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This is the Aftermarket Radio Network. It's your weekly blitz with Chris keeping you in the game. Hey everybody, are you ready to super charge your auto repair business? This is Coach Chris Cotton from Auto Fix Auto Shop Coaching. The weekly blitz is where industry expertise and business innovation collide, revving your engines for the week ahead.
This episode has game-changing insights, up-to-the-minute industry updates, and practical tips to shift your business into high gear. We're talking about stuff you didn't even know you didn't know folks. This episode is brought to you by shop marketing pros, the experts in marketing for top-tier auto repair shops. If you're running a successful shop and want to take you to the next level, shop marketing pros is without a doubt your best option.
Websites and SEO to social media and digital ads, shop marketing pros help shop owners just like you, in me, fill our bays, grow a revenue and build the life we've been working for.
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Hey, everybody. Hope you're having a great day. I was listening to another podcast. We were driving down the road and something that the person said just hitting me like a ton of bricks and it was you can't win the game if you don't know how to play it or you don't know what the rules are.
And so I had Kimberly text me the title real quick. I created this episode. I'm also going to do a follow up episode to this. It's going to be part two, but a different name. I'm going to record this one. I'm going to drop right back in here and get the next one.
So Chris, the title can't win the game if you don't know how to play. I know you're rolling your eyes. You're thinking, come on, Chris, I'm not playing games. I'm running a business. But I need you to hear me out because that's exactly my point too many shop owners are running a business.
But they're doing it like someone who's never read the rule book. So guess what? Add the rule book. Do you?
What game are you even playing? So let's start right there. What game are you playing? When I ask most shop owners that they tell me things like while I'm fixing cars, I'm keeping my customers happy. I'm just trying to keep the doors open. And while all that's technically true, none of it's the real game.
The real game, the one that determines whether you win or lose is the business of running an autorecar shop. Not just doing the work, but understanding how to run it profitably, sustainably and in a way that doesn't eat your life alive.
You got to know the rules, how to make a profit, how to build a team, how to track performance, how to use data to make decisions. That's the game we're in. That's the game. I'm in. Maybe you're not in it, but I'm in it and I'm in it to win it.
Whether you realize or not, and if you don't learn how to play it, you're basically running on to the field without knowing what a touchdown looks like. Every game has rules, right? Football baseball chess, monopoly, or c'ton, shout out to piper, which by the way, ruins more family gatherings than bad potato salad, just saying.
But in business, nobody's going to hand you the rule book. When you start, you might get an overall generic of how businesses are ran, but how is your auto repair shop ran? What is the rule book? What does winning look like nobody gives you that foreign auto repair shop unless you get it from somebody else.
So here's what I've learned after coaching hundreds and hundreds of shops. The rules of the game are simple, but they're not easy.
You win when your business consistently produces net profit, not just sales. Your team executes the processes without you having to hold their hand every day.
Your customers come back and bring friends because they trust you. You the owner can take a vacation without having panic attacks. That's what winning is.
You lose when you chase car count instead of profitability. You spend money before you know what's coming in. You ignore your numbers, and you work yourself into burnout while your business still feels out of control.
Those things are like fumbling on the one yard line every week over and over again. And here's my favorite line. You've heard me say it before numbers never lie.
If you don't know your numbers, you're not even watching the scoreboard. You might be celebrating a busy week, but busy doesn't mean profitable. And in this game, profit is how you score points.
Earlier this week, I had a potential client call. And there are things like there are phrases I ask when I'm interviewing you, what's your gross profit on parks, what's your gross profit on labor?
Do you have an income statement? Do you read your income statement? What's your net profit?
And the first one is, is do you have an income statement? Do you read your income statement every week? Yeah, yeah, I have one. I read it.
And then I ask them, what's your gross profit? Well, I don't know. We make plenty of money.
Which one's worse or which one should we pay attention to? Does it need to be labor profits or parts profits? And they're like, I don't know.
And then I ask, what's the net profit? Well, I don't know. Well, guess what? You're not reading the scoreboard. You're not looking at things. You do not know your business.
Every business owner walking down the street today, probably couldn't tell you exactly where their net profit is. They should be able to though.
I'll probably guarantee you that Jeff Bezos knows the numbers in his business at a high level, like there are probably other people that are on the departmental level to learn more granularly.
But people know, like they wake up knowing they look at their reports, whether it be a flash report or whatever, and they know exactly where they stand.
They probably also have outlook for their cash flow. What's coming in? What's going out and everything like that.
So the problem with playing without a playbook is shop owners playing the game, but without the playbook, they come in every morning, they put out fires.
They talk to a few customers, maybe rent a little and by the end of the day, they're like exhausted and then they go home, collapse, repeat.
They also complain to their spouse about what crappy day they had or they talk about the one bad customer they had instead of the 20 good customers they had.
That's not running a business. That's just surviving and it's not surviving well. I wouldn't think that you would let your technician start replacing a transmission, replacing an engine without some sort of a guide.
Maybe a service manual, if you will, like looking at things, what are torque specs? What is this? What is that? What's the order? What's the process to this?
But somehow owners think they can run a multi-million dollar company on gut, instinct, and hustle. And that's not the case. That's playing blindfolded.
You got to know your place. What's your average a pair of water? What's your gross profit margin on labor and parks? What's your break even point? How much money do you need to make per car just to stay afloat?
If you can't answer those in under a minute, you're not playing to win. You're just hoping you don't lose. Even worse than that is, if you don't even know where to go to find that information, you are...
The Sooners just played Kent State this week. Kent State, I love you, but you're not playing the same game, the same league that the Sooners were.
So how do we learn the game? Well, just like anything else we're doing, you study it. You get coached, you practice.
Step one, get a coach or a mentor. Someone who's played and won. A great coach can show you the shortcuts, help you avoid penalties, make sure you're playing offense instead of defense, help you work on your technique.
Step two, you build your playbook. This means creating your systems, your SOPs, pricing strategy, workflow process, KPI dashboard, all of it. That's your game plan.
Step three, you practice and review. You can't just build a scoreboard, you got to look at it, review your numbers weekly with your team, talk about what's working and what's not, celebrate small wins, adjust, repeat.
Step four, you adjust your plays when the market changes. Things right now are a little wonky. Like I'm talking to shop owners all across the country.
The topics in our peer groups are, man, we'll have three good weeks and then one week the bottom drops out and we do nothing for a week and then three good weeks and then the bottom drops out.
Or we had a good week last week and this week, you know, things are happening. I'm not sure what's going on with that right now. I would love to be able to tell you, those are some of the things we're trying to try and navigate.
Great football teams don't run the same play every quarter. They adapt. When you go in at halftime, what kind of changes do you make? You know, the key is staying flexible and being proactive.
Again, remember, you can't manage what you don't measure and you can't win what you don't understand.
I'm going to give you a real world example real quick. You know, out of client, great shop, hard worker, hard of gold, but he struggled.
He's like, Chris, we're slammed. I don't understand why we're not making money. So we look into his numbers, turns out average a pair of orders 312. Well, we know that pretty quickly what it should be parts margin was 38%.
He's undercharging for labor, doing discounts that he wasn't tracking. And then on top of that, his employees were like, oh, the boss man discount so I can discount and people are just willing.
Just willing, he's just making up discounts to overcome their inability to sell. Then everybody's basically giving away services because everybody wanted to take care of the people.
You know how I am. If you've listened to more than one or two episodes, you know, I love the heart, but good intentions don't pay payroll.
And if you've been to one of my classes or you've listened, you know that what I tell you is take care of yourself in the company first when it comes to things like that.
And then once everybody's taken care of, including your employees, then you can get back to the community. Then you can do things.
Like last month was our 40 slash one year anniversary for the business and we had all kinds of discounts. We were doing $40 off oil service $40 off an alignment.
We basically gave back about $10,000 to the community and discounts last month. This month we're doing breaks for breasts. But we can do those things because our playbook is set up for us to win.
And now that the business is taking care of, we can give that back to the community. Okay. So back to this case, you know what we did is we worked on building this playbook. We implemented a DVI system. We retrained the service advisors.
We raised their labor rate based off of what his expenses were and we started tracking KPIs every week. Six months later, same car count, same customers net profits up 30%.
He didn't become a better mechanic. He just finally learned the game. So now as you work through this process, you have to be able to teach the game to your team or coach them. Like this is the goal.
Once you understand the game, you have to teach it to your people, your advisors, text managers, they all need to know what winning looks like.
You can't expect your team to play hard if they don't know the score. You can't ask for a 55% parts margin if nobody understands why.
You know, we have to set goals. We have to talk about average repair order. We have to talk about efficiency. We have to talk about gross profit. And it's not like it's some secret business language.
But, but like it's the scoreboard we're all playing on. When everyone understands how the role affects the outcome, suddenly the shop starts working like a team, not just a group of individuals.
And again, now we're moving on. We're advancing. You're advancing as an owner. Now you're in the owner mindset. You have to stop being the player and we start being the coach.
So now here's where I see a lot of shop owner struggle. They're still trying to play the game when they should be coaching it. If you're still doing all the work, you'll never have the bandwidth to call the plays.
Your role should shift from being in the trenches to being on the sideline watching analyzing and making strategic calls knowing when to call a time out knowing when not to call a time out.
You know, that's leadership. That's ownership. That's how you win championships and business because just like football, the players win games, but coaches build dynasties.
And here we are to the cold hard truth. It's your responsibility to learn. I'm continuing this on. But this is true. If you don't know how to play the game, that's on you.
Can't blame the economy. Can't blame your vendors. You can't even blame your employees. You've got to take responsibility for learning the business side because at the end of the day, nobody's going to care about your scoreboard like you do. If you want to win financially, personally, mentally, you've got to understand how the game works.
Once you do, the stress starts to drop the fog lifts. You stop guessing and you start leading. And man, that's when it gets fun because now you're not just surviving. You're competing. You're out there building a business that wins on purpose, not by accident.
If business feels hard right now, if it feels chaotic, unpredictable or just plain frustrating, maybe it's because you're still figuring out the rules. And that's okay. Every pro started as a rookie.
Just remember, you can't win the game if you don't know how to play it. So learn it, study it, master it, then teach it to your team. And once you do, once you truly understand how the business works, that's when the magic happens. That's when you stop chasing success and start creating it.
And if you don't have the playbook, you don't know where to get it. We're just a phone call away.
If you want to give another shout out to our sponsor, shop marketing pros, they're the only marketing company I recommend and they handle all the marketing for my own shop as well.
If you're serious about growth, you need strategies that actually work better websites, hire Google rankings and ads that bring real customers through your doors. I want you to go right now, visit shopmarketingpros.com forward slash Chris and partner with a team that understands your business because every great shop deserves marketing. That's just as great.
Great day everybody. Rising grind. Get out there. Get after it. I love you. You've been listening to the weekly blitz with coach Chris cotton on the aftermarket radio network dot com. Follow Chris on your favorite podcast, listening out. Let him know what you'd like him to cover. His email is in the show notes. Chris is all for advancing the aftermarkets.
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