Turn on the radio in Canton, OH, and you’re bound to hear a commercial for Hills & Dales AutoCare. And the first thing you’ll notice is a young girl’s voice sharing what makes the shop unique. That voice belongs to shop owner Marty Long’s 14-year-old daughter, who has been recording the shop’s radio spots for the past six or seven years.
“They don’t want to hear me, but they do like to hear the kids,” Marty explains, adding that his son has also lent his voice to some of the shop’s commercials.
In business for the past 15 years, Marty says the 60 radio ads per month on a couple different local stations, as well as the shop’s sponsorship of local high school sports teams, helps bring in 8-12 new customers per week. Marty is quick to point out that the staff at Hills & Dales strives to treat each customer, new or existing, as family.
“Some people might ask why we call it a ‘family of customers,’ but why wouldn’t we?” he says. “To us, a family is a close-knit, caring group of individuals who have trust, respect and compassion for each other. We believe that this ideal encompasses the relationship we have with our customers, past and present.”
Mutual Respect
With that working relationship comes the commitment to follow up with customers after each job to make sure they’re satisfied with the repair.
“One of my service writers does daily and weekly callbacks to make sure everything was completed properly, with no issues,” Marty says. “When we do reach a live human being, they’re shocked that it’s actually one of us making the phone call to them.”
Besides regular outreach, maintaining a nice, clean appearance also impacts a customer’s opinion of your shop. Having just leased a building across the street a year and a half ago to house Hills & Dales AutoCare Express, Marty says he made a conscious decision to brand both shops with the same outside paint scheme. But it’s also important that the inside matches as well.
“The staff does an awesome job of keeping the shop clean, so it makes a great first impression if they take customers into the bays to show them their car,” he says. “There is no offensive music, language or calendars. We want the customer to feel comfortable that we’ll return their car just as clean as when it came in.”
Competent Staff
The Hills & Dales AutoCare staff is made up of eight technicians, a shop foreman, a janitor and four service writers. More than 50% of the techs are certified, Marty says, which goes hand-in-hand with training.
“We try to get the techs into as much training as possible through vendors and suppliers,” he says. “All my guys are anxious to learn, so when tech training is available, we normally have four or five guys going.”
Online training through NAPA is available to all the technicians as well, and when a tech passes ASE testing, the shop pays for it.
“The other beautiful thing is that our shop foreman is also an automotive instructor at a local state college,” Marty says. “He’s an asset to have and helps the younger guys quite a bit, but the older guys as well.”
In addition to word-of-mouth advertising through tool and parts vendors, Marty says the vocational program at one of the local high schools has also been a source for finding qualified techs.
“One of our guys started out as a cleanup lube tech, and he has worked his way up through the ranks,” he explains. “At the same time, he went to Stark State College to earn a degree in automotive technology. Now he’s an ASE Master-certified technician and probably one of my best employees. And he’s all of 25 years old.”
Tools & Technology
Marty says the shop is currently going paperless, having purchased shop management system-enabled tablets for the staff that allow them to perform things like multi-point inspections that can be shared with customers.
“It’s a professional inspection that can be shared via email or text message,” he says. “That way, we’re not sharing an inspection sheet with fingerprints on it.”
In addition, the tablets help with communication, something employees are always striving to improve.
“We want to always make sure that the right job is getting to the right technician at the right time,” he says.
The Hills & Dales Auto Care website is also critical to the shop’s success, so much so that Marty evaluates it every quarter to determine what he can be doing better.
“You always have to maintain your website,” he says. “You can’t just put a website out there and let it go stale. You always have to be moving forward.”
Despite their success, Marty is always looking to the future while remembering his past.
“It takes dedication and hard work,” he says. “You have to have a business plan and goals, and you need to know what you need to meet those goals.
“You need to have a good relationship with your techs, service writers and customers. We have second- and third-generation customers from when the business was started.”
By focusing on its “family of customers,” Hills & Dales AutoCare and Hills & Dales AutoCare Express have laid the groundwork to serve many more future generations for years to come.
