JUST BECAUSE IT IS SLOW, DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN’T GROW!
By David Rogers
There are certain times of the year that a bit of a slowdown in customer traffic seems inevitable. These times are the ones where many teams become unproductive and unhappy. If you aren’t concerned, maybe you should be!
Your employees may not always outwardly demonstrate their dissatisfaction, and you may think that they ought to know by now that some weeks are just slow, but it’s when we relax and think we know what others are thinking that we really get in trouble!
Even though we have become very adept at marketing and advertising our business, Back-to-School, Christmas, and Tax Week have never made it off the bottom of our “busy times” list!
Our secret to success, though, is that we actually have a plan for these tougher times that increases morale and helps prevent comebacks! By planning ahead while sales are taking a dip, we’re actually preparing our shop to make even more money once the slowdown is over!
We do this in three ways: internal/cross-training, to make sure that our shop is prepared to handle an influx of cars; image management and beautification, to make sure that our shop’s image gives our neighbors a great impression of our facility and staff; and by marketing on a seasonal plan, where we make our biggest push in the month leading up to a seasonal slowdown.
Internal Training/Cross-Training
The secret, we’ve found, is to focus on the areas in which our shop is most limited during the busiest periods. By removing the bottlenecks and, as a result, increasing our capability (and therefore our capacity), we prepare to make more money every year!
How do we do this in our shop?
Say, for instance, you have a guy who flashes proms, and does your heavy diagnostic work. Schedule the next most talented technician to spend a couple of hours per day with that top diag guy. By the time the shop is busy again, he too will be able to flash proms and confidently perform deeper diagnostics (You’ll likely be amazed what 8-10 hours of training like this can do.).
(And of course, great diag work helps your shop stay busy, even when car counts drop off!)
For instance, if you have an alignment machine in your shop, it’s likely you have one guy who is the primary alignment tech. Have each of the other techs spend an hour or two with him during slow times, so that every tech in your shop is adept at alignments. The next time your alignment technician is sick or on vacation, your shop won’t lose that revenue!
In our shop, we train all of our staff to help us with estimating and parts sourcing and to do so in the proper way! Imagine how many more dollars you could push through your shop when you are buried in cars if, instead of sitting around watching his toolbox rust, your tech would grab a work order and help with sourcing parts and building the estimate!
Just because your service writers are buried in recommendations and your techs don’t have approval doesn’t mean that your shop has to act like a clogged drain!
Image Management and Beautification
When our shop is slow, I pay my techs and other employees to paint, drywall, pour new concrete pads for lifts, hang Christmas decorations, pass out flyers at the local movie theater, et cetera, just to keep them productive and to get a handle on our image – all while filling the pipeline with work for next week or month.
Two things are important to remember and consider, however:
First, control the number of hours you can afford to pay for each job by creating a budget and sticking to it; and second, assign the guys to the work based upon: a) your budget and what you can part with (remember to spread it around!); b) their hours flagged that period (help out the hungry!), and c) their willingness to participate in this most important work! (Whiners and complainers move to the back of the line!)
If you plan for these things and undertake a minimum of preparation (such as having a few gallons of matching paint on hand, budgeting a few extra bucks each month when you’re busy, writing lists year-round of things that need mending or maintenance, etc), you can turn slow times into times of personal and team growth . . . and you can improve your team’s trust in you to take care of them, even when things are hard.
At the same time, too, you are readying the business for the next rush period. You’ll definitely see the team perform more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater teamwork – and, we’ve found, they’ll take better care of the facility and equipment when they have each personally worked so hard to make it nice themselves!
Remember: when it comes to running a successful shop, image is everything. How your facility and staff look creates an expectation for the customers before they ever even reach your front counter or pick up a phone to call.
Marketing Before A Slow Period
Perhaps the best way to increase sales during a period when you know your shop will be slower than usual is to ramp up your marketing before your car count starts to drop.
In our shop, we’ve set up a seasonal marketing plan where we stop any slowdown in its tracks by stepping up our marketing & advertising 1-2 months before sales normally start to dip.
For instance, we know that our shop’s car count typically begins to slow down in late November for the holidays. To counteract this, we increase our marketing efforts in October (and earlier), so that when that typical slowdown comes around (while other shops are experiencing a drop in sales), the marketing and advertising from the previous month are continuing to bring us, great customers.
Since we know that the big companies and chains will be investing a huge amount of money when it slows down so that they can be sure to grab as much of the available business as possible, we know we must beat them to the punch, to be sure we get our share of those customers first!
Besides the timing of your marketing efforts, however, what those pieces say is just as important. In our shop, we constantly focus on doing “replacement marketing,” where we aim to market only to customers that we want in our shop. After all, if your shop is anything like ours, we don’t have time for the cheap, discount-seeking customers that typical advertisements bring in.
Instead, we focus on bringing in people who want to take care of their car, and who are focused on quality over price. By concentrating on these customers, we guarantee higher sales year-round, and by stepping up advertising efforts in the month or so before a slowdown, we make sure that we have a steady stream of quality customers all year long.