ENTREPRENEURIAL OWNERS EXPAND BUSINESS PROSPECTS THROUGH THEIR COLORADO SHOP

At age 21 Terry Keller hit the ground running. Hired in 1972 as an apprentice mechanic, two years later he was one of the first and youngest technicians in the country to receive ASE’s newly minted Master Technician certificate. Shortly after that he bought his place of employment; rechristened Keller Brothers Auto Repair, Terry molded the business into one of the leading repair shops in metropolitan Denver, CO, eventually getting rated the #1 Auto Repair Facility in the Nation by CarQuest.

But along the way there were a few bumps. “I was the technician-turned-business-owner at age 23,” Keller explains. “I knew how to fix cars really well. I knew how to talk to people fairly well. But I didn’t understand how to manage employees: how to hire, train, hold accountable—no clue. One year I remember sending out 102 W-2 forms, and I only had 12 part time and full time positions.”

Despite growing success—or perhaps because of it—this was Keller’s Achilles heel. “The thing I didn’t understand was if you knew what your expectations were, but your employees didn’t and weren’t training to meet them, how in the world can you expect them to do a good job and take care of your customers? I also didn’t know how to speak to customers in an empowering way—not communicating with them at a level that was respectful to them. And I certainly knew nothing about marketing. It was an absolute miracle that I was able to stay in business.”

Terry and Margaret Keller	David Rogers

Enter David Rogers. Hired as a service writer in 1997, Rogers quickly realized something was wrong. “I had worked in two shops before and had seen the exact same thing,” he reveals. “When you have multiple customers a day screaming in your face, you know you’ve got a problem.” Having previously operated in the high-end hospitality sector of five star restaurants and hotels, this situation was inexplicable to him. Still, Keller Bros. was unique.

“I don’t know too many shops with 9 bays and a couple of lube bays that are doing 65-70 cars a day,” Rogers concedes. “But the key is not to confuse activity with results. In Terry’s case an average RO of $80-85 was actually costing him: having to staff up to serve all of these people; and more transactions means more paperwork, more bookkeeping costs and opportunities for mistakes.

“And when you try to be the cheapest place and reflect other shops’ marketing by doing it for a dollar less,” Rogers continues, “you’re going to get exactly what you ask for: bottom feeders, with no loyalty whatsoever. There are more complaints to deal with, and that really leads to a vortex; the staff becomes displeased, moral gets low, pressure is high–it’s not a healthy environment.”

Rogers apprised Keller that they had to convert this culture of cut-rate to attract the right kind of customer and serve them in such a way to sustain a long term relationship. “I spent about 28 years building the car count to that point,” sighs Keller. “But I know I wasn’t making any money. So I said okay, teach me about that.”

“We’re not going to invite people to look at us like we’re of no value,” begins Rogers, “so we introduced charging for diagnostics, which was a fairly new concept at the time. (With the proper tests) we could give customers an almost 100% answer on what was wrong, and take responsibility for that answer rather than spend their money and throw parts at the car.”

“We had to learn how ask better questions and document more—the list was endless,” Rogers recounts. “And we partnered these new systems with ongoing training that was specifically designed to overcome those problems and mitigate those risks, and help the staff learn not only how to behave, but understand why they needed to behave that way, why they needed to ask those kind of questions or document these solutions, and how to present them to the customer.”

Just two years later these systems were so successful they became businesses unto themselves. “Auto Profit Masters (APM) was founded in 1999 to provide shop owners the tools needed to increase profits and reduce operating costs,” notes company literature, “through training and software to analysis and hands-on coaching.” Keller and Rogers followed this up in 2001 with the Automated Marketing Group (AMG), offering comprehensive marketing plans proven successful by their own business.

“It wasn’t so much that we decided to take these ideas and make money by becoming consultants,” Rogers admits. “That certainly wasn’t my goal; I was very happy doing what we were doing. We were setting records in every measurable aspect of the business on a weekly or monthly basis.”

But his colleague was thinking beyond business. “Prior to this I’d always looked at my fellow shop owners as competitors,” Keller says. “The last thing on earth I wanted to do was teach them something that worked for me. But that flipped–something inside me gained a great deal of empathy, because I looked back at that 28 years of pain and suffering I’d been through, going to sleep at night not knowing if I could make payroll the next day, not being able to do things for my children–I wanted to help others avoid all this.

“It was the most fun thing I’d ever done in the business,” says Keller of his and Rogers’ legacy. “I just can’t tell you how important it was to me to see that happen.”