In the best-case scenario, the new equipment pays for itself, increases trust and loyalty with your customers, improves efficiency, and leaves you with no regret. But, the opposite is always a possibility: the equipment never pays for itself, it goes unused, it breaks down and makes your team inefficient, and ultimately makes you wish you’d never have written the check.
Fear is standing between you and a long-term relationship with your customer. You need to change their minds, show them that you’re different and overcome that fear to build trust. In essence, you need to take care of them.
Summer is the shop owner’s best friend. Just as surely as Independence Day means fireworks and Thanksgiving means turkey, the end of summer means the fall slowdown. And while it doesn’t happen overnight – just one fewer car here and another there – by September, the fall slowdown will be in full effect.
Do your uniforms look like every other shop in the area? Does your waiting room look the same? Do your advertisements look exactly like what everyone else is sending? These things are all part of your shop’s brand – its image in the community. And you can either choose to look, sound and act like everyone else, or you can choose to build your own brand, tell your own story and set yourself apart.
What would one more visit per year from your best customers mean for your shop? Let’s say you have 100 current customers and the average customer comes in twice per year. If you can get each one to come in once more every year, you would grow your sales by 50% without spending a dime.
If you close your eyes and picture a tough customer, what image do you see? Is it a price shopper on the phone? An argumentative customer at the front counter? A Yelp reviewer who went directly to the Internet instead of giving you a chance to address his or her concerns? Each of these kinds of tough customers can put a kink in our day if we let them.
Is your shop a hotbed of employee conflict? Even if we look only at generational differences, it’s not hard to see why employees can butt heads and morale can suffer. Millennials are replacing Gen Xers, who displaced the Baby Boomers before them. Each group grew up in a vastly different world, and each has their
