You Can’t Win Every Argument
I found myself in an argument the other day that I couldn’t win no matter how right I might have been. It was with two golf buddies who know I’m in the auto-repair business and chose to vent their frustration about the cost of car repairs on me.
The Customer Will Believe It Only If You Do
A half-hearted attempt to make a sale leads to disbelief on the part of the customer: “Well, your brakes are pretty worn out. You may want to think about replacing them.” Does the customer need the brake job or not? If he does, tell him so. If not, tell him when he will. Being wishy-washy about it doesn’t do either side any good. The customer loses confidence and you don’t make sales.
Turn It Around
The show was called “The Turnaround King.” It was about a consultant who is called in when a business is in pretty deep trouble and in imminent danger of failing. His job is to analyze the business in its current state and see whether he can teach the owners how to turn it around to save its life.
Statistics – Who Needs Them?
You do, but only if you aspire to a higher level of success. It’s amazing how some business owners count very heavily on statistics but others rarely, if ever, look at their numbers.
Stick to the Plan, Stan!
How hard is it to make a business plan and stick to it? Turns out for most people it’s very hard. That’s one of the reasons not a great number of entrepreneurs are the super successes they set out to be. Lots of folks come up with terrific business concepts, but not very many can see them through to fruition.
Is It Time for a Checkup from the Neck Up?
Many of the shop owners I’ve interviewed lately have indicated that they’ve had a tough time coping with all that’s taken place over the past couple of years in their businesses and the economy in general. Many remember the days of “easy business” when you could rely on doing certain basic functions like advertising, marketing and selling the same way over and over again because they always yielded a good result.
Doing Business with Integrity
His name was Mendy Sussman. He was in his early 80s when I knew him back in the mid-1970s, so either he’s no longer with us or he’s about 117 years old and still sitting under a palm tree in Miami Beach. What that man taught me in about a half hour modeled my entire career.
Some Things Never Change
A whole lot of concern has been raised lately over the fact that pricing information (right or wrong) has become so easy to obtain. Callers now start conversations with, “I was just on the Internet and I have a price to rebuild my transmission. How much can you do it for?” It’s annoying and upsetting to shop owners and service advisers that the public seems to know so much about their business.
Two Ears, One Mouth
Humans and most animals are endowed with two ears and only one mouth. Although some people can talk out of both sides of their mouths at the same time, the proper ratio for salespeople, negotiators and most others in business or the professions is 2-1 – listening twice as much as we speak. It only makes sense; if we listen more and talk less we can take in valuable information that we can use to get the other party to do what we need. If we’re too busy trying to get our points across instead of listening to theirs we will miss the clues that could give us the outcome we want.
Many Happy Returns
Since so many previously dedicated transmission-rebuilding facilities have of late become more oriented toward repairing and servicing the entire vehicle, a new set of challenges has emerged. Leading the pack, believe it or not, is returns – parts and cores that need to go back to local parts stores for credit to the shop’s account.
Diagnostics: To charge or not to charge; that isn’t the question
Pretty much every online forum lately has had the question come up as to whether charging for diagnostics is appropriate and/or good business practice. There are many opinions from which to choose. The bottom line, however, is that it’s your business so you need to pick one or several methods to be applied in varied circumstances that will keep your customers happy and at the same time allow you to make the money you require.
When Things Go Wrong
Customer service in the transmission and auto-service business begins when something goes wrong. If nothing ever did, there would be no need for it. So you have to figure that in virtually every after-sale customer-service situation, somebody didn’t get what they either wanted, needed or thought they were entitled to. That means that emotions are running high in every one of these instances. People range from being mildly upset to fighting angry. Often an otherwise calm, friendly individual can turn into a monster before your very eyes.
