If there’s one thing shop owners used to be able to count on to keep them busy, it was the weather. When we see extremes on either end of the thermometer, it typically can signal a busy time.
Winter is coming: Are you ready for whatever weather it throws at you?
If you think that this conversation is premature, ask yourself if you were prepared for the extremely unusually warm winter we had last year. I know I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I will be this year.
There are many tools available for us to use that are designed to prevent the uncontrollable downturns or upturns that can happen in business. The most important tool is planning. You must know how much revenue and gross profit you need to be able to pay your bills, pay your staff, pay yourself and make a profit.
Once you know these numbers, you need to find a strategy to achieve them. How are you going to fill the bays — consistently — with profitable work instead of waiting for breakdowns?
That’s a stressful way to operate. For shop owners last year, expecting cold weather revenue on blown power steering hoses, dead batteries and coolant leaks never came was surely worrying.
Breakdowns are stressful for everyone:
- Our clients are not prepared to be without their vehicle or spend money that wasn’t in their budget
- Our service advisors must deal with the emotions of these client’s unexpected breakdowns
- Our technicians feel the pressure to get the repairs done quickly so they can move onto the next breakdown
Utilizing our marketing tools effectively and choosing consistent messaging will drive clients into our shops in a more manageable way. Early last year, we started discussing the benefits of preventative maintenance in our TV commercials, email blasts and during conversations with our clients.
“Once you know these numbers, you need to find a strategy to achieve them. How are you going to fill the bays — consistently — with profitable work instead of waiting for breakdowns?”
When new clients booked an appointment, we sent them a list of maintenance “Reminder Items” and asked them to check their records to see if they were due for any of these services.
On the day of the appointment, we performed a DVI and marked maintenance items as “Check Vehicle History” so the client was reminded to look into this.
Once their appointment was over, we would book the next appointment and include one or two of the reminder items that the client had determined they were due for, ensuring that we were discussing the importance of staying on top of these important services.
By the end of the year, we were booking all of these appointments for February, hoping to fill up a notoriously slow month with pre-booked work. Did all of these appointments show up? Nope. But we had more clients show up than if we hadn’t been following this process.
As well, instead of relying on weather-related breakdowns for revenue, we were billing more hours performing preventative maintenance services, due to the fact that our messaging was bringing in more maintenance-minded clients. February’s sales still sucked but it would have been unbearable if we hadn’t implemented the systems and processes required to create this flow of revenue.
One of our greatest tools are our teams. In the CARS February edition, I wrote about our “Kinetic Coffee Talk Tuesday” meetings, where my team sits down to discuss the previous week’s performance and the goals for the coming week. By sharing with them the business’s financial challenges, achievements and future goals, each team member is able to make educated suggestions about what improvements could be made that are not obvious to myself or my manager.
If our team’s goal is to have consistent revenue from week to week, with a healthy profit margin that will afford us the ability to pay great wages and stay up to date with tooling, we will work as a team to prevent weather from getting in our way.
For your shop to fight off unseasonably warm weather, economic uncertainty or a labour shortage, the best tools you can utilize are systems and processes that will prevent you from having to react to these situations, and instead be ready to face them head on.
Erin Vaughan is the owner of Kinetic Auto Service in Regina
This article originally appeared in the June issue of CARS
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