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Well, I am old, been in business 55 years. What I have found and continue to do. You know what has worked in the past, because you always monitor it. If it doesn't work, get rid of it. We are on the west coast. As of today, we are up 39% for the year. That includes being shut down a whole week for a storm. I will say it has slowed down to the effect of we were making appointments out a whole week, now we are working on the current week. A couple things I will say is, know when it might be slow and do what it takes. For us it is our rebate check $39.23 mailed out in 3 groups, February, March and April. Our new snail mail to new customers 3 times over 6 weeks. Probably the best thing we have done is have the phones forwarded to either my daughter or me. We have Log me In on our home computers and can make appointments on the week-end. We have almost every month something going on from coat drives to Free brakes with donations for the food bank. Loaners were are biggest thing, especially after Covid. No more rides. We have a really small parking lot. We encourage our customers to pick up as soon as possible . No care leaves without paying.

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Good afternoon... 2nd half of April was challenging... Our Sales were close to last year but not enough. We were short 9%... We're doing google ads and that works for us.. Again, we're a Specialty shop, We're a brakes & front end shop big challenges for this year. We have to keep in mind, we're in a Presidential year. It has been my experience that in this type of year Sales are more of a Challenge. Also every things is very expensive, as consumers, we don't have the buying power, which creates a big problem for the consumer.. I am really good about finding solutions to the problems but at this point my view is very cloudy and gray, which makes it very difficult to have a clear view. We live in an area where there are several small town within our town and we advertise in the surrounding areas. I am going to consider to reduced our advertising area to just within town and see what results throws this approach Thanks JP

For me the most difficult one is Failure to Adapt to Market Changes , While running the shop day to day it is difficult to look down the road 3 months, 6 months or longer. We tend to make adjustments reactionary not proactive, : OMG its busy lets hire a tech, OMG were dead, lay off a tech. So I have learned to have about 30k in the bank for winter just to be safe. Proper planning is the key. I will always remember a story about a toy store that would have a line of credit to make it through the summer, then pay it off during the holiday season. The problem was a couple of slow holiday seasons and they could not repay the loans and lost their business. so save money for the slow times and it helps to keep the cash flowing.

Thanks! This is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT. This filing is due by Dec 31, 2024. Penalties start on Jan 1, 2025 at $591 / day for not filing. By Jan 17, you will have hit the maximum penalty of $10,000.

We provide major equipment and some specialty tools, but for the most part, the technicians are responsible for providing their own tools. Having said that, Offering a spiff or a bonus of a credit on the tool truck can be a great incentive to increase performance or productivity. Especially for a tech in his first few years trying to build up their tool collection.

Wow, 55 Year in Business, That's an accomplishment! ...with that amount of years, your business is a land mark for the city/town where you live. Your business is 55 years old, I am 52 years old and my business is 10 years old. We have had our ups and downs but I started this business from scratch.. I don't considered myself a mechanic since I did not go to school for that. I am an Entrepreneur/accountant that got retrained 10 years back to do Brakes & Suspension work. ...and Yes, I come from a family of Mechanics, I just did not enjoyed it when I was young, now I loved it It's harder for a younger business to even consider the thought of competing with a 55 year old. HOW? The business itself has it's path and journey, at that age of a business, somebody will come through the front door, it could be minor activity or a lot of it. Now reaching goals and owner's expectation is something totally different! Congratulation I just hope one day our business can reach to that age, and that would be up to my kids...

I need to correct my 39% up for the year should have said up $39,000 Sorry. I should proof read what I write.

Just to show you this morning when I got here, there was only five vehicles on the schedule. We made an email blast and sent it out immediately to fill the bays. Always have to be ready for slow time.

The lure of cheap rent is a universal rookie mistake resulting in a low/no traffic count. Cheap buildings are affordable for a reason. One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was, "Expensive rent is the cheapest advertising you'll ever buy." From Roy H. Williams in Austin, TX. With a killer location, a shop won't need Repair Pal or Open Bay.

Definitely. We do a colored newsletter every month. Most of our marketing is for our own customers

Try https://www.convirza.com/pricing/ for all of your call-tracking needs. It is very economical and accurate, letting you know what works and, more importantly, what doesn't. 🙂

Good day to every one and very thankful for the responses, everything helps. I already took some action and reduced our advertising to the zip codes where we get the most on google ads. working up on a list of follow up from our current customers Also working on an advertising campaign for the coming holiday, Memorial Day and the summer, it's just around the corner and the traveling starts right after the memorial day, since school is out. Thanks again, I will come back with a report right after the end of this month

In my shop we heavily focus on each and every customer we HAVE, getting new ones have been much harder to get through Google, Instagram, and FB. FB is pretty much a joke. It's been much slower from last Nov to current. I talked with our World Pac rep and he said it's even worse on the west coast. Focusing on your customers is excellent advice, I agree but when you don't have enough of them to focus on because people aren't even doing brakes when they are at 2%, then what? Trying to keep an open mind is also good advice, but that gets hard as the percentage of sales to the last fiscal year grows further apart! I know many shops in this same situation too.....we've had some HUGE dealers go out of business here, and one comes to mind that's been in business for a very, very long time with 5 HUGE lots, all gone, 144 employees lost their jobs, business closed, land owners probably freaking out now wondering what to do with their space...it's just a horrible time period right now. Usually, when we are in a recession or recession-like period customers still fix their cars because they know buying new isn't an option, that is VERY different from where we are now.

As a business coach (former shop owner) I see that many areas around the country are having a slow down in business. However, a lot can be done. Focus on your existing customers. Make sure that all deferred and declined work is followed up and reminders sent out. Regarding your advertising, local is always better. Just don't cut your advertising too much. Perhaps the most important factor is to have a positive open mindset. Look for ways to improve, discuss with your team. Don't sit on your hands and say nothing can be done. With the right approach, things will improve. Good luck!

Here's what happened when we moved our shop's location from a lower-income area (Lindon, Utah) to an affluent area (Draper, Utah) Some of the links are broken because I wrote this piece in 2011.

The Basics of Owning An Auto Repair Shop - Balancing GP per Hour and Productivity

I'm really impressed with Hireology.com A very good intro is a 1-hour video at https://youtu.be/2ZF1XWH94xc A 10-page .pdf is at

Our program shows recommendations when we make an appointment.

The engineer that does the installs. With that we have an area rep that is local. My scissors rack is heavier and very well designed at a comparison price difference of $30,000.00 I have an Atlas 4 post in my other shop and it has had it problems and service from Atlas is poor. The Autel equipment works well for me and this one was made to order for me. Autel didn't sell this lift when I bought mine. Its from TLS in Ontario Canada. I was so please I bought a 2 post Asymmetrical/Symmetrical for EV service and I got the EV battery table from BendPak.

Yes, at the very least over the last 4-5 years as the industry has changed many shops I hear from have embraced multitiered labor rates. There seem to be 3 major, but common, categories. The Standard Labor Rate is used for common tasks and common vehicles. The European is for as the name implies those more demanding brands or models within standard brands. And finally a Labor Intensive Rate for low parts' dollars repairs like engine rear main seals. We'll also use that rate for R & R or motors trannys etc which are always more involved and usually require additional finessing after the component is replaced. . These varied labor rates would be in addition to an across the board labor guide bump for the additional tasks a tech needs to perform to accomplish any repair. Tasks like finding the keys an SA didn't tag, moving another vehicle to get the one he's assigned, we all know there's a list.

No wholesale for other shops. I avoided warranty companies like the plague, mainly because of the hassle factor of plugging up our production. We only did retail jobs and left the rest to other shops to do. We had plenty of work to do.

We had different labor rates for different jobs. Sometimes it was because of the difficulty, and other things like risk. We had our labor rates at the lowest, plain vanilla, straight jobs. If the vehicle had been chipped, twin turbos, high flow heads, exhaust, or deleted emissions, part labor for those types of vehicles carried a higher premium labor rate. For me, it's not just about the money as it was about managing risk. We commonly found when customers make a horsepower/torque range change, the first thing that goes is usually the factory original transmission. With diesels, this is especially true. The transmission simply is the weak link in the drivetrain. They were never meant to handle that much power. Sometimes it was the extra hard parts/upgrades that drove the price up, which is additional parts on top of the increase in labor. Our ARO for major jobs was about $3,600 as of 2015.

In this week’s episode, Hunt gets into the financial intricacies faced by auto repair shop owners, from refinancing debts and selling shops to securing new mortgages in today’s unpredictable market. He explores the strategies and tips to steer through the banking hurdles and optimize your financial operations. • Market Update & Interest Rates: Starting with a quick market update, Hunt discusses the current state of interest rates and how they're affecting both personal and commercial loans. Despite the unchanged rates by the Federal Reserve, the historical highs are impacting mortgage affordability and commercial borrowing costs. • Loan Acquisition Challenges: The episode sheds light on the complexities of acquiring loans in the current financial climate. Hunt discusses the often opaque criteria banks use to approve loans, offering some tips for what shop owners can do to increase their chances of securing financing. • Listener Q&A and Acknowledgments: A special thanks to listeners for their engaging questions in the previous mailbox episode. Your curiosity fuels our content, and we’re here to address your concerns, guiding you toward informed financial decisions for your auto repair shop. • Rapid Fire Tips for Financial Management: Closing the episode, Hunt offers some rapid-fire advice for managing your finances better, from understanding the nuances of loan interest rates to practical tips for ensuring your business stays liquid and prepared for any financial challenges ahead. Thanks to our partners, NAPA TRACS and Promotive Did you know that NAPA TRACS has onsite training plus six days a week support? It all starts when a local representative meets with you to learn about your business and how you run it. After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice. Let us prove to you that Tracs is the single best shop management system in the business. Find NAPA TRACS on the Web at NAPATRACS.com It’s time to hire a superstar for your business; what a grind you have in front of you. Great news, you don’t have to go it alone. Introducing Promotive, a full-service staffing solution for your shop. Promotive has over 40 years of recruiting and automotive experience. If you need qualified technicians and service advisors and want to offload the heavy lifting, visit www.gopromotive.com. Paar Melis and Associates – Accountants Specializing in Automotive Repair Visit us Online: www.paarmelis.com Email Hunt: [email protected] Get a copy of my Book: Download Here Aftermarket Radio Network Click to go to the Podcast on Remarkable Results Radio

When I look back at my 41 years as an auto shop owner, there is a direct link between my best and most profitable years to the quality of my employees. Contrary to that, the years I struggled in business was directly related to having the wrong team, more specifically, a bad apple or a few bad apples. If you want to truly achieve great things in business, you need to have great people around you. Take a hard look at the people you employ now. Would you hire them again? Think about this: If your auto repair shop is reliant on your skills, your intellect and solely on you, your business will eventually plateau and stall. You need great people around you to build your empire. The strategy of finding the right people for your company is ongoing. Lastly, once you have assembled the right people, then you need to do all you can to give them the training, the coaching, the support, the praise and recognition to bring out the best in them.

I've said it before and I say it again, we use our Google PPC advertising radius to "throttle our business." Normally, we would be listed at the top of a Google search within a 5-mile radius of the shop. If it got slow, I would increase the size of the radius. If we got slammed, I would even pause our Google PPC ads altogether. If it got slow, I would increase the size of the radius. The largest I've ever gone with our Google PPC program is a 100-mile radius. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Google PPC program works for a transmission repair shop. That's because, in our line of work, it is transactional-based. How it would work for other automotive businesses, where it's usually relationship-based, I can't say for sure. If anybody wants to know that this works, make sure you get hooked up with a call-tracking company and use call tracking where you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's either working or not working. This is true with any type of advertising. Each lead source has a different tracking number. Otherwise, every phone call is just that, another phone call. You have no way of knowing the source of that sales lead. Without call-tracking being a part of any advertising campaign, advertising is just another bill you'd rather do without.

Sometimes perception turns into reality. I have seen this all too often, "Feb is always slow, there is nothing we can do." Just by thinking this, it become the reality. A key thing you did was to be proactive, not giving in to the mindset that Feb stinks. Great job! When I was in business, we had a plan starting in Sept to flood Jan, Feb and Mar with Service reminders, backed up with reminder phone calls. Again, be proactive, not sit on your hands!

Good morning. February was a record month. The Service writer kept saying February stinks, had to eat his words. March we are full for the day and after, but don't have the long term waiting appointments. Still a good month. We send out rebate letters in 3 mailings Feb, Mar and April. That helps us ins the winter months easing into summer .

Also, don't forget about Social Security. People who get paid "under the table" are unknowingly clipping themselves out of a lot of S.S. pay later in life. Earlier in my career, I worked for a family who would pay us by check but insisted we cash the paychecks with them. They had a safe in their back office full of cash. They also had a construction company in Chicago that I now suspect took in a lot of cash, but who knows? Now that I'm collecting S.S., I've come to realize they weren't reporting my income on the 941. Thanks to those clowns, I'm now collecting much less S.S. than I should be because they weren't reporting my income. I came to learn that not reporting all income comes back to haunt a person much later in their life.

This is why I don't promise any same day repairs, not even on an oil change!. Crap happens and auto repair is not a cut and dry process sometimes. If it's 5 and the job likely won't be done real soon then I will arrange a ride home for the customer and it's time to go. I have enough signage telling customers that I don't operate as a drive thru (mcdonalds) repair shop that they don't blink when I say no guarantees on same day service. I tell them it will probably will be done but they better have plans for transportation to and from work and don't even think about holding my feet to the fire!

We are a small shop just around the corner from a 7-11 (convenience store) that sells gas and used to have a FREE air pump. Now, in the past year they have changed to a $1 charge for air, just pop in a dollar and the compressor runs long enough to top off all your tires. What has happened is that we now see all of the people who are to "thrifty" to spend a buck to top up their tires... Much as you describe they have a "I need air - serve me" attitude without so much as a thank you. I am seriously considering one of those self serve dollar a pop air compressors to put on the outside of the building and then inviting those people to "help them selves - it's right out there for you to use" I find that people are becoming more and more demanding of service at no charge - like it is our responsibility to take care of their every whim. Get real people! In the "old days" people had respect and common courteousy for those who would go out of their way to help them out. I know, it sounds like a minor thing but when it pulls techs off of jobs and delays getting the work done for "paying clients" it really does get under your skin after a while. Thanks for seeing this... Curtis

Hand them an old fashioned bicycle Hand pump. I do not think the law requires your compressor to do the inflation, or your payed labor to inflate it. And get a deposit on the pump.

I keep a varity of sodas and bottled water, coffee and fresh fruits at the shop. It amazes me how people are taken when you offer them a cold drink and a piece of fruit. Most look at me and say theu were never offered anything at the "big" shops! Just vending machines that dont work half the time!

We have all been there, below is an article I wrote a few years back, a true story... A Bad Week Ends Up a Lesson On Life November 21 2010 06:00 PM | Joe Marconi in Customer Service We all have had that week from hell. You know, the one week that makes you ask yourself why in the world you ever got into this business in the first place. The week that makes you doubt yourself, your customers and the people around you. And as you push through the week, every turn you make you find another fire to put out, another bounced check to worry about, another comeback that needs to be done over again, on and on and on. By Wednesday you say to yourself, “it must get better, it can’t get worse”. Well, guess what? It can. For me, my recent week from hell happened this past summer. I came in on Monday morning in the second week of July to find that my service manager was sick and would probably be out until Thursday. I also learned that one of my top techs got into a motor cycle accident over the weekend and was seriously injured, with no information about his return to work. It was 6:45am and little did I know, this was just the beginning, and it was about to get worse. A Subaru we serviced a few months ago was towed in over the weekend with a seized engine and the owner was blaming us for not putting oil in the engine. He was demanding we pay for a new engine because in his mind, it’s our fault. I gathered my crew together a little before 8am and told them this was going to be a very challenging week. I also told everyone to be positive, work together and we will get through this. On Tuesday my air compressor caught on fire. The compressor, only a little over two years old, apparently had a defect in the wiring which caused a short and fried the motor. We were one month over the warranty and I had to eat the cost for a new compressor motor. On the ride into work on Wednesday I called my shop foreman and asked if it was safe to come in. I was joking, but he wasn’t laughing. There was silence on the phone and I asked, “What happened now”? He told me that the transmission we installed in the Dodge Van last Friday was towed in overnight; “the transmission doesn’t even move”, he said. He also told me that there was a note from a very unhappy customer that said she needed the van back ASAP! Then he told me that someone threw a rock through the front window and that the Police are waiting for me. I wanted to turn my truck around a go to the hills and hide. Aside from these new issues, we were getting behind in our work as the problems kept mounting. Somehow, we made it through the rest of the day. Thursday morning started out ok. My Manager was back and we were well into the process of getting all the issues settled. The compressor motor was due to arrive that day. Luckily we had an old back up compressor which kept us going. The glass company was there installing a new window. Things were looking better, I thought. But, I was wrong. That morning we received the wrong tire shipment, and all the tire sales for that day had to be reordered. We lost electric power from a downed pole around the corner at 10:45am. We did what we could, but we all know how dependent we are with computers, lifts, phones and other equipment. The power came back late that afternoon and we all stayed late into the night to catch up. The push to get the work done was draining everyone, including myself. I could sense despair setting in as the morale in the shop was suffering. I spent the better part of Friday morning dealing with the customer of the seized Subaru engine. The truth is, there was oil in the engine, but low about 2 quarts and he couldn’t read any oil on the dip stick. According to our records he was 5,000 miles over his scheduled oil service. We only serviced his car once and as I questioned him, I realized he didn’t take care of the car as he should, often going over the recommended interval for an oil change. I asked him if there were any lights on the dash before the engine seized. After a short pause, he admitted that the oil light and check engine light had been on the day the engine seized. Knowing the truth put me in a better position to deal with the problem. He was still angry and wanted to know what I was going to do because we were the last to touch the car, but the facts were the facts and I stood my ground. By Friday afternoon I was mentally exhausted and was looking forward for the week to come to an end. About 3:30 that afternoon, a long time customer came in for service on her car. I walked over to her to say hello and she started to cry. I sat down in the waiting area with her and asked if there was something I could do for her. She told me that her daughter, 41 years old, just passed away from cancer. She left two young children and a husband behind. In an instant, all the problems that happened the past week took on a different meaning; all of the worry that I had the past few days suddenly vanished. This woman had real issues to deal with; issues about family and life, and in the end, are the only things that really matter. I sat with her until her car was finished and listened as she spoke about her daughter and family. When her car was complete I walked her out to her car. As I walked back to the office, I started to put things in perspective and realized that all the trouble that had happened in the last 5 days seemed a lot less important. As shop owners, we face adversity every day. At times I feel we are being tested. Sometimes, things appear to be too tough to bear. Sometimes, just sometimes, the problems we face are just what we need to remind us that things could be a lot worse. For me, I learned a valuable lesson about life. I learned to appreciate the things that really matter in my life and not concern myself about the things that are only part of life, not what life is all about. Tomorrow is Monday, and I don’t know what the auto repair world has in store for me. It may be hell or it may be paradise. But whatever happens, I’m ready for it.