Why Pay More Auto founded on the principle of sound diagnostics

There aren’t too many shops that tender a question in their title, but Why Pay More Auto Service makes perfect sense when you think about it. Founded in 2012 on the principal of sound diagnostics, owner Russell Bates felt that customers were paying an excessive amount of money just to learn what was wrong with their car.

“I’ve always thought if I can’t get a good grasp of what’s wrong within a solid hour, then something’s wrong with me because that’s a long time to be looking at a car,” Bates explains.

“If you spend $800 and we don’t fix your problem, that’s back on me because I didn’t do my job correctly. I feel we have enough equipment, enough tools, enough knowledge, enough databases that we can get 90 percent of the stuff diagnosed and repaired right the first time. 

“Is it an easy thing to do? Absolutely not,” Bates continues. “We make mistakes, but it’s my job to stand at that counter and tell the customer that we screwed up, we missed it, and we’re going to take care of it. You’d be surprised how many people appreciate that.”

A lifelong resident of the Baltimore, Md. area, Bates explains that while his shop is only seven years old, he’s been in the industry as a technician for over three decades. His reputation is such that a former instructor recommended him for an Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) panel to help refine their certification test.

“I think there were 11invites from across the country,” recalls Bates. “But with hundreds of thousands of qualified technicians available nationwide, I wondered ‘why me?’” This question led him to ignore ASE’s calls at first. “I hung up on the guy; I thought it was someone in the shop screwing around,” he laughs.

But once he learned it was legit, Bates headed to ASE’s headquarters in Leesburg, Va. “They basically wanted us to look over (their questionnaire) to decide if there was a right answer, a wrong answer or a ‘maybe’ answer,” he explains. “We got rid of the ‘maybes’ to help guys understand the test better. I did three categories: electrical, brakes, and engine performance.

For Bates has incredible acumen for electrical systems. “For some reason I can look at wiring diagrams and understand where everything’s going, what it’s doing,” he observes. Plus his insights help teach others; “I told (a technician) don’t ohm anything out anymore, do voltage drops, it’s more accurate — it’s a better picture of the circuit. He said ‘I’ve never had someone explain it to me that way before.’”

Bates’ need to go independent is even easier to explain. With his regular job 25 miles from his house, Bates got the okay from his employers to do some side work from home. “But it got out of hand one week,” he notes. “There was so much to do I took a vacation from work to just get caught up. Then my wife asked if I could make this work all the time.”

She offered him a bet: if he got through the week and still had work scheduled for the following week, Bates would put in his notice and give independence a shot. It did, he did, and the Bates family was going into business for themselves. With a financial partner, Bates set up shop with just his toolbox, six jack stands and two floor jacks. “I didn’t get my first lift until about seven months into it. Since then, I’ve kept adding.”

To that end, they recently moved to a new location within the town of Essex, part of the metropolitan Baltimore area. A repurposed gas station, Bates’ crew overhauled the building and are entertaining plans on enclosing the old gas pump canopy and adding two lifts for work trucks.

“If you’re capable and you have the facility, do the heavy-duty too,” says Bates, “because that’s going to combat your slow times. If you get that mix of everything, as an owner you’re going to be busy throughout the year.

“We have been extremely busy for the past 8-10 months,” notes Bates, “and I make a point with every new customer who walks in here to ask how they heard about us. That’s very important to me, because one, if somebody is recommending us, I want to tell them thank you. Secondly, I need to know if my advertising is working or is this word of mouth.

“We’ve gotten probably a 60 percent increase in new customers,” he remarks. “Looking at the notes being put on the work orders, probably 80 percent of it is word of mouth. The other 15 percent would be internet reviews. I do very little paper advertising; I pretty much keep all my advertising dollars to the internet because that’s what driving them in here.”

What Bates emphasizes on the internet is also what he teaches his technicians. “We’re not like everybody else,” he maintains. “There are other shops, so the difference has got to be the service. That’s what we can control the most, the service the customer gets as they walk through the door.

“I’ve always wanted to make the customer feel comfortable, to relax, to watch some TV,” he continues. “I keep very little auto advertising up front; I want people to come in, sit down, read a book, use the WiFi, be comfortable. Everything that we do which is the service end of things, I try to do top notch. That’s what sets us apart.”

With the auto market shifting drivetrain technology to electrics and hybrids, and self-driving cars becoming a very real possibility in the near future, isn’t that reason enough to ask Why Pay More?