Looking for an idea to spark some improvement in some aspect of your business? Chances are, another shop owner somewhere in the country has implemented just the idea that will work for your shop as well. Here’s a collection of concepts that might inspire the solution you’re looking for.
Interacting with potential customers
Lefler Collision, which operates four shops in Indiana and Kentucky, hosts “Ladies Night Out” at its shops, free events that promise to share “what every woman should know about vehicle care, repair and maintenance.” The events include dinner and give-aways, and cover what to do if you’re in a crash and information on why vehicle maintenance is so important.
The company also racks up some impressive social media interaction. A “cutest pet contest” on Facebook solicited nearly 2,600 posts and comments (and 455 “shares”) in less than a week, with entrants vying for a $50 gas card. Give-aways of St. Louis Cardinal game tickets also result in hundreds of comments and shares.
Thinking big in a small town
With a population of about 13,000, St Marys, Pa., may be fairly small as far as markets go, not large enough even to break into the list of the Top 50 cities in the state. But that hasn’t kept Sandy Buerk and her team at St. Marys Auto Body from thinking big. Since 2010, the shop has brought big names in country music to town for concerts that have become both a marketing opportunity for the shop as well as a way to give back to the community.
This year’s concert featured Joe Diffie, who has had five No. 1 songs on Billboard Hot Country charts, including “Pickup Man” and “Bigger Than the Beatles.” Headliners at previous concerts have included Merle Haggard, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Sawyer Brown and Montgomery Gentry.
The shop sells tickets though its website, and the annual event regularly fills the 1,300-seat high school auditorium. Though costs generally exceed revenue, Buerk said it’s designed not as a money-maker but a way to celebrate and bring the community together. A portion of the proceeds are always donated to a local cause, generally one connected with the local school district or senior citizens.
Don’t get mired in the day to day
Like other shop owners Cris Kuhnhausen of Fix Auto Springfield in Oregon knows there’s value in developing and maintaining relationships with local insurance agents in the shop’s market. That’s why he and his business partner John Kimpton conduct regular continuing education classes for them.
But Kuhnhausen also knows how easy it is to get so involved in the day-to-day demands at the shop to put off making regularly visits to insurance agents.
“The hardest thing to do is get yourself in the frame of mind to leave the shop,” he said.
That’s why he now stops in to see 8-10 agents each week right after another weekly morning meeting he attends away from the shop, before he ever gets to the shop that day.
“You’re in a different frame of mind, before you get here and get involved with things here, so you can focus out there on working on the business, not just in the business,” Kuhnhausen said.
Post the reminders your team needs
Tony Arbisi, vice president of Crash1 Collision Center in Rockford, Ill., last year started taking the quarterly “Who Pays for What?” surveys conducted by Collision Advice and CRASH Network, and realized he needed to keep the information from those surveys in front of his 20-employee team.
Each of the surveys ask about 25 not-included labor operations or other estimate line items, asking shops how regularly they bill – and are paid by insurers – for those items when they are necessary as part of the repair.
“We’ve been trying to develop ways to ensure we get paid for what we do,” Arbisi said. “I print out the results of the surveys and I put them in a binder for my entire team to look at. And we continue to talk about it non-stop with the estimators and everybody else.
Arbisi had previously printed out the survey results to put in a binder to share with employees. But earlier this year after the results of the refinish-related survey came out, he framed a copy of the pages of the survey that list and define the paint-related procedures the survey asks about.
“It’s hung up in the alleyway to the paint department in our shop that everybody walks through every day,” Arbisi said. “It’s to remind them when they are working on a car to write down supplement items on the folder for that job, whether it be tinting time or masking time or anything that’s on that list. We need to remind ourselves that we need to get paid when we do those things.”
Arbisi said efforts like that are helping the shop improve its numbers.
“We’re waiting for the body-related survey results to come out, and we’ll put those up, too,” he said.
A unique benefit?
Looking for a new perk for employees or customers? What if you could fill their vehicles’ gas tanks without going to a gas station? That’s a service being offered by a number of start-ups like Booster Fuels, Filld and InstaFuel; use a phone app to request a fill-up, and a fuel truck comes to your business with gasoline competitively-priced in the market.
One shop in the San Francisco Bay Area (where the new mobile fuel companies all seem to be based and focused currently, although Booster Fuels serves the Dallas-Ft. Worth area as well) is topping off tanks as a thank-you to some customers, and any shop employees can get their vehicles fueled-up (currently on their own dime) without interrupting their work simply by leaving their vehicles’ fuel door open in the shop lot on days when fuel delivery is scheduled.
The shop owner (who didn’t want to be identified) said he remembered reading years ago about a Texas shop that also owned a nearby gas station and filled customers’ tanks as a courtesy to those referred by particular agents. But these new mobile services enable a shop to cost-effectively do something similar without owning a gas station nor having to drive the vehicles to one.
Offer something that others aren’t
Tom Fleming looked around his market in Oregon’s capitol city of Salem and saw there weren’t many shops equipped to repair larger vehicles like buses, RVs and Sprinter vans. So he added a 50-foot paint booth to his shop Fleming’s Body & Paint and is considering adding a large truck frame rack.
“Nobody is really going that direction, and now if you want to survive, you can’t be just another guy waiting for the insurance work to come through the door,” he said. “You’ve got to be different from everybody else.”
Always on the look-out for a good deal, Fleming said he found the booth for sale at an auction downstate. He paid just $5,000, a fraction of its cost when new, and his employees volunteered to spend a weekend helping him dismantle it and move it back to the shop. He said a 2.5 million BTU heater can get the large booth up to 180 degrees to bake a bus or other vehicle in 40 minutes. Because few shops are equipped to handle that kind of work, he said, the shop can charge a premium rate.
Give back in a memorable way
Nu-Look Collision, which operates 16 shops in the Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y., areas, each year selects three families in need to each receive a $100 grocery store gift certificate each week for 20 weeks starting just prior to Thanksgiving. Over the last five years, Nu-Look has donated $36,000 in gift certificates to 18 families, and received a lot of positive publicity in the community.
Take the right risks
Opened his sixth location this year, just over four years since he acquired his first, Bret Bothwell of Central Auto Body in Portland, Ore., is clearly not afraid to take chances. One of his best decisions, he said, was converting a former tire shop into the company’s flagship store given its location at one of the busiest intersections in the city.
“It has the most signage. It’s the most recognizable,” Bothwell said of the Southeast Portland shop. “It put us on the map. If I had been scared and didn’t have the courage to proceed, we wouldn’t have this location. We’d be less known. We’d have fewer contracts.”
One other idea Bothwell implemented at the location: The shop’s screw-drive compressor is located in a small separate area that houses the shop’s detailing department.
“That compressor generates a ton of heat, so we installed a fan in that room,” he said. “In the summer, the fan sends the heat out the roof. In winter, a fan in the door allows us to heat the detail area with heat from the compressor.”
Put a face on your business
Schaefer Autobody Centers each month posts to its website (www. schaeferautobody.com) and on social media a brief profile of one of its customer-facing employees – estimators, managers, customer service reps – at one of its 11 shops in Missouri and Illinois. The posts highlight each of the employees’ strengths, their career path at the company, and what customers or co-workers say about them. Each piece welcomes readers to contact the employee at their particular Schaefer Autobody location.
Eliminate the start-and-stopping
Melanie King-Salgado said she went through “lean training” and transformation at a former employer in the industry, but she began implementing it at Auto Art Collision Specialists in Escondido, Calif., where she is now general manager, in recent months.
“I was really excited to bring it to the table here and say, ‘You guys are doing so great, but this will be like gasoline to the fire,'” said. “I’ve been talking about it with everybody, kind of warming them up to it for the past couple of years, but toward the beginning of this year we really started implementing a lot more of the techniques.”
The shop has worked on the “5S” process of ensuring the shop is uncluttered and organized and that technicians have what they need close at hand. She has purchased parts carts to improve the accuracy and efficiency of parts handling. And she’s brought in a site consultant through the shop’s paint provider to help ensure they are using the company’s 7,500-square-foot production space efficiently.
“That’s probably my biggest constraint here, the square footage,” she said. “You can only do so much with the square feet that you have. So I want to utilize it to its full potential. I had a few ideas of where I wanted to move and structure things, but I wanted to get that second opinion from someone who works on that on a daily basis.”
King-Salgado said ultimately it’s the blueprinting process – completely tearing down a vehicle to prepare a single comprehensive repair order before production begins – that has shown technicians what “lean” means for them.
“You really see the difference when they start working on the car only when they have everything they need.” she said. “That’s what really gets your technicians on board: When they can actually work on a vehicle and they don’t have to stop. Your efficiency, your cycle time, everyone can see it improve right off the bat. They can see, ‘Wow, I only had to work on that vehicle for a day-and-a-half and it’s in paint already.’”
