Ultimate Auto Repair Sees Endless Possibilities

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.

Mrs. Jones doesn’t care if her alternator fluid is leaking. She cares if she can get her kid to school, or her mom to the doctor. Stan’s helps with that. Stan’s helps solve problems; auto repair is just part of how they accomplish that goal.

Scott’s parents, Stan & Donna, started Stan’s Automotive in 1973 when Lafayette was a small town with a population of about 4,000. Today, their son Scott and his team serve a community of about 100,000, repairing a full range of domestic and foreign vehicles. They have grown his family’s shop alongside Lafayette and the surrounding area. We caught up with Scott to learn more about him and his team, how they continue to refine Stan’s Automotive, and how they continue to find new ways to help the people in his hometown of Lafayette.

47 Years of Quality, Care, and Giving Back

After college, when I returned to working with dad, he showed me that the business was really not about fixing cars, but about our relationships with people. A turning point for me was realizing that ‘family-owned business’ means that my family values are my business values—and that dictates how I treat my staff and how we treat our clients. I want to take care of my people. At least a third of my staff has been with me for the entire 20 years that I've been here. So I owe a lot of loyalty to them and I want to see them handsomely rewarded as we grow.

My fundamental philosophy is that if you live to help other people win, then ultimately you're going to win, too.

We all care and look out for each other. If one of our staff has a family emergency, we all pull together so that they can take the time they need to be with their family. The definition I have of "doing things right’’ is this: Am I taking care of my team, my customers, and my business? If I can say “yes” then we’re doing it right. Profitability, sustainability, and growth will follow.

We had that happen this past year. I won't get into it, but basically a staff member had to take leave to take care of his wife. What we had to do was support him and do whatever it took for him to get through what he and his wife were going through in their life, and the business became secondary to treating him like a member of our family. The best part is, everybody else here and all of our other technicians really stepped up, and we made it through it and actually managed to grow through it.

There is no secret to sticking around for 47 years; we just treat everyone like family and stay involved in the success of the community.

Helping Our Community Succeed

Our business has grown up in a small town that has become a big town. I think we owe a loyalty to our community. I always feel like I want to give back, so we do. We partner with a multitude of schools and community groups and other things to grow programs here locally. And then my wife and I do mission work in Ecuador.

We see doing the right thing as a philosophy and not a tactic. It's made us very successful.

We set aside the majority of our marketing budget to help people. Another ad in a newspaper doesn't help people. Solving people's problems does.

For example, we helped the school across the street. Their band's boosters program came to me and they wanted me to write them a big check. I said, "I can't write you a big check, but there's this program that I have. I give you these coupons. They cost you $0. You go sell them, and they're worth about $200 in value to the customer. You go sell them to people that you know and let the kids' parents sell 'em at work and let them sell 'em on social media." They came to me for $500 and what they got was $6,500 that they were able to generate out of these coupons that I gave them.

We've got a community food bank. We keep a food bin in our waiting area and we're constantly gathering food for them, and then we do our own stuff to give to them also. I've got a coffee and a soda bar in my waiting area, and I accept donations. Every month I take those donations and add a chunk of money from the business and that goes to our Meals on Wheels program here in the area. I've done that for like 20 years. And we just stay plugged in, we stay connected. When something comes up and one of my guys is like, "Can I go to this event?"

Yeah, absolutely, go! Go represent us and go preach the gospel of goodwill to everybody. And it's been pretty awesome.

I've probably given away somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 worth of auto repair this year, and that's been done for anything from the local police department showing up and saying, "Hey, I encountered this family on a call. They're having problems. One of their problems is with the car. Can you help?" Of course I can help. A couple weeks ago, a church reached out to us to ask if we could fix a woman's heater who just moved here from Florida. Somebody had bypassed her heater core because it was too expensive for her to repair. That was fine when she lived in Florida, but in Colorado during the winter, a heater is pretty important. We took care of it because under the circumstances it was the right thing to do.

So now I have people coming in sayin, "Hey, I'm here because you guys are awesome and you supported this program. Oh, and by the way, turns out I have a car!" People laugh at me sometimes when I sit in groups of shop owners and they're like, "That's really old school." Yup. Guess what? It works. 'Cause people are people and relationships are relationships. You've got to nurture relationships.

Adopting a New Shop Management System

When my dad started Stan's in 1973, they were running on scratch paper, pens, and pencils like everybody else. Throughout the years, we adopted shop management systems that were fit for the level of business that we were doing at the time.

In the mid-80's we went to a UNIX-based system that was pretty primitive, but it did a lot. My mom went to a training class on it, and I don't think she even realized it, but she was coding everything that needed to be done. She was programming in UNIX before that was a thing that people were doing! So that carried us into probably the mid-90's , give or take, maybe early 90's. Then we went to a DOS-based system and we stayed with that for probably 10 years, give or take. We went from that to RO Writer. We were with RO Writer for probably 14 or 15 years.

Then in July of '18, when I bought the shop, we decided that it was a good time to make a switch, and we switched to a software company that I won't even give them credence of saying their name. They've been in the industry for a long time. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they got purchased by a larger company on the literal day we switched over and went live. And that was a complete and total disaster. We spent five months last year pretty much limping along and not even knowing what our real numbers were. I went back to doing accounting manually. It seriously was a frickin' disaster.

So two months into that, I knew it was a disaster, and I was looking for a solution to my crisis. And that was when I started looking at some of the more progressive companies that were leading the way with technology. That's how I came to get to meet people at Tekmetric.

For the sake of my team, I wanted them to be able to accomplish more without simply working harder. If I can put a tool in their hands that helps them do their job in half the time, it empowers them to put more of their focus on client service and run a better shop. That's motivating. That's growing. That's transforming.

The first thing that we noticed when we switched to Tekmetric was that the processes are fairly intuitive. Frankly, it's kind of scary to think that we just switched over to this software and there's not a 400 page manual for me to sit down and read through and figure out how it works. We just had to sit down with it and figure out and how it worked. And the fact that that happened smoothly says a lot to the workflow processes that they put into place. They just make sense. It's very intuitive and pretty easy for a service advisor to keep up with volume using this software.

Tekmetric also empowers our clients. They need to feel like they are more than just a repair order. We give them options to communicate with us on their terms: we can text, email, or call them about their repairs. The more communication options our shop management system provides, the more we are able to give our clients the kind of experience that shows how much we value and respect them.

But the biggest thing is that the team at Tekmetric listens to me and really drills down to solving shop owners' pain points. It's not just "What do we want?" but also "Why does it need to be a certain way?" And that, quite frankly, is the difference-maker for Tekmetric. Every other shop management system is either written by a shop owner and is tailored to exactly how they run that shop, or it's written by some software developers who don't have a clue about how a shop runs, and they think they do, and they want you to change all your processes and procedures to match what they wrote. Tekmetric has done an awesome job of surrounding themselves with people in the industry, mostly people much smarter than me, who have really helped them figure out what an average shop owner looks like and needs.

For more information about Stan's Automotive, visit stansautomotive.com

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