Shop owners who have been in the business much longer than I have said they remember that one of the mantras in the late 1980s, just as the first computerized “shop management systems” were rolling out was, “You have to know your numbers.” With direct repair programs (DRPs) being introduced and insurers beginning to much more actively “manage” their own numbers, shops were realizing they had to become more sophisticated in tracking and improving their own business performance.
For me, however, it’s not enough for us as shop owners to know our numbers. For a long time, I’ve been a big proponent in also sharing our numbers. There’s only so much I as the owner can do to impact our numbers. If those numbers are ever going to improve, my entire team needs to know them as well.
Think about it from a sports perspective. Players in almost any sport can adjust their performance based on what they see happening with the score. I’ve always heard that one of the reasons boxing struggled as a sport for several decades is that it’s one of the very few sports where no one knows the score until the bout is over. I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes sense. It’s always knowing the score that makes a sport more compelling for fans, and that can absolutely influence the players’ performance as well.
That’s the same in our industry, too. If your company participates in any DRPs, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of being handed a scorecard from an insurer long after you can do anything to influence those numbers. A score has to be much more “live” to really be helpful. We’d sometimes get our April numbers from a DRP partner in June, long after we could adjust to improve our numbers even for May.
If we’re not giving our employees as close to a live score as we can, they can’t know how they’re doing and thus adjust to improve. It’s an employee satisfaction issue as well; anyone who doesn’t know how they are doing feels lost. So the more you can let your team know how they are doing — in essence, what the score is — the better able they’re going to be able to improve to help themselves and your team reach whatever goals that have been set.
Having everyone know the score is also important because whenever you start to measure a number, it almost always improves, simply because all of a sudden you’re paying attention to it.
So what does “knowing the score” look like in our company? It’s pretty simple: Every morning, we post and email to every employee our current scorecard, which include the previous day’s numbers. It’s not quite 100 percent live. I’d like to get my shops to the point that when a tech flags a labor hour, it’s instantly reflected on a scoreboard up on the wall. We’re not there yet, but we’ve found daily reporting to be amazingly effective.
I’ll talk more in a future column about exactly what we’re reporting. But maybe you’re thinking, “I’m not sure this is going to be something anyone on my staff cares about.” Years ago as I was just starting to share the numbers, that’s exactly what I thought might be the case. And I’ll be honest, there are some on my staff who don’t care. They’re not numbers people, and they’re here just to work, and that’s fine.
But I can also tell you that there is a surprising number who do care. If I get busy or am on a call or traveling and I haven’t posted our scorecard numbers by 10 a.m. on any given work day, my phone lights up with texts and emails from employees – including some of those who I never thought would care – asking me, “Where are we at? How did we do yesterday?”
That was shocking to me. And it has convinced me of the power of sharing your numbers
