Car Count Daily
Hey, shop owners. Welcome to 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 plus years is help thousands and 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.
Now, I want to start off today by asking you a very, very important question. What is the one thing that you can identify that’s standing in the way of your massive success? Or to put it another way, what’s the one thing standing in your way of taking your shop to the next level? We all have things that are standing in our way, whether it might be car count, maybe it’s can’t find the right employees. Maybe it’s the location that you’re in or maybe you don’t own the shop and you can’t get the owner to make improvements on it.
Maybe it’s the type of customers you attract to your shop. Maybe you don’t have any money to make the improvements that you need or maybe your customers don’t have the money to fix and maintain their cars. It could be those excuses or reasons or other things that are standing in your way from taking your shop to the next level. Maybe a better way to ask the question is what’s keeping you up at night? You know those sleepless nights that we all have as business owners? You’re staring at the ceiling and the one thought you have going through your mind is, if I only had X, if I only could do Y, whatever that is, my business would be so much better. That’s the kind of level questioning I’m talking about here is the big thing standing in your way from getting to where you want to go.
Okay? Well, once you have identified what that one big thing is, now I know there’s a lot of things, but the biggest thing is we want to tackle the biggest thing standing in your way first. So once you have identified what that is, you need to now start spending all of your spare time on fixing this problem or addressing this problem because after all, it’s the big thing standing in your way. You fix that, your business moves to the next level, okay? You fix that, and of course now you’re working on the next biggest problem. There’s always gonna be problems in your way, so you know, let’s just get that out of the way. There’s always going to be things to address. What I’m talking about is getting that big, nasty thing out of the way because you fix that, you automatically can move to the next level. So, I’m going to give you three questions that you need to be asking yourself in order to be able to take care of this problem.
Number one: how do I overcome it? Okay? In other words, how do I eliminate it? How do I get past it? How do I climb over that giant speed bump that’s in my way? What do we need to do to fix that problem? And then whatever you come up with the answer is, start taking action on it right away. Because if you don’t do it today, that problem’s going to be there tonight when you go to sleep and you’re staring at that ceiling wide awake, wondering how you’re going to get past this problem.
So every day that goes by that you don’t address that problem and get past that problem, you’re still going to have it and you don’t want any more sleepless nights. You don’t want to have that extra day of not progressing with your shop. So if you can figure out how to overcome it, then start taking action on it. Okay?
Now, maybe you figure you can’t overcome it. You just cannot get past it. Okay? The next question, what we want to try to address this big problem that’s standing our way is how do I get around it, okay? Sometimes you don’t have to climb over the wall or get rid of the speed bump or blast things out of your way. Sometimes you just need to zig and zag a little bit. Whatever it takes to get past it is what we need to do. So instead of going over it, how do we find a way to get around it?
Okay, so what do I mean by that? Well, let’s just say we’re talking about needing another technician. Okay? This is a big problem. A lot of shop owners tell me I can’t find good quality technicians. The question I always then ask is, why do you feel you need another technician?
If that’s your problem, I want you to ask yourself that very same thing. Well, in most cases it’s because I want to make more money. I’ve got some work here, but I can’t seem to get through all these cars that are sitting out in my parking lot. I need another technician. So then the next question is, well, why do you need a technician, why do you need to go through this? Well, so ultimately you can make more money, right? That’s what we’re in business for.
So let me give you an alternative to that. Rather than feeling you need the technician to make more money, why not find a way around that problem? Because finding technicians is difficult and everybody struggles with that or whatever the problem is that you’re talking about that’s standing in your way. It’s a difficult thing if you can’t overcome it and you find a way around it, well if you want to make more money, why not? Oh, I don’t know, raise your prices a little bit? Okay?
Be more selective on the cars you take in. Maybe improve your marketing so you’re attracting a better clientele that has more money and you raise your prices so you don’t have all these car sitting out there and you don’t have the technicians to fix them. You see what I’m talking about? I’m just trying to tell you there’s another way around whatever that problem is. You have to look at it maybe from a 10,000 foot view. Look down on that problem and say, okay, there’s gotta be some way around this and then figure out what it is. I don’t know exactly what your problem is, but figure out what it is and then find alternative ways because if you can’t get over that hill, you’ve got to find your way around it. Okay?
So that’s the second one. First one was how do I overcome it? The second one is how do I get around it? The third one is, look, if this is something that you can’t get over and you can’t get around, you’re just going to have to learn to live with it. So the question is, how do I learn to live with this problem? Okay? Because otherwise it’s going to eat you up. You have an insolvable problem. If it truly is insolvable, there’s no way over it. There’s no way around it. You have the problem, it’s still gonna be there, so you can keep banging your head against the wall and banging your head against the wall with an unfixable problem or learn to live with it and then start addressing the next thing, the next thing that’s on the list, that maybe you do have some control over and something that you really can fix.
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