REPAIR SHOP MANAGEMENT: HIRING AND RETAINING QUALITY PEOPLE

By Terry Keller

How good are the people that work for you? How loyal are they? How long do they stay with you? Are they better than you are at their position?

For 25 years, I really struggled with this one. Because my shop was not consistently profitable during that period, I was always looking for ways to hold costs down including the wages I was willing to pay. Even though it seemed necessary at the time, much later I discovered it also caused a very serious self-perpetuating problem. It wasn’t until I woke up one day so sick of the chaos and failure of my employees to follow through that I realized my approach — where I was the most proficient person at every position in the shop — was not working. Right then and there I decided things had to change.

When David Rogers came on board 11 ½ years ago, I was already making strides towards upgrading my personnel.  But as you can imagine, it was very difficult to do…the business was losing money most months and I just didn’t have the budget to replace everyone at once with top-notch employees.

As David took over the management duties of the business, profitability began to turn. This provided us the opportunity to slowly change our business model. We decided we had to stop being all things to all people. No longer could we attempt to be the big discounter in the market and still try to be the most skilled, the most trusted and the best at customer service. We had to choose which type of customers we wanted to cater to.

The dilemma was that our medium- to low-quality people could not provide the value, the level of competence, or the customer service that the upper-level customers expected. I could not afford to hire and pay new, high-quality, top-producing employees unless we continued to improve the quality of our customers and our profitability…almost a catch-22, right?

After much soul searching we made the commitment to hire and train the best people we could find at every position. Over the next couple of years here is what we learned…

1. A significant segment of almost every market is willing to pay for a high level of quality, honesty, ethics, and customer service.
2. This can only be delivered and sustained through high-quality personnel who are well-trained and well-compensated through incentives to do so.
3. Performance standards and expectations must be set during the recruiting, screening and hiring processes.
4. A high level of accountability must be sustained through daily measurement, reporting, training, and discipline. Consistent follow-up and follow-through by managers and front-line supervisors must be established.
5. Quality control and customer satisfaction systems must be monitored and reported to the team.
6. Positive and corrective feed-back — along with regular performance reviews — must be part of the regular management routine.
7. Production systems and rules must be thorough, synchronous with all other systems, and simple enough to be understood and sustained by everyone on the team.  Once these are in place, then…
8. You must train and train and train, and hold everyone accountable for high performance, maintaining the systems and following all the rules all the time!
9. Where appropriate (and within the bounds of company policies and boundaries), management and ownership must reach out and support or help an employee or their family in special need or circumstances.

Under these conditions, high-quality people will thrive! They will go well above and beyond the norm to please customers and the boss. They will even help to establish a self-governing attitude among coworkers where rules and systems are followed at levels not possible under any form of command and control style of management. A bond of cooperation and concern will become the culture of your business.

This will produce an environment under which the highest-quality employees will find and make a “home” for themselves! High quality employees and customers will be attracted to this environment, and low quality people will be repealed and replaced. I have seen this process unfold and work in my shop and dozens of our clients’ shops.

What are the benefits and value to you the business owner, of experiencing such a transformation in your shop? How would you like to have a life again, with low levels of chaos in the shop, happy employees, thrilled customers, high take-home profits, and more freedom to spend your time how you want? How would that affect your family and finances?

Only you can put the actual value of these things into perspective for you and your family. I have successfully remote-managed my shop for almost 8 years now (I’m at the shop may be a half-hour per month), and I can tell you it’s worth any amount of effort and pain to make this transition! Your ego may suffer a little as mine did at first as you hire people who are smarter and better at their jobs than you are. So what?!

It should be about having what you desire and deserve as a business owner, not about your need to be the go-to guy, the final authority, the micromanager, the only one who knows, the only one who can fix cars…right? With lower-quality people, you had to be all those things to survive. I can tell you for sure that it can be different!

It’s your choice! What do you want?

I welcome your feedback and questions in the comments section below!