Elevating Silver Lake Auto's Customer Payment Experience

Business picked up over the years, and Karl was able to assemble a small team and build his own on-premise shop management system. In 2010, he decided to move Ultimate Auto Repair to a larger space two miles from his house. He was able to employ more people but eventually hit a growth cap.

After switching to Tekmetric, Karl was able to accelerate over the hump and more than double his business. Today, they’re still growing every month.

Ripping the Band-Aid Off

With my old system, I was stuck. Each technician would have five or six clipboards, and they'd have to shuffle and figure out what was authorized and what wasn't. To find out anything, I had to do it manually. It's no fun at the end of the month trying to count how many cars and work orders we did.

There was no way that we were going to make it any further without a lot of changes.

I was afraid to make the change. I thought, "Tekmetric has a lot of good stuff going, but I'm not sure". And then everything came to a head. My laptop crashed. I couldn't get into the old program. We had been talking about making the change, so I grabbed my service writer and said, "We're making the change right now". It was like ripping off the band-aid.

By day three, I said to my team "Hey guys. I'm sorry about the stress". And they said, "Stress? Are you kidding me? This is way better! We don't have to look for a work order on the wall!" They took to it right away.

The immediate result was that everybody could instantly see with a click what everyone else was talking about. The technician could put his notes in there: what he saw and what he didn't see. It's so nice for the service writer to be able to see the customer's notes and the technician’s notes. The customer came in with this complaint. We addressed it. This is the problem. The technician also found this. And everybody can see that live, instantly.

Ticket to Freedom

I was welded to the place without Tekmetric. If I wasn't there, nobody knew what to do. Now, they know.

You can't run a million dollar shop off of one guy having to be there. At the end of the day, the world runs on math. If you don't know what the math is, you don't know what you're doing; you have no clue whether you made money or you lost money. You're just throwing quotes out there and hoping things are there.

But with Tekmetric, I can see in realtime what my markup is, what it's going to be, and what it should be. I can give my service writers a bottom dollar: what they need to sell it for. I can tell them how much they need to discount for, and they can quickly see all that right in Tekmetric. I can set up matrices, even labor matrixes now, which is crazy to me!

I call it their 'guard rail'. They know how high they can go and how low they can go to make a sale. At some point, if you don't have a technician working, and that's their job for the day, and if you don't sell that job, they’re not going to be working. That service writer needs to know how low they can go to make that sale.

Tekmetric gives me the freedom to leave for days at a time and everything keeps running. It has basically allowed me to duplicate myself, to show the guys: this is the system, and these are the steps you need to take. I can show the guys what to do, and they can replicate it.

Before, vacations were almost impossible. Now, I can leave, and I know the shop will keep running. With Tekmetric, it's all right there. My team has everything they need.

Realizing the Potential

As a business owner, Tekmetric helps me make quick decisions, which is what it's all about. I have to be able to know where I’m at and where I’m going to project it. And then we need to be able to operate with consistency, too. Because when the customer comes back the second time, we need to be able to quote it the same. There's so much background information in there that I don't know how I'd run anything over $500,000 without Tekmetric.

We're moving into commercial diesel. In Jackson, there are a lot of general contractors, plumbers, and electricians. I'm cleaning out the spare building on my property and putting in four bays, so we can concentrate on commercial diesel customers over there and get their trucks in and out quickly. It's awesome because I can set that up in Tekmetric as its own repair shop. I can track the efficiency of service writers and technicians in each building.

Growing my business allows me to get people good jobs - jobs that weren't necessarily available to me. The possibilities are limitless.

Making the Dean's List

My daughters have been helping around the shop, too. My 21-year-old comes in after hours and spends three to five hours a week cleaning the shop and does interior details. She started her own cleaning business, and she cleans houses.

My youngest is our Quality Control. She QCs all the cars when we're done. And she wants to be a service writer, so we're training her to be a service writer. She works with me every day. It's pretty awesome. She likes accounting, and she actually does our end-of-day reporting, so she loves Tekmetric. She can jump in there and go through and close out all the cars and make sure they're all paid for. She gives me the final count.

I'm happy that I can teach her a trade where she can make some money, whether she’s working at Ultimate Auto Repair or another shop.

And both kids made the dean’s list this semester! So I’m proud of that, too.

For more information about Ultimate Auto Repair, visit ultimateautorepairmi.com

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You may be tempted to think that Jim Brown is a lucky case in 2020. He’s one of the shop owners who managed to expand his business in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. But the more you learn about Jim’s approach to running his auto shop, the clearer it becomes that he simply proved the old saying true: luck is the crossroads where preparation meets opportunity.

In July 2020, Jim opened the second location of Speed Auto Repair, the shop he started working part-time in 1989 when he was only 17 years old. Back then it was called Speed Oil Change & Tune-Up, a fast-service lube franchise that had recently opened up in Roswell, GA. Jim kept working at Speed all through college, and after earning his business degree, he began to see a future for himself at the shop.

“The guy who started the shop was a retired GE electrical engineer,” Jim says. “He took me under his wing and we grew the business together.”

Jim had big dreams for the shop, even at that young age, and the owner was more than happy to let him run with the ball. He spearheaded Speed’s evolution into an independent, full-service auto repair business, buying-in and becoming co-owner at age 24. Four years later, at the ripe old age of 28, Jim bought out the original owner and changed the name to Speed Auto Repair.

We recently sat down with Jim over video chat from his new Speed Auto Repair location, nine miles down the road in neighboring Alpharetta. He talked to us about his love for the auto repair business, how he took the opportunity to streamline his shop during the initial COVID-19 lockdown period, his efforts to uplift his community through auto repair mentorship programs, and what he thinks is the secret to success in the auto repair business. Here’s what he had to say:

Pushing Through With the Community

The first three weeks when the virus hit here, everything was frozen. It was a little scary, but the right thing for us to do was push through.

What I was trying to relate to my customers is that we care; we're here for you no matter what.

The first thing I did in response to the lockdown was triple my marketing budget. Social media, videos, mailers—all the things that we normally do—I tripled it. What I was trying to relate to my customers is that we care; we're here for you no matter what. We're not only here to serve your mechanical needs, but we're here to get through this pandemic together no matter what may arise. That could mean repairs or service on your car, or it could mean getting your medicine or groceries if you couldn’t leave your house. I made a video for our customers where we laid it all out: whatever you need, just give us a call and we will make it happen.

Overhauling Our Systems to Stay Profitable

The next thing we worked on was our shop’s processes. We asked ourselves: how can we become profitable during these times? Those first few weeks were very slow, so if we didn’t have cars, I set my guys to redoing the floors and painting the walls. We worked on building repairs, redid the parking lot, and repaired and serviced all of our equipment. Everything that needed to be done, we took those three weeks, and we did it. We ended up redoing the entire shop.

Then we worked on all of our systems. We perfected our customer intake, our checkout systems, and our digital inspections. We recreated all of our canned jobs and things like that so that when we got busy again, we were ready to roll. We also worked on our expectations of our employees and retrained them on the profitability of our labor margins, parts margins, and gross profit margins. It simplified us overall. We set the bar, trained our employees, and now they know our expectations.

Tekmetric was a huge help in achieving our system overhaul. Using Tekmetric’s tools, we’re able to see the profitability of each job. Our mark-ups, our parts makeup, our labor matrix——it’s all there. And now that we’ve overhauled and perfected our system, we’ve been able to take it to the new store and duplicate it.

The Time Was Right for a Second Location

I’ve always wanted to expand the business to another location, but I got really serious about it in January 2020. We wanted a location that was far enough away that we could serve a different clientele, but not so far away that I couldn’t easily manage both locations. We kept looking at locations, trying to find the exact right fit between distance, road frontage, income, car count on the roads, and stuff like that.

When the virus hit, I started hearing all these rumors about shop owners who were up there in age and thinking about getting out of the auto repair business. Then in May, the opportunity to take over this Alpharetta location presented itself, and it felt like now was the time to take the chance. We jumped on it, and officially opened our second location on July 13th.

Rethinking How We Interact With Our Customers

Our big innovation during the pandemic was touchless service: you book an appointment using our online portal, and we’ll come to your house to pick your car up for you. I’d never really thought of doing anything like that before, but it became such a hit that we decided to keep doing it. Most people weren’t even leaving the house when we started the touchless service, so we marketed it as a perfect opportunity for them to finally get all the repairs that they had been putting off because they needed the car to drive back and forth to work.

Once we pick up the car and get it in the shop, we perform our inspection and use Tekmetric to send pictures of all work that needs to be done directly to the customer’s phone. The invoice is attached to the report as well, so they can pay it right there on their phone, and they never have to leave the safety of their home. Before we take the car back, we sanitize the interior, run an ozone machine inside the cabin to purify the air, and completely cover the floors, seats, and steering wheel to drive it back to their house. Once it’s back, we take all that stuff out, wipe the interior down one more time, and that’s it. That whole time, you never even have to see us.

Getting More Insights from Our Shop Management System

Our previous shop management system was a program that we had written specifically for us. It lasted us about 10 or 12 years, and it worked well for us at the time, but we needed more information. We weren’t tracking as many things as we could, and it was very difficult to track labor profitability, parts profitability, jobs, and everything else. If you wanted to time the technicians in order to track their efficiency, you would have to put a clock on their box. To be honest, those methods are not very accurate.

When we started looking for a new shop management system, our number one goal was to go cloud-based. Right away, we started running into barriers. We use Apple products at all of our stores, and most of the other systems aren’t compatible. We had 25,000 customers in our database with complete histories of all their work: names, addresses, emails, everything. The other systems we were talking to said that we would have to lose all of that information.

Useful Tools and Integrations Have Helped Us Streamline Service Across the Board

Tekmetric has worked very well for us so far. All my guys love it. They love being paperless and doing digital inspections. They all have iPads, and a few of my guys even use their phones. It just makes things easier. You can teach anyone how to use it. We don’t have to walk back and forth from the front office to the back all day long, so it’s easier to communicate. The digital inspections have all the pictures right there with typed up descriptions of what needs to be done. It’s much easier to sell a job when everything’s written on the inspection, and you have the pictures to back it up.

It just makes things easier.

I think the biggest benefit of using Tekmetric is that we’re able to see our customer retention and our profitability for the week, the day, and the job. I think that's huge. We use these reports to lay everything out and see what kind of workforce we're going to need for the week. It’s also much easier to track our technicians’ efficiency. I can see the time that they’re in the building versus what they’re producing and what they track on their labor times. It’s much simpler than any other method I’ve used before.

Before we were on Tekmetric, I wasn’t using any special program for customer retention. Now we use the MyShopManager and integrate it with Tekmetric, which has worked well for us. It’s really simple to manage our reputation and respond to our online reviews. I just log on in the evening and go through the list for both stores.

The whole Tekmetric crew has just been awesome, too. Any time there’s any kind of issue, call, or write-up, they take care of it almost immediately. We’re always excited when there’s a new update. We appreciate that Tekmetric is constantly changing to what the industry's needs are, and at the same time, taking care of their individual shops’ needs. I like that we're able to call up and get somebody on the phone immediately. We love the product and we love people.

Embedded in the Community

I'm a huge believer in serving our community in any kind of way. Wherever we go, we're going to embed ourselves and become a part of the neighborhood. That extends beyond car repair. We ask ourselves what we can do for the folks who live here.

We have a mentor program that we offer to some of the local high school and college students who want to become entrepreneurs later in life. They learn the auto repair trade, but they also learn about the business side of things. We also run a young driver's workshop for students and other people who are just getting their driver’s licenses. It’s all the stuff that you don’t really think about if you’ve been driving for a while, but that you need to know. We teach them about their cars, what the lights on the dash mean, how to change a tire, and what to do if you get in an accident. I’ve written some small books to teach children about how to become safe drivers. We’ve been doing these programs at the Roswell location for a while now, and we’re about to start it up in Alpharetta.

Back in August, we offered free and half-price oil changes to the teachers who were going back to work. When school got out at the start of the pandemic, we offered every single school employee a free oil change. It’s an easy way for us to give back to our community, and it lets them meet us and see if they like our service. Hopefully, they’ll use us again someday.

The Secret to Growing and Staying Successful

If you’re trying to get into the auto repair business, my advice is to create a superstar team with your employees. I’m constantly hiring on all platforms and interviewing potential new employees. I’m out there in the community, too. I ask our customers who come from other shops if they knew the mechanic at their previous shop. I set time aside each week to try to recruit people. Once they’re hired, I also believe in continuing to train. Whether it’s with each other or through coaching, I believe in having the team be a constant part of the training process and being held accountable.

I love this industry. I love the people, I love the cars, I love the business. And I still do my best to keep getting better and stay an industry leader. I learn about the cars, the direction we're headed—everything. And as I keep growing in the industry, I grow my business along the way.

For more information about Speed Auto Repair, visit speedautorepair.com

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Tim Suggs has always had an independent streak. He started his career working at a Lexus dealership but felt like he could help more people if he could run things his own way. So in 2006, at just 23, he opened his own shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota: Turbo Tim’s Anything Automotive.

Over the years, Turbo Tim's has grown a reputation for being one of the friendliest and most fun shops in the nation.

Tim believes that his success stems from treating the people (and animals) around himself well and cultivating a unique and relatable culture that gives back. Tim, his technicians, and service advisors focus on “average cars, average people.” They’re currently making big moves by expanding to a second location and creating a nonprofit side of the business.

We recently caught up with Tim to learn about his shop and how he plans to ramp up business for the future. Here’s what he had to say:

Creating a Unique, Relatable Culture

The first five years of business were tough. We focused our auto repair business strategy on doing a high volume of work at a low cost, which was great for bringing in customers, but obviously stressful.

Early on, it was apparent that if I put people first, the money would come. I focused on building an atmosphere that was both fun and professional for employees and customers alike. One of the most instrumental, yet unintentional, parts of our culture came from a cat I found at a machine shop. I’ve always been a cat person, and I asked the technicians there if that was their cat. They said it was a stray that they regularly fed. After checking that he wasn’t microchipped and didn’t belong to anyone, I brought him home with me.

And that’s the origin story of Bobby, our original shop cat. We now have multiple cats who greet folks in our waiting room. Bobby also positively affected our marketing. Halfway through our growth, we began branding ourselves with a cat logo inspired by Bobby. Today, customers who put Bobby bumper stickers on their cars get 10% off for life. Less productive are our chickens, who “work” in the chicken coop on our outdoor patio.

Having animals around has really influenced our culture. Good people generally care about animals, and if they care about animals, they’ll likely care about people as well. The employees that we’ve attracted and retained over the years are a part of our community. We’re always hanging out at the shop after hours and on the weekends. A few of our employees have even formed their own band. Of course, our culture extends to our customers, too. When they visit us, they can get nitro cold brew and energy drinks on tap, grab La Croix from our stocked fridge, and play games in our shop waiting room.

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Implementing a New Shop Management System

We switched to Tekmetric during the COVID-19 pandemic. I demoed Tekmetric at the Vision conference in February, and by April, we launched it at the shop. My service advisors and technicians were instantly excited about it once they started using it. They told me:

This is it. This is what the future is.

What they love the most about Tekmetric is how the software helps them be transparent with customers. That’s something we’ve always valued and emphasized. Tekmetric makes it easier than ever for them to send customers estimates and other vital information about their car repairs, especially now that they aren’t regularly interacting with customers face-to-face due to COVID-19. They also find the Tekmerchant payment processing integration and text-to-pay features extremely convenient.

Tekmetric has streamlined our processes and led to business growth. In our first month using it, we had our most hours billed per repair order (RO) average.

Even during the pandemic, we keep beating our records.

As a shop owner, I’ve been using Tekmetric’s detailed reports to manage my staff more fairly. For example, if the reports show me that a technician is doing a disproportionate amount of oil changes compared to others, I’ll make it a point to assign him different tasks.

Expanding My Mechanic Shop

Having Tekmetric has made me more comfortable with opening up a second shop location. To manage overflow, we needed to expand. Our second shop, which will open soon, is only two miles away from our original location.

I still want all new employees to start at the original shop, as I think it’s the best way to get them accustomed to our culture. Half of our existing service writers will move to the new shop, and as the second location gets business, we’ll slowly move over some of our technicians.

I’m looking forward to trying new creative marketing and advertising methods at the second location and comparing the results between the two shops. It’ll be interesting to see which one ends up attracting more customers, or particular types of cars, and why. Tekmetric’s reports will make it extremely easy to analyze those things.

One thing I still don’t know yet, though, is what we’re going to do with the animal situation at the second shop. We just might have to hoard more cats and chickens!

Turbocharging the Community

We’re also in the process of starting a nonprofit, Community Automotive, for low-income auto repair.

Rachel, my wife and co-owner of Turbo Tim's has really helped us grow our relationship with the community. She has a Ph.D. in sociology and is heavily involved with women’s workshops and community-building events. Our other team members are passionate about giving back as well.

I plan on hiring a service worker who can strengthen the connection between auto repair and social work. That person’s knowledge and experience, coupled with our use of Tekmetric, will give us important metrics about our nonprofit branch. We’ll be able to track the nonprofit arm and the two shops so we can see how much we’re helping while balancing our business needs. I want to make sure that we’re not undercutting other shops in the area while also providing quality auto repair to those who may need it to get their lives going again.

For the world to get better, I think everybody has to get better. I want Turbo Tim’s to pay it forward. Many people have helped us on our journey, and as human beings, we all have an obligation to lift each other up.

Anyone can end up in a difficult life situation. With some help, they can start to turn things around. It’s about giving each other mutual support—having each others’ backs.

To get a feel for Turbo Tim’s and meet Bobby and the rest of the team, visit turbotims.com.