Car Count Daily
Hi shop owners. 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 of auto repair shop owners, just like you, to get and then keep all the top-quality customers that your shop can handle.
Something that I’m hearing from shop owners constantly when we’re talking about car count. What I’m hearing all the time is “car count is down in my auto repair shop because cars are made better.” If I heard it once I heard it a thousand times, and chances are you’ve probably said it yourself. Look, I’m not going to tell you cars aren’t made better because that would be sheer stupidity. The fact is that cars are made better. Cars are made to last much, much longer than they used to. That’s not the reason why car count is down in your shop.
How do I know that? Well, a recent study came out that said the average car on American roadways is over 11 years old. Let me say that again. The average car is over 11 years old. That’s not a new car. That’s the average. That means for every brand new car out there, in order to have an average of fourteen years, that means there’s a car out there that’s 28 years old. There is a balance there. If the average care is 14 years old, there are available cars for you work on. Right? 14 years ago the cars weren’t made as good as they are now, and even if they were, they’re 14 years old right now, so they’re going to need a lot of maintenance. They’re going to need a lot of repairs.
Don’t get caught up thinking that the car count in your auto repair shop is down simply because cars are made better. Those cars that are made better is not a problem with your business. Those won’t be the ones that are going to give you the most money. That profitability is going to come from the cars that are older, and the average car is much older than it used to be.
Clear that out of your mind, understand that there are plenty cars out there, it’s just totally up to you to focus on your shop management and marketing to attract more customers to your shop. Chances are, with the average age of 14 a vehicle, when you attract somebody to your shop, they’re for one of those 14 year old cars, or older.
Yep lets keep those old cars running. They are our Bread and Butter. May look like junk to us, but to the customers that car is like gold to them
Well said Pat!
Unrelated question to this video Ron, but what are your thoughts on YELP? I realize it is going after new customer acquisition and not focused on existing customers as we want to focus. But they are pushing harder into the auto repair market in our area so I wanted your thoughts.
Also an unrelated question, I have been using online for new customer acquisition
from Google and sites like Yelp for ten years and they have been great, but now other shops also have five stars and are above us on the page and we are getting fewer calls.
Do you think we should pay for an add? we did it before and it didn’t improve
the results.
Keep up the good work.
Hans