I attended the NAPA Expo in May where the NAPA folks did an absolutely stellar job with this event for their extended family of 18,000 people.
There is something remarkable that happened that I have not experienced before. It is both great and terrifying. In addition to many of the most progressive repair shops in the country NAPA brought a cross-section of attendees that almost certainly are not attending any other industry events. Before I tell you how I know this let me explain my role in the event.
I had the opportunity to teach a technical program on module programming that was aimed at convincing those who have not embraced the concept to step up to the J-Box. As part of my duties I hung around with the amazing and entertaining guys and gals from NAPA Training and ASE for four days. This afforded many opportunities to listen to and answer questions of folks who came by the booth or were in our training classes. This leads me back to my concerns for our industry.
If you attend many of the regional events you are well aware that most of the folks attending are the Kool-Aid drinkers who absorb any training opportunity they get near. Having attended more of those than I can count, I know their profile. The questions I receive, as a trainer, are so technical I sometimes have to research them to answer them.
In contrast some of the questions we were receiving were so fundamental that I was surprised to find that these were the business owners. I met people who do not own scan tools, who do not know how to read a financial statement, or calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a scan tool. I fielded questions about ASE testing that included “why” a little more often than I have come to expect. I encountered shops with no web presence and shops that provide no training of any kind to their technicians. We had a shop win a television out of the booth that I could not find an address or phone number for on the web.
Before you rush to judgment – don’t. These guys were asking the questions they needed to ask. They were there and they were taking advantage of the staggering amount of expertise that surrounded them. My hat is off to the folks who figured out how to get these shops to attend. They just may have saved their businesses. The core question is how does it happen that some people who own repair businesses are far from the competency level needed to repair a car that was built in the last 15 years? I don’t have all the answers but I have a few symptoms.
No trade association participation
Not one of the folks I talked to in this predicament belong to a trade association. I see you parts guys rolling your eyes that the Automotive Service Association guy is grandstanding. But it’s a fact that shops that belong to trade associations are the better shops as a group because they interact with other shops and share information once in a while.
Little to no training
For the most part training was not a part of the culture of these shops. If there was little to no technical training, I found that there was absolutely no owner training. Many of these folks were seeing a management trainer for the first time. Imagine being in that position. You would probably be pretty excited, and they were.
Inadequately tooled
Because I was teaching a program that required a tool, access to the Internet and some computer skills I received a lot of questions. Many of these folks had purchased equipment but never got it to work. There is a real opportunity for tool sellers to provide the add-on service of supporting the initial install and doing a shop equivalent of an oil change reminder on software updates. That item alone could spin into a whole Motor Age article.
Trade magazines are free?
Another observation is that this group is not big on reading trade magazines. I had a guy ask me how I can afford to subscribe to all the magazines I suggested to him. I smiled as I told him that there is no cost to shop owners to subscribe to the magazines. He said he hung up on those callers when they called to offer a subscription before they got to the free part.
We can take the attitude that we don’t need to pay much attention to these shops because they won’t survive long term, but I think that is too short sighted. These guys are competing for customers who are less informed than they are. If we don’t help to address their professionalism we will continue to fight the battle of public perception not only at the customer level but also in schools where counselors steer smart young men and women away from our industry.
Clearly there is a percentage of these guys who are very interested in bettering themselves and their business but don’t know where to turn. I salute NAPA for figuring out a way to fill that need and communicate with them. Hopefully we can learn something from them and engage more repair shops that are in the shadows.
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