“I had to kill the technician to become the manager,” admits AC Guarino. No, this wasn’t a confession but a realization. “I was getting in here at 4 a.m. and working till 11, 12:00, and I realized I just wasn’t getting ahead.”
It said, “Read ‘The E-Myth’ by Michael Gerber.” Subtitled “Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It,” this seminal publication posits the theory that most new businesses are not necessarily started by entrepreneurs, but technicians. Be they bakers, graphic artists or auto mechanics, they enjoy doing hands-on work themselves, still working for the business rather than on it.
“Coming from a technical background, I probably had to read it five times before I understood it,” says Guarino. But he was simultaneously synthesizing ideas from other business gurus like Bob Cooper and Gary Gunn, particularly the latter, who Guarina met after attending one of his seminars.
“Gary was teaching measurements, how to really look at the P and L, how to look at the balance sheet, how to measure things and write them down, graph them,” he recalls. “That really interested me, but when he mentioned the E-Myth, that really piqued my interest. So Gary and I started a relationship that still goes on today and has grown.”
Today AC Auto Service succeeds because Guarino works just as hard at managing the business as he was the technician. To set himself apart from other shops he instituted extended hours, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Then there’s his manual, a book he’s compiled over the years for training his personnel, the basic theme being that they are a “yes” company.
“We do not say no,” affirms Guarino. “Because if you don’t have a sale set up with your employees, I wouldn’t spend a dime on marketing; you’re not ready. Say somebody’s going to come in with sales flyers for an oil change, and you’re just going to say, ‘Sorry, can’t get you in.’ You just wasted every penny you spent. You get them in there somehow.”
“Or not,” laughs Guarino. “They might decide to go ahead and get the work done. Not only have you made a sale but you’ve bought a little time. If you haven’t started draining the oil you can take that car out back and get the customer home; we’ve have a shuttle driver ready to go. Now some people, in my case more often than not, decide to wait, because I have a real beautiful waiting room with a 60-inch TV, coffee, soft drinks—why should they want to be anywhere else?”
This past October, Guarina spent $50,000 renovating the waiting area and parking lot. “There was only one entrance and everybody tried to park at that door,” Guarino relates. “So I knocked a whole wall down, put in another door, rearranged the parking lot to (maximize) spaces and completely repaved everything.”
In the revamped foyer, the new 60-inch flat screen features a menu board provided by AC/Delco with a video package designed by Muzak. “I can put prices up there, some of the things that we do; it’s totally programmable,” Guarino explains. “If I didn’t want people seeing stuff (like a loop) from ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ I could change the whole thing. Bbut people seem to love ‘The Big Bang Theory.’”
But perhaps the greatest thing Guarino accomplished was networking with other shops. “Join a group,” he advises. “I think for entrepreneurs it’s the best thing in the whole world to do. I learned from others; find some place that fits you and your personality. Keep ego out of it. I see so many (shops) fail because of ego. Even if you’re the best technician in the world, you’ve got to let ego go or you’re going to fail because you haven’t changed yourself.”
These groups also share research. “Using the DiSC behavior system (Dominance/influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness), we’ve been studying the kind of people we hire,” Guarino explains. “We created points of how a technician should be, how they should think, how a manager or a service writer should think, even how an owner should think. But you have to have somebody to compare this to so for the last year we have been working with 10 shops across the country to have some of the best people in the country take the test.”
With this data now compiled on a website, evaluations can be made quickly once tests are administered. “Now are these employees going to work out for sure?” Guarino muses. “No one knows; it’s only a third of what we do to look at a candidate.”
With the knowledge and experience he’s accumulated, someday AC might find himself in a hotel lobby giving advice to a newly minted shop owner. Would he say anything different? “No,” he laughs, “except that they should learn how to use Excel!”
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