Car Count Daily | Edition #81

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 over 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 their shops can handle.

Today we’re gonna talk about appearances and credibility. More specifically, let me just start off by telling you a story. You know, the other day I stopped in to the local health food, nutritional supplement store to find out what I can take to help improve my body, to look better, to be healthier, and to be more active.

You know, I’m getting older as some of you probably are too. I look at what I put into my body as the fuel to get me through the day. I’m going in there for some advice. Advice from the experts, the people that work there and live, eat, and breathe this information. Unfortunately, the person I was greeted with that was going to help me, and the only person there to help me, was overweight! She looked tired. She looked like she hadn’t gotten sleep in a long time. She was just very sluggish and she didn’t look healthy at all. She certainly didn’t exude that youthful appearance that I would like to have, yet I’m asking her advice on what I need to do for myself when it’s quite obvious she wasn’t using the information that she had.

We see this all the time. A lot of times you have the information but you don’t actually act on it. You don’t use it yourself. Now for me I’m just going through the mindset of somebody that is a customer and I’m listening to her and I remember myself saying, “She’s probably lying. This doesn’t work. This isn’t gonna work for me because look, it’s obviously not working for her.” She’s not walking the walk. She’s not talking the talk. Therein all the information she gave me which as I processed it later was all the right information. She recommended the right things for me. My bullshit radar was going off thinking, “You know, if this was so good why isn’t she doing it?”

And then at the same time I started thinking awhile back I had gone to some hypnotist show where the lady performing was claiming that she could hypnotize people to do everything. It was a fun show and it was awesome. Then afterwards she talked about you know, I can hypnotize anybody to do anything. She went into her little sales pitch at the end that, “I can hypnotize you to stop smoking, I can hypnotize you to make more money, I can hypnotize you to lose weight.” I remember thinking, “Oh my god, why don’t you hypnotize yourself? She was not the slimmest person in the world.

Please forgive me, I’m not trying to poke fun at anybody that’s overweight but, if you’re gonna tell me you know how to make myself healthy, you know how to get me to lose weight, I’m looking at you as if you are a product of the product. What I’m trying to say is that your clients are watching. Your employees are watching and if it’s not congruent with what you’re saying and what you’re doing, that’s a big problem. It’s much like my technician that’s gonna work on my car, he’s gonna tell me how to keep my car running in tip top shape and I drive by later on and I see him broken down on the side of the highway.

He’s driving a car that’s not in tip top shape so it makes me wonder am I going to the right place. Look for all these incongruencies, look for what you’re saying and what you’re doing. They should really match up. If you’re talking about having a top-quality shop yet I go to your shop and it doesn’t look like it’s a good quality shop, again, the appearances are what’s gonna get people to jump to the first conclusion. I don’t know how long, it only takes a few seconds for somebody to form an opinion. What opinion are they forming about you? Do they feel that you are the best place to take their car to or are they questioning themselves thinking: “I’m not quite sure that this is the right place.”

People are always looking, so look around at all areas of your shop and see what you can possibly fix. Listen to what’s coming out of your mouth and then also look at what you’re doing. The two really need to jive.