It’s Just Routine - Transmission Digest

It’s Just Routine

“Routine.” The word basically means to do the same things in the same order time after time. What’s interesting is that in the transmission or auto repair business that’s exactly what we need to do to be successful: Follow the same routines every time. There are routines for dealing with telephone callers, with customers as they come in, with diagnosing and pricing jobs, with calling customers to close sales, with handling price objections, with delivering the finished vehicle, and with following up after the work is completed.

It’s Just Routine

It's Your Business

Author: Terry Greenhut, Business Editor
Subject Matter: Maintaining successful routines

It’s Your Business

  • Author: Terry Greenhut, Business Editor
  • Subject Matter: Maintaining successful routines

Many of you may remember Jack Webb who played Joe Friday in a radio and later a TV series he wrote, directed, and starred in called “Dragnet.” For those who don’t, it was a police show about two detectives in Los Angeles and how they tracked down and arrested criminals. What made it unique was that it was the first police drama that mimicked the way the police actually operated. It was more like a reality show than a stage play and people seemed to appreciate that. They must have because it lasted for about 40 years.

When interviewing suspects, at some point, while Webb was asking questions, one would want to know why he was asking. His answer would always be, “It’s just routine.” That answer of course was meant to allay the suspect’s fears that he or she was the target of the investigation and that all persons of interest would be asked the same things.

“Routine.” The word basically means to do the same things in the same order time after time. What’s interesting is that in the transmission or auto repair business that’s exactly what we need to do to be successful: Follow the same routines every time. There are routines for dealing with telephone callers, with customers as they come in, with diagnosing and pricing jobs, with calling customers to close sales, with handling price objections, with delivering the finished vehicle, and with following up after the work is completed.

Of course there are routines for all of the other functions of the business as well those that keep us on track and headed in the right direction. Even when it comes to performing the actual repair jobs, each one has a routine that should be followed to help insure its success.

My background being in the transmission business and having rebuilt units myself for 25 years, I know that having good solid routines for every step in the process is critical. The act of simply cleaning off the workbench completely between jobs makes a huge difference in productivity. It allows you to start fresh each time and never have to worry about whether or not there were parts left out or over. It seems almost like a no-brainer but in visiting other shops as a consultant, too often I see rebuilders trying to work on 6- or 8-foot-long benches that were reduced to 2-foot squares because of all the junk they had let accumulate on them over time. The word hoarder wasn’t popular back then so we didn’t know exactly what to call rebuilders who would let their work areas become so cluttered with things they thought they might eventually use, but that was it. They were hoarders and it was killing both their productivity and their accuracy as well.

You may have noticed that when you have set routines for doing everything, stuff not only gets done more quickly and accurately, but when things go wrong it becomes much easier to track down the source of the problem and therefore to remedy it. When a haphazard approach is taken to business – or most anything else – the results are evident; quality and speed both suffer. After all, it’s hard to turn out a quality product in a reasonable amount of time when you’re tripping over yourself trying to get things done or when you can’t immediately pick up what you need off your workbench or out of your tool box because it’s hiding under everything else. You just don’t make a lot of headway when you’re repeating processes because you can’t remember if that part lying on the bench came out of this transmission or the one you finished yesterday.

It’s been proven time and time again, for example, that when you don’t follow a precise routine for selling you start losing sales and losing money on the sales you do accidently make. But what takes us out of the routines we know we should follow? Why would we abandon what we know works so well? There are any number of circumstances that can pull us out of our routines. When it’s a selling routine, we can be pulled off of it by the fear of losing a sale, by time pressure because we think we are too busy to devote full selling time to each customer (I call that one “being too busy to make money”), by getting so used to the routine that we think it’s OK to skip steps, or by shear laziness – the last one, of course, being the worst.

Whenever I mention the laziness angle it makes me think about the story of a good friend of mine who had attended one of my seminars. He had taken my advice and had quit giving prices over the phone and instead started talking callers through the entire process leading up to them accepting an appointment to bring the car in for diagnosis before getting a price. It had worked so well that my friend’s business was flourishing. He was making more sales at higher prices than ever before. However, the shop got so busy that he shifted his main area of concern from getting the work in to getting it out. He wanted to turn over the bays as quickly as possible like a restaurant at dinnertime trying to turn over tables two or three times.

Because of his perceived need to work as quickly as possible, he cut short most of the routines that had made the shop so successful, one being the sales process, so instead of following the entire phone procedure he would cut it short by quoting prices over the phone if the callers didn’t agree to his first offer of an appointment; the same thing that got him into trouble in the first place. He even went back to quoting prices in the driveway or during the road test. Then he couldn’t understand why people were hanging up on him or driving away right after he quoted a price. As a result of losing jobs this way, he started to think maybe his prices were too high so he started lowering them, making the problem far worse. Now not only did he not have the volume anymore but he didn’t have the price either.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that abandoning his successful routines was killing his business, but he was frozen in his new unsuccessful ones and didn’t know why. You see, part of the problem with deterioration is that it happens so slowly you may not even realize it’s taking place. You think you are still doing things the way you always did, but you’re not. You can’t even tell that you’re cutting corners until you feel the pinch in your wallet. Then fear takes over. Now you’re afraid to change from your present routine because it might cost you even more business. The downward spiral keeps going and gets worse.

At some point you have to stop, take a step back, let somebody smack you in the back of your head, and ask yourself: “What the heck am I doing? Do I know how to fix it, and if I don’t, where can I get the help I need to set this ship back on course?” Even if it means taking risks that you haven’t taken in years, you can’t go on the way you are because it will ruin you. Once you get to the point where you can’t go any lower and you know you will lose the entire business, you can fix it because you haven’t anything more to lose by taking a big chance.

So how do you fix an ailing business? You go back to basics. Ask yourself, “What was I doing when it was working well?” Then start doing those things again, even if it hurts, even if you think it’s beneath you to do things like going out knocking on the doors of other businesses looking for work, even if it scares you to death to change your selling process, you have to do it to break the chain.

It might help to document all of your successful routines when you are succeeding. That way, if things eventually start to go sideways on you, you can refer to your notes to see what you were doing right during the best of times.

Fortunately my friend was able to turn it back around once he was made aware of the position he had put himself in. He already had the tools to fix it. He just needed to hit the reset button and start over. He was one of the fortunate ones who still had enough resources left to do it. Most don’t; by the time they realize what they’ve done, they have already burned through all of their money and have no way to start over.

One action I always found successful for a business that had broken its long-standing good routines was for the owner to put him or herself in the “New Owner” frame of mind. You do this by saying, “If I just bought this business or was opening it from scratch for the first time, what would I do to get it rolling? How would I advertise and promote? How would I treat and how far would I go out of my way for customers? What would I do that’s different from my competitors? How much would I be willing to invest to get this business going?” If you decide it’s worth doing, you have to do it all the way.

Making some half-hearted attempt at fixing it won’t do the job. Your initial attempt to start the business wasn’t half-hearted so this one can’t be either if you expect it to work. Complete dedication is called for here. Nothing short of it will do.

Once you get back into successful routines, you need to stay on top of them to make sure you don’t stray too far off center. Then make instant course corrections before things get too far out of hand. Good solid routines for sales, management and production will last a long time if you monitor and keep them in check.

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