker
So, you know, you didn't get the first benefit from it until December to January, but it it it took a lot of pushing on the front end to try to get it because again, it's not an immediate return from the advisor standpoint and they do get pushback,
Handling Customer Pushback
01:00:05
Speaker
right? It's not it's not a fun conversation to have really. Depends on how you cast it, right?
01:00:12
Speaker
Are being helpful or are you being pushy? But once they got some six, once they started seeing people come back in and they're like, oh, we're not getting, you know, nobody punched me when I asked, you know, when I told them I going pre-schedule their appointment.
01:00:25
Speaker
Like we're always riding the high in June, July, and August. Right. Because we're just, you raking it in as fast as we can, but that's the time to plant the seed so that you can harvest in February and January, you know?
01:00:37
Speaker
And again, if you're splitting it up, you know, every 90 days, you're getting that same bump in December. And you're and in it the return on it's going to be lower in those months, right? But yeah um
01:00:50
Speaker
my goal is is is kind of what I tried to focus on the last year is how do I, I can't necessarily affect available income from my customer base, right? So my ARO might fluctuate, my closing percentage might fluctuate, but I want to do everything that I can do to make sure that my car count is as flat as possible.
01:01:09
Speaker
right. That I'm, I'm always Cause if I have cars and I have opportunity, if my discovered services are flat, if my car count is flat, then, and I'm providing a good experience, my client may not have available income today to say yes, but they will eventually. And that's going to come back to me.
01:01:27
Speaker
Right. So I'm always growing my potential sales. Um, as long as I'm doing that. And, but one of the challenges that we all have is we have certain times a year where car count is more, more of a struggle. yeah And this was one of the ways that we implemented to try to flatten that out.
01:01:45
Speaker
We're good. Hang on one second. yeah joe um recordinging an episode yeah Everybody wave at Jackson.
01:01:56
Speaker
He's leaving. I'll come find you in little bit. Just came in from playing basketball in the driveway. he's all sweaty. so
01:02:06
Speaker
All right. So we've got, just to give a quick recap, um we're going to work on getting the effective labor rate up to 150.
01:02:19
Speaker
We've got a couple that we're going to pull Diag-only tickets out and do an audit on Diag-only tickets to see how many of those that we have. We're going to take a look at our canned services and check the effective labor rate on the canned services just to see if there's any adjustments that we can that we can do there.
01:02:36
Speaker
We're going to tinker with the idea of adjusting the labor multiplier or the markup and and then maybe offsetting that with some of the um commodity service labor times that we're paying out currently.
Summary and Conclusion
01:02:53
Speaker
If we do that, we're going to really good conversation with the team before we roll it out. So they understand what we're doing and why
01:03:01
Speaker
we've got the flags coming in that we talked about at the last, at the last meeting to get some of our tire sales up. And we're going to try to work on the walk around process. So
01:03:17
Speaker
let's try to improve some of those pre pre discovery items.
01:03:24
Speaker
I'm making all these notes in our performance report. I added a tab to the performance report so that it's all there for reference. um Good.
01:03:34
Speaker
I think that's... Man, if I get half of that to do list done, that'll be yeah pretty powerful. so And then Sales Master University, get John, and you have... You have a second advisor at the counter now as well? Yep.
01:03:47
Speaker
yeah ken he He bounces back and forth between the Raleigh stores where he's needed, but his primary home base is is that is the Hillsborough Street store. Okay. um So get him, get both of them set up on the BG training and Sales Master University and see if we can help them out.
01:04:04
Speaker
I would also recommend that, like I said, that Bob Cooper Selling Maintenance, it's an audio file, but I'm assuming they have some version of a commute there in the Garner area. Um, that is a great audio file to listen to, as far as the reasons for selling maintenance and why it's important.
01:04:21
Speaker
Um, but I would get them to listen to that and see if we can bump up those things a little bit as well. Great. Thanks, man. Yeah. You've given me a lot to do. Hopefully I pull off some of it.
01:04:34
Speaker
ah appreciate you. 10, 10, 1% better every day is better than nothing. Yeah. True story. going to go for a 10th of a percent better each day. There you go. And I'll be three times as good after the year.
01:04:45
Speaker
i don't know. Whatever. I'll talk to you later. I will say though, this, like I said, this is a Pat on the back episode. You've been, uh, you know, I know we'd normally give you a hard time, but you guys have, you guys have anything that's gone poorly is, uh, Steven's fault. Anything that's gone well, Steven, you've done a great job.
01:05:02
Speaker
You get toppings on your pizza. All right, man. I'll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner, where we lay it all out. The good, and the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host, Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes, so why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink?
01:05:22
Speaker
You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover, or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am? Email mike at confessionsofashopowner.com or call and leave a message. The number is 704-CONFESS. That's
01:05:37
Speaker
three three seven seven If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership. I'll see you on the next episode.
01:06:16
Speaker
Yes.