Are you hunting customers or farming them?

There are two ways to draw clients into your auto repair shop: You can hunt them down or farm them, according to a shop coach.

Hunting would be akin to reactive marketing. Shops were busy during the pandemic — but what happens as business levels off? You’re looking at your schedule and realizing you don’t have the same business you did the last few years.

“And then we scramble,” observed Rick White, president of 180Biz. “And here’s the problem with that: I call that reactive marketing. It is the most expensive and least effective marketing you’re ever going to do. It’s dialling for dollars. This is where you’re calling declined repairs, you’re doing this, you’re doing that to just try to get something in that day.”

And it doesn’t often work successfully. It’s the hunting mentality where, to use a caveman example, the hunter goes out in the morning and hunts down food or else they’ll starve. To use an example in the auto repair world, someone comes in with their vehicle and the service advisor tells them they need $4,000 worth of repairs. The client walks out and the shop forgets about them.

The industry needs to get better at farming where the seeds are planted for tomorrow’s harvest.

“So we’ve got to get really good at follow up where someone says no,” White said during the presentation Business Boss Leader: From Creeper to Leader at the Mid-West Auto Care Alliance’s Vision and Hi-Tech Training Expo in Kansas City.

He pushed for greater exit scheduling.

“Nobody should walk out of your shop without their next appointment,” he urged. “Sometimes two: One for the repair they need in two weeks and then the service in six months. But they’re going to have appointments every time.”

Because when there’s nothing on the docket for the day, the fear builds up. White called it “fear stack,” which happens when the shop owner worries about the lack of cars coming in, then the lack of money to make payroll, then fearing staff are going to leave, the shop will shut down and so on.

“And it’s because we want to plant the seeds today and we want to reap the harvest today — and nature doesn’t work that way,” White said.

He suggested this solution: Keep a panic button at a set number of days out. Don’t wait until you’re zero days booked out to panic — do it at five days out, or whatever set number makes sense for you.

That means marketing and doing things to attract customers all the time. Send mailers. Make calls to those you haven’t seen in a while. Do something to keep business constantly churning.

“If you do that you’ll never be slow a day in your life,” White said.