It’s a common refrain from shop owners, especially during the summer. They feel like the only way to stay on top of higher summer car counts is to drop everything else so they can focus on working inside the business as an advisor or technician.
The problem is that the shop has to keep operating, whether the owner has time to focus on fixing profit margins, training in employee processes, or creating new written procedures. This often leads to the business leaving significant money on the table at the very same time that the business could be maximizing profits, during the busiest time of the year.
There’s a better way than simply putting your head down and working your guts out for a few months each year…all while never making any progress or improving your situation.
First, however, you need to set goals for yourself and your shop. What will you improve this summer, even while it’s busy, even when you feel like you can’t get ahead? Writing out your goals – for instance: raising your parts gross profit margin, doing more thorough inspections, or selling more diagnostics – and then putting them up on the wall where you can see them is a critical part of keeping yourself accountable to reaching them.
After you’ve defined your goals for this summer, figure out what’s getting in the way of reaching them. Some of the most common bottlenecks in shop operations include the time it takes to get approvals and receive parts, time spent on inefficient inspections and writeup processes, and wasted time shuffling or re-entering data between the different programs used for inspection, writeup, estimate, and customer contact.
Shop4D is designed to remove each of these bottlenecks, which typically means technicians can bill two more hours per day…but in cases where the shop owner is working as a technician, that could mean spending two more critical hours working to scale and grow the business each day.
Once you’ve defined your goals, and eliminated the bottlenecks preventing you from reaching them, the only remaining task is to spend time every day working toward those goals. Create written documentation and then train your team, hold them accountable for reaching key benchmarks, and soon you’ll have an entire team all pulling the shop in the same direction.
Want to learn more about how Shop4D helps shops bill two more hours per tech each day – ten more billed hours per tech each week? Schedule a business discussion today and let’s talk!