It’s Your Business
- Author: Terry Greenhut, Business Editor
- Subject matter: Education
- Issue: Training for tech, sales
I come from a time in this industry when building a transmission was a simple thing. Of course we didn’t know it then. The problems we faced looked just as big to us way back when as the ones you now face. We were dealing with hydraulic pressure and vacuum with just the slightest bit of electricity thrown in, but even then, that kickdown solenoid that didn’t work could have us scratching our heads for quite a while. Today you have lots of solenoids, sensors, and one or several computers to deal with, and if you’re a rebuilder or a troubleshooter you’d better know how they all work and what to do when they don’t or your shop will lose an awful lot of money.
We were lucky back in the ’70s and early ’80s. If we really got stuck and couldn’t figure out why a transmission we built didn’t work right, we could go to the local junkyard, pick up a core for $15 or $20 and start over. That usually solved the problem, unless there was something else on the car causing it. Today, of course, you can’t do that. Just finding a core that is a close enough match to be useable is a monumental task, and the price you’d have to pay for it would probably eat up all your profit and then some.
So what does it take to be a successful shop owner, manager or technician today? In a word; education. We flew by the seat of our pants back then. We learned by screwing up and/or by looking over the shoulder of another mechanic if he would let us. I was lucky enough to have come into the possession of several original GM manuals that came along with equipment I bought at a dealer auction, but they didn’t teach me everything, just enough though to get me in trouble. After reading all of those books I thought I knew everything there was to know about fixing a transmission, but boy was I wrong. Those books and most of the others I used for troubleshooting information over the years were very disappointing. The problem was that they were all written based on brand-new manufacture, not on vehicles with 100,000 miles of wear and tear on them.
The manuals gave you the common and easy stuff to find, but after a few years of experience, you came to know that if your particular problem wasn’t run of the mill, you were not going to find the answer in one of those factory manuals or even in aftermarket books written from the same point of view; so after a while it didn’t even make sense to open them anymore. After all, how many times did you need to be told that your slipping clutches were a matter of low hydraulic pressure? You knew that. If the pressure was normal, the clutches wouldn’t be slipping. You needed to know why and where exactly to look for the cause. The books couldn’t tell you that because the writers didn’t know. They never experienced the same type of age- and mileage-related failures that you would in a workaday transmission shop.
It wasn’t until people like Bob Cherrnay and Gil Younger, among others, came along did we start to receive real-world information that we could use and learn from. Those pioneers of industry education worked in shops, experienced problems, and took the time and trouble to come up with solutions, then passed them along to others who would attend their seminars or read their tech bulletins. Over time other transmission mechanics would provide information about fixes they discovered and people like Bob and Gil became clearinghouses for useful information through their tech hot lines and bulletins. Fortunately these tech services still exist and their scope has been broadened to take in most other aspects of troubleshooting and repairing a vehicle. If you’re trying to run a shop today and don’t join one or more of these services, you’re wasting a lot of time and money. The time you take to figure out a problem that someone else has experienced and can give you the answer to can much better be used in money-making endeavors like marketing and sales.
If I had access to these types of tech services when I first started out, I wouldn’t have wasted nearly as much time and as many resources, but I didn’t. One transmission in particular has stood out in my mind over all these many years, because I refused to give up until I found a solution to its problem, was a GM ST300. Yes, I could have bought a core for a few bucks and started over, but I wanted to know why it worked when it came out of the factory. Now I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t. After all, it was nothing more than a two-speed Powerglide with some features that it would later have in common with the THM350. I should have been able to fix it. It came in with a “dropping out of gear at idle problem.” If you stopped for a light, it would neutral out. When you would step on the gas again it would go “bang” and then take off and run normally till you stopped again. After going through and reinstalling the unit five times, which is more than most mechanics want to handle, and having deduced that it was a pressure problem, the rest of the time was spent trying to find out exactly where it was coming from.
I went through all the usual suspects over and over again; the pump, the valve body, gaskets, seals, and rings, but everything continued to check out. The truth is I could have looked from then till now and still not found it because I didn’t know what I was looking for, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have had a convenient way to test it.
While in the midst of wracking my brain and losing precious time and money playing with this transmission, I received a call telling me that there was a board meeting of the Liberty States Chapter of ATRA taking place the next evening. I attended and got to talk to several other shop owners. When the conversation got around to problems and fixes, I brought up my dilemma. Immediately I was asked, “Did you check the governor shaft for size? It sometimes gets worn along with the bore in the case. There’s enough pressure to keep it in gear with some extra RPMs but at idle it would drop right out. There’s a good chance that’s where you’ll find your problem. It’s actually very common.” Yeah it’s common once you’ve seen it and know what it is, but it wasn’t in any of the books. It had to be experienced and the information had to be passed around the industry by the only way we could in those days: word of mouth. P.S. I went into work the next morning and fixed that transmission like I knew what I was doing.
In the early 1980s, inspired by the work these men had done on the tech training side, I developed and began to teach sales and management training courses for shop owners, managers and service writers of the automotive aftermarket who previously were shooting from the hip because there just wasn’t any training available to them. I endeavored to teach them how to price and sell their work at a profit so they could afford the proper equipment and training to do the job right. I had learned by then that there were three sides to this business: the one where you manage it, the one where you sell it, and the one where you fix it – and that you needed to be successful at all of them to make a good living from it.
In 1975 when I started my shop, the one thing I knew was that I didn’t know. I didn’t know much about how to fix or how to sell a transmission. If it wasn’t for the fact that it didn’t cost very much to run a shop back then, I probably would have been out of business that first year.
The more I learned over the next five years, the more I realized that the industry, in general, was seriously lacking in the education it needed on both sides. Contrary to the belief at that time that being able to fix things would make you money, if you couldn’t fix them profitably, you weren’t, and still today, aren’t doing yourself any good.
I had to learn sales and management skills from studying how it was being done in other industries, then adapting what I had learned to the transmission and automotive aftermarket. I would ask myself, “This technique I just learned for selling jet planes; how can I apply it to transmissions?” Once I figured it out I would test it several times in my own shops. If it worked, we would use it. If it wasn’t too successful, we would tweak it till it was.
With all the research and development that’s been done on both the technical and the management side, today there are so many more opportunities to learn what you need to know to be successful. All you have to do is make a commitment to take whatever courses you need and subscribe to the available publications and services. Does it cost money to do these things? I should hope so because the people who present you with all these answers need to get paid for their time and expertise, but you should never see it as a cost. It’s an investment in your shop’s future. I know that some of you have spent money on training in the past only to have the employees you’ve trained move on to other jobs or even become your competition, but you can’t let that deter you. In this business we live primarily in the moment, and in this moment you need people working with you who can do the job. That can only happen if they’ve been properly trained.
