A Q&A with Greg Sands

Jan. 1, 2020
Greg Sands, CEO of Mudlick Mail, shares his secrets on direct mail and a successful shop marketing campaign.

Necessity often is the mother of creativity. As cliche as that might be, it’s the story behind Greg Sands’ company Mudlick Mail.

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Sands is CEO of Mudlick Mail and owner of 25 repair shops throughout Georgia, Colorado, Texas and Tennessee. Sands and his team creates direct mail marketing campaigns for the 25 shops, and then share it with Mudlick Mail clientele.

We spoke with Sands recently about how the marketing landscape is set up, how direct mail still works in today’s technology-driven environment and what others in the business can do to help the shop owner.

MA: Tell me about your million dollar shops.

GS: We have 25 domestic shops, we have one European shop, in four states. We’re in Colorado, Texas, Georgia and Tennessee. Our average sales yearly per store is $1.3 million, just a little over that. We currently don’t have any stores, other than stores that’s been open less than a year, that are doing under a million dollars in sales. Those sales are with less than 5 percent tires, which is a question I get asked a lot. I think the national average for an automotive shop is about $400,000 to $500,000 in sales.

The thing that I would say makes us different or the reasons we’re able to drive those kinds of sales is that we really focus on key benefits. When you look at our shops, one of the benefits that we notice is saying yes to customers. A lot of people say, “Well I say yes to customers,” but we make that part of our culture. When I listen to shops around the country, it’s real easy to say no and not realize it. For example, if a customer calls and says, “Hey, can I bring my car in now to get it checked out.” If you say anything other than, “Yeah, absolutely, now’s a great time. Let me go ahead and get your last name,” and get them in, then you’ve really said no to that customer. If you’re asking them to come back tomorrow, to come later in the day, that’s an example of a no. We really drive that point home, we focus on that.

The other part is our unique hours of operation. We’re open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday. We are closed on Sunday. All of our stores have the same operations. When people come in, we really zero in on speed of service. If we know that a customer comes in, for example, for an oil change, they’ve really only budgeted an hour of their time to have that oil change done. We know if we don’t get that car pulled around and on a lift and checked out, the chances of us being able to sell any maintenance work or anything on that cars goes way down, the longer it takes us to get back with that customer.

Our staffing, we’ll run three managers at the front counter. We have a general manager and two assistant managers. Where if you had one store, it’d be the owner if he’s an owner/operator, and two assistants. Then we run two to three technicians in the back, depending on the qualifications, and three to four GSes, general service people, in the back, depending on if your state does state inspections, emissions testing. If you do, you’re going to want to run four.

The whole point of that if you notice a normal shop around the country would run about half that staff. What we noticed is like the front counter, if you have a manager that’s selling a job, it’s very frustrating and there’s a high propensity to miss a sale if another call is coming in while you’re selling a job to a customer. Or you’re taking in a customer at the front counter and the phone’s ringing. We feel with days off, we need to have a three-man front to be able to make that happen.

MA: Why is direct mail still important? 

GS: Direct mail is about the only tool left to zero in on the customers that we want. To understand direct mail, you have to understand very quickly, the other vehicles you have a your disposal. This is where it’s very confusing for shop owners. You have direct mail. When we say direct mail, that is a stand alone postcard, whatever size, and the customer has to look at it, make a decision either to throw it away or keep it and decide to use it.

There’s a thing called marriage mail, and I call marriage mail anything that comes in together. You see these things that come in envelopes and there’s a whole bunch of coupons in there. You see this newspaper type deal that comes in and it has a bunch of coupons in it. The problem with those is that you’re really going after that coupon shopper. If you’re not a coupon shopper, you’re not going to be interested in digging through those types of vehicles, and therefore someone may not ever see your offer.

Then you have radio, newspaper, billboards and TV. All of those are great vehicles if you have multiple units. It’s very hard to make those work if you have only one to five units, especially in a bigger city. Those are more brand building vehicles, they’re not really  call to action. Direct mail, what that allows you to do, here’s the advantage. You can target households, the households you want. I’ve heard going across the country shop owners say, “Well, I keep getting bottom feeders.” So when you ask them how do they market, their marketing in a vehicle that will bring in the coupon shoppers, the lower-end customers.

With direct mail, you can simply raise the incomes that you’re trying to hit in your neighborhood and get to a level where you can offer a price, a call to action that is attractive to them, because it’s based more on the services you offer, the benefits you offer and less on just the dollar amount that you’re selling something for. Direct mail allows you to hit specific homes in geographic parameters. It’s easy to track. One of the things we do with direct mail is we put a recorded line on their postcards we mailed out. Not only can they see how many people called off that piece, they can also listen to the calls, which is huge when it comes to training.

With the number of stores I have, I use direct mail as my main advertising vehicle. And until something changes, that is still the main way to advertise today for shops.

MA: What is the No. 1 mistake in terms of marketing shops make today? 

GS: A shop should spent 5 to 10 percent of their sales, really the sales they want to accomplish, on advertising. It’s not a lot of money when you think about it. Let’s say a shop owner is going to spend $3,000 to $5,000 in advertising. Most shop owners make the mistake of putting it in the wrong direction, like for example, they don’t want lower-end customers, bottom feeders, whatever they call them, but then they advertise in marriage mail because it’s cheap. That’s an example of they’re actually advertising and bringing in the customers they don’t want.

The other thing is they try to sell too much. Even if you do direct mail, what we’ve found is there’s a thousand ways to do direct mail wrong. The people who use Mudlick Mail get to use my ads that I personally create, because I’ve made all those mistakes. If you put an ad out there and you’re trying to get a higher-end customer, but all you’re really advertising is cheap prices, you’re going to attract the lower end customers in a high-end market. You’ve gotten have features and benefits listed. Higher-end customers are interested in your warranty, they’re interested in your hours of operation. They want to see a picture of your building, or maybe a picture of the owner to know who you are and to feel like they know you in that marketplace.

The main thing I see is they spread their advertising so thin, they’ll just decide one day that, ‘Hey, there’s a billboard available, I’m going to put my logo up on that billboard,’ not recognizing that that may be brand building, but if you’re struggling to pay your bills, you’re going to want something that’s more call to action. If you’re making tons of money, then a billboard or going into subdivisions, into their magazines, things like that to build your brand, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Then the other thing, and I think this is a huge mistake, is getting confused on what advertising is. For example, if you want to sponsor a little league baseball team, if you want to fix vans for a local homeless shelter or be in the community and do things, those are called donations. It’s very good to do that, but it’s not really advertising. That’s the way I look at it. We do things in the community, but we don’t do that and it’s part of our ad budget. That’s not really the call to action that I’m looking for.

MA: How can you fix that mistake? 

GS: What we suggest and what we do for our clients and we do for ourselves, is we look at their area and we will tell them, based on what I would do in my market, and we tell people to create a marketing plan that’s really geared for what you want. Most people want more customers in their shops. Let’s gear our marketing plans toward that, let’s go after those customers.

Then we put a plan in place. We help them. We have a learning center, we teach you about being a yes company. We teach you how to track or how to staff a store. A lot of people don’t understand the basics of hiring great technicians. What’s the secret to that. These are things that we help them so they don’t waste their money in the marketplace with customers that are maybe less desirable or don’t fit what they want. The biggest thing is to get real focused and real consistent.

Advertising direct mail is not a magic bullet. It’s part of a recipe for success. That recipe, part of it is advertising, a lot of it is that owner has to recognize if you’ve been in business 20 years and you’re not seeing 500 or 600 customers a month, there are still some flaws in your store you have to fix. Shop owners that aren’t willing to recognize that tend to not do very well, even with direct mail. We try to help them with the areas they’re not doing so well within the store. Advertising is going to work either way, but it’s only going to make you money if you take care of them once they come in the door.

MA: How do you see the changing marketing landscape panning out over the next few years? 

GS: All I have to do is go back over the last 20 years and then look at the last five years. If you look at the marketing landscape, I still think direct mail will dominate over the next five to 10 years. You have the Internet, which is a big presence. Ten years ago, there was no Google. Netscape or Twitter and all these accounts that are out there, you’re going to see a lot of these accounts come online. The Internet is no doubt the future for larger companies.

I see the future as becoming even more fragmented as more and more people crowd into the Internet. You know, email blasts were a big deal when they first came out. We do more email blasts than most shops probably in America, we have more than 100,000 emails that go out. We’ve learned to do it once a month. That’s really good for customer retention. But what’s happened is that companies that just started out that were ahead of the curve, they were sending out so many emails that now, all of us have an email account, the first thing you do is you get on there and just delete junk. You don’t even open them up. You’re getting hit with these same junk emails. That was a positive that turned into a negative.

There will be another Google someday. There will be another Facebook. There will be something that we haven’t dreamed of. As more and more of those crowd in, that to me makes direct mail, which is still really the last resort for small businesses, for me to dominate my three-mile radius it’s still going to be the dominant player for me unless something radically changes.

MA: What can technicians do to help a shop?

GS: I think the biggest thing is ongoing education. I’d say it’s a two-way street. Shops should pay for their technicians’ educations. In our shops, if a technician wants to go to a class, as long as he goes to the class and he goes through the whole process, we’ll reimburse hi for it. It’s a two-way street.

Technicians, the best technicians, and I would tell this to anybody who’s a technician out there, be loyal to the shop you’re at. One thing that’s very clear is that the technicians that hop around never make as much money as the technicians that are loyal. You can be a big part of the success of the shop if you’re loyal and hang in there. Never flex, when the owner’s short-handed, that’s not a time to go ask for a raise. That’s a good time to go say, ‘Hey, Mr. Owner, I’m here for you and I’m going to help you.’ That owner is going to remember that.

That technician is just the lifeblood of the business. I would tell any technician, you know, most technicians don’t like talking to the customers, the exceptional ones will. Even when you’re not comfortable, make a point of it to learn as much as the owner will let you on how that operation runs and how it works. Someday if that owner gets sick or hurt, that may be your opportunity to someday to buy that business. The loyal technicians are worth more than anything in a shop today.

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