Transmission Repair

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.

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. 🙂

With any paid advertising, the use of a call tracking pool is the only way to accurately measure the ROI.

The average household income in Draper is $164,948 with a poverty rate of 4.1%. The median age in Draper is 33.6 years: 32.5 years for males, and 34.7 years for females.

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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.

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

I used Google Pay-Per-Click advertising to grab the bull by the horns and CONTROL the work in our transmission shop. I've posted about this before. Normally, our ads would show within a 5-mile radius of our shop. If it got slow, I would increase the radius. If we got really busy, I would either reduce the radius or sometimes PAUSE all PPC ads. Over time, I got really good at it. The purpose of the ads was to get people to call, and we would set an appointment from there. Clicks were, on average, about $12/click and it would take about 3 clicks ($36) to set an appointment. We did that up until my retirement in 2015 when I sold the shop. We were consistently averaging $1.2M/yr. in gross revenue.

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.

I agree, Joe. I experienced the same thing. Often, I wouldn't know how good of an employee I had until they were gone. Essentially, I took them for granted and assumed anyone could do what they did. It was definitely a "trial by fire" learning experience.

Welcome Jade!

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.

Yes! I would shut the business down for 4 days and take my entire crew for them to learn not only technical stuff but also learn about business. It was a great time for everybody. Most years the trade show would take place in Vegas, but one year it was in Orlando, Florida, and another time it was in Washington D.C. All in all, we had a good time. Airfares I covered, I would also cover the hotel and the rental car. We would not cover a rental car in Vegas, I just sprang for the gas down there and back. Speaking of business, one of the best business experiences I've had the pleasure of attending was The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack. The only training was how to read a P&L, and balance sheet, and forecast a budget. Look them up online with the link below...

That is a good topic starter. I have been doing what some may think of as dynamic, or surge pricing, but I never did it regularly. However, I see nothing against it. We (I) used dynamic pricing only to cull jobs I didn't want such as leaks, noises, vibrations, and jobs that were either high-risk or extra difficult. Plain vanilla jobs would get our regular pricing matrix. Speaking of matrix, there are quite a few SMS that have a pricing system built into their software. That tells me more than a few shops are using dynamic pricing. I always measured my pricing by the week, month, or quarterly. The longer the time frame, the more accurate your measurements are. As an industry, everybody likes to talk about numbers, but few put their P&L out. I'm going to break that pattern with a P&L of my own, attached below. The bottom line is all that matters... 2011P&L (6).pdf