Shop Operations

Although it’s been proven to be far less expensive for a company to keep existing customers than gain new ones, attracting new business remains a very important part of growing your business.

From my experience, cars and companies have a lot in
common when it comes to keeping them running smoothly
and achieving top performance. The owner’s manual for any business is the strategic plan that has been developed. The
gauges are the financial reports that are generated on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis.

If you got a chance to attend the SEMA and AAPEX shows in November, you saw probably tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cars, products and equipment. It was an incredibly vast display of all things automotive. But how does all this stuff get out of the showroom and onto the floor of a typical repair shop?

Some business owners and managers continue to be stuck in the past. They fail to realize by squeezing out the last drop of productivity, cutting their overhead to the bare bones, trying to cut costs, working harder, and continuing to do business the same way with the same old customers and the same projects won’t cut it today.

In this tough economy, every business could use a break. Here is a list of available tax credits to businesses who hire employees fitting in the following categories.

We’ve all been hearing for years how vehicles are becoming more sophisticated, with electronic content on the rise each model year. Sensors and on-board computers are communicating with each other to make constant adjustments allowing the vehicle to operate as fuel efficient and environmentally clean as possible.

As a business owner, feedback is generally accepted as a way to make improvements to your shop or services, and is even a helpful method to short-term and long-term business decisions. For most shop owners and repair businesses, customer feedback is often immediate, allowing you to act upon it quickly.

With the year quickly winding down, as a shop owner in this business, there are likely certain strategies, policies, practices that you are really emphasizing now to ensure your shop finishes the year on a more solid note.

Women influence 85% of all consumer-purchasing decisions in the U.S. When thinking about the impact that this group has on commerce and on businesses in general, you are probably asking yourself this question: “Am I getting more than my fair share of this opportunity?” Continue reading to gain some valuable insight into marketing to women.

As the centerpiece of the service bay, lifts are critical to the productivity and profitability of any automotive repair shop. A lift that’s properly matched to the job at hand will let technicians work more efficiently, for greater profitability. If the lift is well-made, it will provide enhanced productivity for years to come.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how collaboration can positively affect your business by producing better business decisions. Now, let’s discuss options for broadening your decision-making inputs by finding the right business group for you.

The U.S. Justice Department tells us that lawsuits alleging discrimination in the workplace more than tripled in the 1990s. These stories can be found online, in the newspaper and on the evening news almost daily, and most commonly involve race, gender, disability, religion or age. The uncertainty of today’s business climate, the downturn in the economy, and most importantly, layoffs, increases the likelihood of legal action.