Car Count Daily

Hi shop owners. Thank you very much for joining me on this edition of Car Count Daily. My name is Ron Ipach, but you can call me Captain Car Count, because that’s all I’ve done for the past 20 years, is help thousands of auto repair shop owners, just like you, to get and then keep all the top-quality customers their shops can handle.

I want to talk about how much marketing you should be doing when you’re busy. In order to do that, I’m going to talk a little bit about a seminar that I went to, where I watched the motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, do a little demonstration on stage. Now, this is probably 20, 25 years ago, and I remember it just like it was yesterday, but I’m going to kind of change things a little bit to make it apply to the auto repair shops.

Zig talked about getting water out of one of those hand pumps. Going by a farm and needing some water and you pump away and you pump away on there. You keep pumping away and nothing’s happening. The water isn’t coming to the top. But then if you stop, all your effort goes away. If you’ve ever done that before, you know you can pump for a while and nothing’s coming out of the spigot there because you’re actually drawing all the water from the well on up. The minute you stop, it goes all the way back down. He talked about the importance of staying at it. You’re pumping away, pumping away. All of a sudden, you get a little trickle of water. Then you get a gush of water.

Well, marketing is a lot of the same. Sometimes marketing is not a home run out of the shoot. You’re pumping for a while and nothing seems to be happening. Then a little trickle starts happening. All of sudden, there’s a flood of business in the door. You’re thinking, “Oh my God. That’s enough. I can’t handle it anymore.” So, you let go of the handle on the pump and guess what happens? Just like with that water that’s coming from the well, the minute you stop pumping, it all rushes back down. Then what happens? You got to start all over again. You got to start pumping again and pumping again to get it back up.

The same thing happens with your marketing. Even though you may be experiencing a flood of car count right now, and hopefully you are, that’s not a time to stop your marketing. Because just like that water going all the way down the well, you don’t want to have to start from scratch again and start pumping away and pumping away again. When you’re really busy, make sure you keep your hand on that handle and you’re just slowly cranking it, just enough to keep some extra car count coming in the door. That way, it doesn’t all rush away.

I know it’s kind of … I like to speak in pictures and I remember seeing that like it was yesterday and watching him on stage pumping away in there, but I hope you get the point here, is you always want to market. You never stop marketing, even when you’re swamped with business. There’s something about having to start from scratch again that becomes very annoying. That’s why your income and your car count go up and down, and up and down, because when you’re busy, you stop. You think, “Oh, it’s going to stay that way.” Well, you should know by now, it’s not going to stay that way. It’s going to fluctuate. Always, always market every single month, no matter what.