Decades of experience special at Specialized

Jan. 1, 2020
Services built on experience move this shop ahead of others.
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About half of the technicians in Specialized Auto Inc.’s bays have been in the shop for more than a decade. That experience is something special, just like the services the shop gives its clientele.

Bob Emmert, president of the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based two-location shop, started as a technician at a Mercedes dealer. After venturing out on his own, he used the owner of the dealer as a model for who he wanted to be.

“I just tried to emulate the way he took care of people and tried to consider the trifecta. That is we need to take care of our customers so that they have loyalty to us, but we have to have loyalty to them. We need to take care of our employees so they have loyalty to us, so we need to have loyalty to them. We need to make sure that the business remains profitable enough to be gracious to all parties involved,” he says.

Specialized Auto is in the suburbs of the Silicon Valley, and home to an eclectic, highly educated and independent group of consumers. The town is full of high-line cars, but has no dealer, giving Emmert’s shop a true advantage in the marketplace. What started as a Volvo-specific shop has expanded to the only one in the area with factory scan tools for Volvo, BMW, Mercedes, Saab, Volkswagen and Audi.

“But also in this shop, in order to fill it, we work on everything. It’s a general repair shop,” Emmert adds. “We’re the only shop down here that can work on all those high-line cars, but we work on Chevys and Fords and Toyotas and Hondas. Again, that was my diversification move. I didn’t want to be tied to just one thing.”

Not being tied to just one make means tying training into the shop is paramount. Emmert has delegated technical training to a shop foreman, and each employee has training he must complete. Training is offered from Bosch, WORLDPAC, ACDelco and the local community college. The shop sometimes hosts special training for its technicans as well as those from other shops.

Also, each employee has required numbers for productivity tied to sliding scale pay plans. The more credentials a technician has, the higher wages he is paid.

“Their pay isn’t necessarily tied to their training. Their pay is tied to their viability and their productivity. But in order to be viable and productive, they need to be in the training,” Emmert says.

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The shop pays for all of the training technicians attend. Emmert’s experience in a dealer setting helped him realize his technicians need to have the options to work on a variety of challenges and learn training to work on today’s technology

“The focus on training is because of the rapidly evolving technology. I view my role as the captain of an oil tanker like the Exxon Valdez. I have to be looking way down there to see what’s coming up,” he explains. “And if I don’t steer the ship in such a way that it’s prepared for the future, it could run aground. Technicians are always focused on what’s in front of them today. They usually don’t have time to think about their own future, so I have tried to think of their future for them so they remain viable as employable technicians.”

Each technician has his own computer, completed with Alldata, factory information, iATN and Identifix, and each line of cars has a factory-trained Master Technician. In addition to the benefits for customers, this setup is a boost for the shop’s relationship with other shops, offering some parts for sale.

“When we came down to this new shop (a second location in Freedom, Calif.), the first thing that I did was write a letter to all the repair shops and body shops in the area to let them know that we were here and that we were here to help them,” Emmert says. “For example, if you’re just a general body shop and you get a BMW in there and you do a lot of body work on it, you need a BMW scan tool to clear the codes. And body shops inevitably have to drive cars or tow cars 40 or 50 miles to the BMW dealer. We wanted them to know that we were available as a resource to them and other general repair shop. By good will, we’ll coach them as necessary. But what we find is that a lot of times, they just refer all those cars to us. They don’t want to get involved.”

Going the Right Direction
This has helped the shop gain a corner on the high-end vehicles in the area. Internet marketing has added to this, as well. Appointments and service reminders are done by e-mail as much as possible. The Internet presence has increased over the years. Emmert says the company tracked phone calls to see where calls were coming from (print, Yellow Pages or Internet).

“Even five years ago, over 50 percent of the phone calls came in from the phone number that was published on the website,” he notes. “We hadn’t really done a lot with the website at that point, so we started pushing back on Yellow Pages and increasing Internet.”

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Specialized Auto’s facility also has been solar powered for five years, giving it another boost among the community. That is extremely popular around the Santa Cruz area, and being a green certified business is key. Their customers are very environmentally conscious, and one of his customers sells solar panels.

“All the shops in the area that are trying to be professional are probably certified green shops. That means we have to buy all recycled paper, even recycled toilet paper, and we have to recycle everything,” Emmert says. “The automotive business is pretty green anyway. We already capture all fluids, but everybody kind of waves that flag around there because it’s almost required.”

In addition to these marketing and customer services, Specialized Auto also offers free shuttle service and washes each car serviced. Rental cars also are available. Part of these and other offerings are derived from the shop’s participation in multiple 20 Groups. Emmert participated in them for 12 years, and his general manager now is taking part.

“It’s a real benefit to sit in a room with people from all over the country in different environments, in different economies, in different cultures. We’re all in the same business, so you have an opportunity to have people who are not direct competitors, but people who feel your pain so to speak, and it’s like having a board of directors,” Emmert says. “It’s been a real benefit for us to compare numerical statistics, to compare training ideas, to compare technical ideas and to compare even business trends. It’s been very helpful.

Throughout the years, all of the training the technicians and Emmert himself have had has helped the shop streamline its operations and keep the techs in the bays. Again, while half have been there more than 10 years, the average tenure at the shop is around seven years.

“They all seem to get it,” Emmert says. “Not that we don’t have disputes or conflicts over a period of time, but we’ve never had a client conflict that we couldn't solve.”

And that dedication from the top down makes it possible to offer high-end service to all of the customers.

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