Car Count Daily
Hey everybody, thank you very much for joining me on this edition of Car Count Daily. My name’s 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, and thousands of auto repair shop owners, just like you, to get and then keep all the top quality customers that your shop can handle.
Why Every Shop Owners Should Have An Auto Repair System
Now today, we’re going to talk about systems. What I mean by systems are your sales system, your marketing system, your accounting system, your management system. If you notice, there’s one word that’s common amongst all of those various jobs that you have as an owner, and that is an auto repairĀ system. What a system allows you to do is have something in place so it can be replicated the exact same way, day, after day, after day, without you having to be there. See, that’s the reason why a lot of shop owners are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, or as I like to call it, like firemen running around and putting fires out every single day, because they don’t have a system.
They wind up reinventing the wheel every single time that they walk into the shop. There’s nothing written down, and it’s up to them to get the job done. Then if you decide that you want to go on vacation, all of a sudden they’re calling you on the phone all the time, asking you how to do certain things. That’s because you don’t have a replicable system, and that system is not written down.
From this point forward, make sure you start documenting everything you do, and what your system is, so that other people, without you having to be there, can get the job done. Let’s talk about what a system actually is. A system is in place, again like I said, so you can replicate things over, and over, and over. Let me give you a real quick demonstration of a great system that we all know how to do, okay? If you’ve ever made coffee. I’m not talking about those Keurig machines, you know? The one single cup. I’m talking about making a pot of coffee, like with a Mr. Coffee.
Let’s go through just real quickly what the system is to make a pot of coffee in the morning. You’re going to pull the pitcher off the burner. You’re going to open up the lid, you’re going to put it underwater, you’re going to fill it up. Then you’re going to take that pitcher, dump it in the top of the coffee machine. Close the lid, put it back on the burner. Then you’re going to grab the filter tray, you’re going to grab a filter. Put the filter tray in the filter, then you’re going to put the coffee inside of the filter. Then you’re going to slide that tray back into the machine.
Then you’re going to go ahead and plug it in, if it’s not plugged in. Then you’re going to hit the start button. Then wait a few minutes, and then voila, you have a pot of coffee. See, what I just did is I showed you the exact system that you need to replicate day, after day, after day, to make something as simple as a pot of coffee. Let’s change things a little bit. See, we as entrepreneurs tend to like to do things our own way. We’re going to do things differently, because we tend to be wired differently, right?
We’re going to do things our own way, so we’re going to maybe take a shortcut. We’re going to circumvent that system, and kind of do it the entrepreneurs way. Without further ado, let’s do the entrepreneurs version of the shortcut for making the pot of coffee, okay?
Same pot of coffee. You’re going to grab the pitcher, open up the lid. You’re going to put water in there, you’re going to dump that in the top of the coffee machine. You’re going to close the lid, you’re going to put it back on the burner. Then you’re going to pull out the filter tray, you’re going to put some coffee in there, you’re going to shove that back in. Then we’re going to plug it in, we’re going to turn it on. Now, did you notice? I skipped something. I skipped one crucial step here, but you know what? It’s only one step. Who needs to have a coffee filter in there? We just skip the step, because as entrepreneurs, as people like to do, we always take shortcuts just to make things easier on us, right?
Let’s look at that pot of coffee compared to the first pot of coffee we made the right way. By simply skipping one step in there, your coffee, while there’s some coffee in that pot, is going to be kind of nasty coffee. It’s going to be full of grinds, and it’s just not going to be tasting good because it’s going to be chewy coffee, because there is no filter in there to capture the coffee in there, okay?
We did everything except for one thing on that system, and we didn’t get the results we’re looking for, okay? Think of that. Every time that you do something, let’s say specifically with marketing because, I’m Captain Car Count, right? If there’s a lot of things you need to do to get some marketing pieces out there, and you skip any one of the steps in order to get your marketing out there, you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for.
Also, a system, what it allows you to do, is stay on track and do the things in the right order. See, not only is there a right way to do it, and there’s a right amount of steps. But those steps have to be done in the right order, if you want to get your desired results.
Let’s back up here a little bit, and change the game here a little bit, and let’s change the order that we do that pot of coffee. What we do is we grab the pitcher off the machine, we open up the lid, put the water in there. Dump it in the top, close the lid, put it back on the burner. Then we pull out the filter tray, and then we put the coffee in there. Then we put the filter in there, we push that back in there. You notice, I switched that little step there. Then we plug the machine in, and press on. What happened? We did all the steps that were required, we did every individual step that’s required to make a pot of coffee, but we just switched the order on it.
A lot of times, people don’t realize that if you don’t do things the right way in the right order, you’re going to get different results every single time. We’re going to get the same crappy pot of coffee that we did when we didn’t even put in the filter tray, or the filter in the filter tray. It’s going to be real full of coffee grounds, it’s going to be chewy, it’s going to be nasty coffee. We didn’t get the results we’re looking for.
I hope you kind of get the gist of what I’m talking about here. It’s really important that when you do something, you do it the right way every single time, and you don’t skip steps. You write down your process for marketing, your process for your accounting, your process for opening the shop, the process for entering information into your computer. All of those things need to be documented so that you can get away from the shop, you can go relax on the beach in The Bahama’s, and not have to call the shop, or answer questions from the shop because they don’t know what’s going on.
If you have a system, you know how it’s supposed to be done. Go ahead and document it, write it down. Train your employees the right way to do it so every step is taken in the right order, and that’s how you get the same results day in, and day out.
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