Like a lot of people mentioned in the May issue of Motor Age magazine, David Wittmayer laid the foundation for his career via the military, namely as a Navy machinist’s mate in the mid-70s. “I guess I would say the military is a million dollar experience; I wouldn’t give you 50 cents to do again,” he laughs. But after spending three years working on and operating his ship’s steam turbines, he wasn’t intimidated by even the largest of engines.
“My thought is that nuts and bolts are nuts and bolts,” he shrugs. “It doesn’t make any difference if you’re working on a water pump or a semi-tractor or a car. For mechanical ability, the same stuff applies; I’m using the same tools I did then, just on gas engines.”
And his military experience had other benefits. “I grew up in a small town in Wyoming, a sheltered environment,” says Wittmayer. “The Navy opened my eyes to different people, different cultures, different ways of doing things—different thought processes.”
Armed, so to speak, with this background, Wittmayer and his wife Lora Hansen opened Hansen Enterprises Fleet Repair, aka HEFR. HEFR is unique for numerous reasons. Known in the Camp Verde region of Arizona as ‘Heifer’, it’s an unusual moniker for a business that has absolutely nothing to do with cattle; they specialize in diesel repair. “Actually our logo isn’t a heifer,” Wittmayer points out, “she’s a pretty old sour-back cow. I know that breaks the rules of advertising, because people see the cow and think dairy or agriculture. But if you’ve seen it once and get it, you remember it.”
They actually had the name before coming up with the acronym. “My wife already had a business with her name” — Hansen Enterprises, Wittmayer explains—“and a credit card machine, so we just added ‘Fleet Repair’ to it. About 70% of our business is medium and heavy duty vehicles, mostly diesel, a little bit gas. About 30% is passenger car and light truck. We started the shop 11 years ago; up until about 2009 we were growing at 20% a year. I had three guys working for me, and we did a little better than half a million dollars.”
About 90 miles north of Phoenix, Camp Verde wasn’t spared the hard economic hit the region took when the housing market collapsed. Wittmayer had to scale back on staff. “But when I look at the numbers, we’re running about 82% for our repeat customers, plus or minus 5%, for the last several years,” he reports. “I cannot see where the economy made a statistical difference in the number of new versus repeat people. When I look at local (inside about a 20-mile radius) versus non-local, I run about 50% local people, plus or minus about 5%.
“I like to track a lot of stuff to see what works and what doesn’t,” Wittmayer admits. “We’ve tried a variety of different advertising and marketing campaigns and tracked the results, but I cannot see that any one thing has worked significantly well. The solution sounds simple; targeting the right person with the right message at the right time. I know who my right person is. I know the message I want to tell them. It’s the timing—getting it to them when they need it. And I’ve asked several people who’ve come through the door, especially new customers, how can I best advertise? None of them have a good answer.”
Wittmayer perceives advertising as acquiring new people; marketing as retaining the ones you have. “There are different things we do to retain customers, and those have been fairly successful. For instance I tell people we don’t do oil changes. We do a service that includes an oil change, but we’re going to air up all the tires and do a quick inspection in the 45 minutes it takes to change the oil. We schedule the next appointment before you leave. We presell a lot of work; we might find you need to clean the induction system, so we’ll set that up for the next time you’re in.”
Wittmayer also believes in reporting everything they find. “I think the client needs enough information to make an intelligent decision for where they’re at in their circumstances. Too many shops only give them a little bit, afraid if they tell them too much they’re going to scare them off. But once the client knows what’s going on, we can put a plan in place to first r,epair then maintain that vehicle. Repairs always come when it’s inconvenient and they’re stressful. You can schedule maintenance and fit it into what works best for everybody.”
For Wittmayer is a strong advocate for maintenance—and has the office software to back it up. “We shoot for the lowest overall cost per mile,” he states, “and it’s always less expensive to do maintenance. I once had two customers in the same line of work who bought identical medium duty vehicles at the same time. I only saw the one fellow when he came in for oil changes and when he broke down. The other guy had his truck regularly serviced and would do everything we recommended. Over the course of about 200,000 miles the first guy’s cost was 27 cents a mile, just fixing stuff when it was broken. The other fellow was 13 cents a mile.”
And besides numbers crunching software, Wittmayer has invested heavily in the right tools. “I look at cost and price,” he reports. “Price is what you pay today, cost is what it does in the long run. If it’s a tool—and a tool can be a piece of software—and it’s something I’m going to use on a repeat basis, the cost per use may become very low. I tell people the most expensive tool in my toolbox cost me $25. The reason it’s the most expensive is I’ve never used it. I don’t have a return on my investment.”
Sort of like trading those legendary magic beans—for a cow.
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