A. Little Help

• Subject: Improving access to management tools & systems
• Essential Reading: Shop Owner
• Author: Art Little

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This year, according to the U.S. government, I am legally old. Most would look at getting old as a negative thing, but having just arrived on the scene I have to tell you it doesn’t look that bad to me. There are a lot of cards to play.

The trump card in this game is the fact that my wife worries about me now more than ever and acts as my advocate to make my life easy for me. I don’t lift anything heavier than a chicken wing nowadays. Sweating is out of the question. Long workdays are over. She wants me home early. Naps are a good thing. Naps – yes sir, I’m thinking I can get used to this.
My wife’s goal, to make my life easier, brings me to this month’s article. I thought if that is her goal, and it is working out so well for me, I should make it my goal to be your advocate and try to make your life, as a manager or shop owner, a little easier for you.

We start off with a little history lesson. Being old now, I have a unique understanding of our industry’s history. I happen to have been there for most of it. I remember when the shop had only one phone and it had a rotary dial. The accounting, banking and invoicing systems were all on paper and kept at the shop on pads, in file cabinets and on repair order racks. I was a manager at a major franchise during this time and remember complaining that I hated to sell a job because I had to document it in six different logs. It was ridiculous. The repair orders had four copies back then. The paper mill was brutal.

One day, I came in to work and there was a computer. They told me it would cut down the paper work; I just had to learn the program. There was a touchtone phone with two lines: one for customers to call and one for something called a fax machine. For a long time I had a difficult time distinguishing between the two when the phone rang, but I really liked that touchtone-dialing computer sitting in the shop.

Time marches on. Nowadays I see the Internet, smart phones, Skype, mobile technology, online banking, Mitchell OnDemand, ALLDATA etc. And, as my travels take me from one member’s shop to another, I have noticed a real organizational problem in our industry.

The source of the confusion seems to come when shop owners mix how and where we access our business tools used to manage our transmission shops. For example, If your production board is at the shop, unless you call and ask you have to go to the shop to see what is going on with production. If your lead sheet is at the shop, you have to go to the shop to view it.
If your parts invoices for the week are in a stack of papers in the back office, if your cash collected for the week is on a computer program at the shop, if your sales records are at the accountant’s office, if your production reports are in your car, if your vendor list is on a piece of paper taped to the wall at the shop and your checkbook in is in your desk at home, you “might” be caught up in the confusion I am talking about.

Here is a good rule of thumb to make your life easier, because that is my goal now:

• Paper systems are a bad thing
• Computer programs are outdated
• Modern Internet apps are a good thing.

Your goal should be to put all your business-management tools and systems online. This makes everything easy to access. Mobile technology is at its best when you can access everything you need to manage your business online. Last month, smart phones outsold desktop computers. Mobile technology is the reason for that. Let me quickly put “mobile technology” in perspective and explain how it can influence our industry.

Management makes decisions every day at the shop. If the information needed to make intelligent decisions is not easily accessible, most of the time it will not be used. That leads to uninformed decisions being made by management, or no decision being made.

For example, you get a call when you are away from the shop and have to make a decision regarding your shop. If you have to go into the shop and look in a paper file cabinet or use the shop computer’s program to get the data you need to make an intelligent decision, you will either procrastinate or make a decision on a best-guess basis.

That is how and why bad decisions are made. That is how profits are won or lost. Remember, most of the time the worst decision you can make is not to make a decision.

Modern business systems used in shops today are called apps. Apps are good because they do the same thing the outdated paper systems and computer programs did for us. The only difference is that they work on the Internet and are easy to access. These apps are mobile. What makes them good is that you can access them at the shop, at home, at lunch or at your kid’s ball game; thus, the term mobile technology.

If all your shop’s operating systems are set up as apps on the Internet, you have your shop in your pocket. When someone calls you and you have to make a decision, you can use the phone you are talking on to access the business data you need to make a smart decision – thus, the term “smart phone.” Easy access to data is the name of the game.

Let me wrap up this session of making your life easier by just saying that if you are not set up with the latest business apps available maybe you should at least look into it. If you think about it, the only reason you cannot leave the shop is because that is the only place you can access those paper systems and computer programs of the past.

If you work on migrating all your old operating systems to the Internet, then your smart phone becomes, literally, the key to your freedom. If you were able to get away from the shop for a while every day and start making timely, informed decisions, who knows what would happen? You might get a chance to take a nap too.

Art Little is the founder and CEO of TransTeam. He has been a professional manager, trainer, multiple-shop general manager, owner and a business consultant for transmission-shop owners nationwide. Visit www.transteam.com.