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Confessions of a Shop Owner is hosted by Mike Allen, a third-generation shop owner, perpetual pot-stirrer, and brutally honest opinion sharer. In this weekly podcast, Mike shares his missteps so you don’t have to repeat them. Along the way, he chats with other industry personalities who’ve messed up, too, pulling back the curtain on the realities of running an independent auto repair shop. But this podcast isn’t just about Mike’s journey. It’s about confronting the divisive and questionable tactics many shop owners and managers use. Mike is here to stir the pot and address the painful truths while offering a way forward. Together, we’ll tackle the frustrations, shake things up, and help create a better future for the auto repair industry.
Mike Allen [00:00:00]:
Hey guys, I was able to get into the shop, so I feel comfortable opening the store. If you feel you can comfortably make it in safely, come on in. If you don't, just let me know. But on days, um, where the shop was closed or someone said they didn't feel comfortable coming in, do you just pay them? Uh, is it unpaid? And how we handled it internally was if you have PTO available, you could opt to use PTO, or you could opt to take it unpaid. Um, but it wasn't just like an extra paid day on top of you know, whatever else.
Mike Allen [00:00:31]:
The following program features a bunch of doofuses talking about the automotive aftermarket. The stuff we, or our guests may say, do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of our peers, our sponsors, or any other associations we may have. There may be some spicy language in this show, so if you get your feelings hurt easily, you should probably just move along. So without further ado, here's your host, Mike Allen, with Confessions of a Shoplitter, presented by Techmetric, the best software ever invented for any purpose ever.
Mike Allen [00:01:08]:
Uh, where's your trophy, dude?
Matt Lofton [00:01:11]:
We don't, we don't support third place trophies around here.
Mike Allen [00:01:14]:
Did you throw it in the trash? Did it not even make it back?
Matt Lofton [00:01:17]:
It's in storage.
Mike Allen [00:01:23]:
I told you I was gonna do that, so I had to do it. Now it's gonna place of honor. Did you watch Daytona this weekend?
Matt Lofton [00:01:31]:
No, I, I did watch the replay of the last 10 laps.
Mike Allen [00:01:35]:
I have no idea how— well, so I watched like the first 20 laps of the truck race because I know Pastrana and McFarland and Tony— I think was Tony Stewart was racing also.
Matt Lofton [00:01:45]:
Tony Stewart was racing too.
Mike Allen [00:01:46]:
Yeah, I don't know how it turned out, but I saw that Cletus was the first wreck of the race.
Matt Lofton [00:01:50]:
Yeah, I watched his— I watched his interview and that was it.
Mike Allen [00:01:55]:
Was it good?
Matt Lofton [00:01:55]:
It was great, it was great.
Mike Allen [00:01:58]:
He's an entertainer, man.
Matt Lofton [00:02:00]:
Yeah, he's gold. They need to hold on to him.
Mike Allen [00:02:04]:
They need something, man. They need to put him up in the top league. Um, well, so we're middle of February, we're going to talk about January a little bit. We just got back, uh, a couple weeks ago from Elite's Ignite conference, which I thought was awesome. Um, had a great time out there. I didn't get to enjoy as much of the content, uh, on, uh, day 2 and 3, but the early day for pro service, I got to spend a fair amount of time, uh, in with the Carnegie instructor that you guys had out, and I thought that was great. It was good to kind of connect and, uh, see a bunch of the folks that we talked to online all the time. So that was, that was nice as well.
Mike Allen [00:02:42]:
Um, from y'all's perspective, was it a success?
Matt Lofton [00:02:45]:
Oh man, what a great event. Um, And I, I told, I told Darren and Hannah and everybody that was involved in the internal team of putting it together, it's, you know, last year was our first event there with Ignite, and, uh, it went very well. To follow up an inaugural event that goes very well with a second event is much more difficult than people give it credit for. And, uh, so I was, I was incredibly proud of the team and, and the effort that they put together to make it happen. I thought this year eclipsed last year Um, you know, from a content standpoint, uh, an ease of operation standpoint, it just felt a little bit smoother. And, um, and we had a, you know, we had a few more people and a few more speakers there as well. So, so that was awesome. And like you said, just to be able to get a chance to see everybody that, you know, we only get a chance to speak to on these virtual meetings, you know, a couple times a year, and then to be able to see them, you know, see them and meet each other face to face again is, is pretty nice.
Matt Lofton [00:03:41]:
And Um, it didn't hurt that, you know, it was 10 degrees and snow on the ground here while we were in Arizona and it was 78 and sunny.
Mike Allen [00:03:52]:
So yeah, I did get delayed, uh, a day coming home. And so I got to hang— I had to hang out, uh, in Phoenix for an extra day where it was like 80. And, uh, you should have taken the
Matt Lofton [00:04:05]:
red-eye home with me.
Mike Allen [00:04:06]:
Well, I was supposed to take the red-eye, but Delta was like, don't take the red-eye, you'll never make it home.
Matt Lofton [00:04:11]:
Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:04:11]:
And so then I changed a, a day later and it turns out I probably could have come home cuz the storm wasn't as bad as predicted. Um, but I used that extra day to work on some of my action items from the, from my coaching meetings that I had while I was there. So it was, it was useful time and it was warm time. I sat outside and drank beer on the patio. It was nice.
Matt Lofton [00:04:31]:
Yeah. So yeah, it was hard to beat, man. It was, it was gorgeous. The facilities were great. Uh, the weather was wonderful. Um, Scottsdale is home to a bunch of Elite, uh, family members there, uh, so it was really neat having that many people that close to home and seeing people drive back and forth and everything. So it, it was, it was a great event and, uh, glad we got an opportunity to do it.
Mike Allen [00:04:52]:
One— yeah, and one of the cool things about it is, like you said, there's like this little community of shop owners from around the country that have been Elite members for a long time that have built huge businesses sold them successfully and bought a retirement home on the golf course in Scottsdale. And so they were all there, you know, um, and that was, that was pretty neat to see, uh, kind of what it looks like once you've finished this journey of shop ownership, what the potential is. Uh, so that was cool. Um, so anyway, let's talk about January. How, how was January, uh, in Roxborough?
Matt Lofton [00:05:31]:
So January was a tale of two months for us. I'm sure, sure, kind of similar for you guys as well because we're not that far away. But, um, first part of January was rocking and rolling, and we had a record— we still had a record January at the end of the month, but it was going to be a record month. And, uh, and then we got hit really hard with the, the weather there at the, the tail end of the month, and we actually shut down for 5 days. And then once we did get back open, I was— like you said, we're into February now. I was— I only— I'm in the store on Fridays. So I was in the store the Friday after Ignite, and I heard people coming in saying it was the first time they left their house since the snow started. So it's been a,
Mike Allen [00:06:20]:
uh, yeah, we're just not equipped for that shit, man. That's not what we do in North Carolina.
Matt Lofton [00:06:24]:
No, and you know, our, our area is more equipped for it. Um, so they'll keep the main road very, you know, very accessible, and it's, it's, it's easy to get down 501. Um, but once you get off the— anything off of 501, it, you know, the story changes pretty big. And then the average age of our community is 55. So at 55 years, they just— they got their bread and they got their milk. They're gonna— as long as the TV's working, they're gonna hang out and— and ride it out. So, um, it's just, you know, just the way that it goes. And I know when we were doing our goals and everything a couple weeks ago, you know, we sat down and we talked about, you know, dividing the year out by 48 instead of by 52.
Matt Lofton [00:07:03]:
And I had to pull the team together, you know, last week and just remind them that's why we do that, you know, because we're, we're going to lose a week or two here and there, you know, just because of weather. Um, you know, different events are going to happen. You know, sometime in the, in the spring through early fall, we're gonna have a tornado or a hurricane come through that's gonna impact us, and we're gonna lose a day from that. And it's just, uh, just how it
Mike Allen [00:07:29]:
goes. Yeah. And so you average out the goal, uh, across the year based on that expectation of losing 2 weeks. But to lose them almost all 2 weeks of the plan right at the beginning of the year makes you feel like you're kind of behind the 8-ball and you're playing catch-up for the rest of the year, which is— can be stressful.
Matt Lofton [00:07:48]:
Yep, for sure.
Mike Allen [00:07:50]:
Yeah.
Matt Lofton [00:07:50]:
And so, um, so same conversation we had internally at my store I'll have with you today. So we are a little bit behind the 8-ball, right? And weather, unfortunately, as much as I've tried in my life of going to church on Sundays and praying it away, I've not figured out the direct line of communication there to make that happen. So we're not in control of the weather as much as I would like to be. Um, so that's outside of our controllable. So let's put that away. Outside of the weather, how did our— how were our daily averages? How did everything play out there? And then we'll talk about some strategies we can use to, to get on the catch-up side of things.
Mike Allen [00:08:29]:
So let's see, how many working days did we have in January? We had, uh, 21 because we were closed on New Year's Day. We ended up closing 2 days So that knocks us down to 19, but it really badly impacted us, uh, probably 3 additional days on top of that. So I don't know, but the doors were open for 19
Mike Allen [00:08:53]:
days.
Mike Allen [00:08:53]:
Um, so last month, uh, at the reporting store that we talk about, we did 104,000— just under 104— 103,720. Um, And so that puts us at
Matt Lofton [00:09:06]:
about $5,000, a little over $5,000 a day. And total sales, which had we not had the weather events, puts us at around 120, which puts us pretty close to our target for January.
Mike Allen [00:09:20]:
Yeah. And so you combine the weather days with the fact that the students were out of town for, um, a good portion of that. I don't feel bad about how January went. You know, we've got the people that we need in place, the right number of bodies in the right positions. Um, so, you know, onward and upward from there. Okay. I do have a question, uh, though, for you about, you know, you talk about weather days and there was a lot of conversation that I saw online about how do you handle, uh, employee compensation on weather days. And so our current policy., and you get 10 PDO or, you know, 15 if you've been there for long enough, uh, on January 1.
Mike Allen [00:10:09]:
Um, and, you know, the communication internally was, hey guys, there's a storm coming. Uh, here's our text tree that will communicate. Um, you know, by 5:00 AM I will send out, cuz you know how it was, 5 o'clock the previous afternoon, it was, it might be 1 inch, it might be 17 inches. We don't know. Yeah. I said, by 5 AM tomorrow morning, I will start the text tree and let you know if we're going to be open or not. Um, and the communication was, hey guys, I was able to get into the shop, so I feel comfortable opening the store. If you feel you can comfortably make it in safely, come on in.
Mike Allen [00:10:46]:
If you don't, just let me know, right? Um, and so that was the case a few of the days, and then a couple of the days it was, hey guys, I mean I don't think we're going to have enough people to be open, so just stay home, stay safe, stay warm, you know, that kind of thing, right? But on days, um, where someone— where the shop was closed or someone said they didn't feel comfortable coming in, and that happened, um, you know, do you just pay them? Uh, is it unpaid? And how we handled it internally was if you have PTO available, you could opt to use PTO or you could opt to take it unpaid. Um, but it wasn't just like an extra paid day on top of, you know, whatever else. Yeah. So what, what are you seeing across Elite customers? How do you handle it? That kind of thing.
Matt Lofton [00:11:31]:
So I mean, across Elite customers, obviously there's different state laws out there that require different things. Um, so we ask everybody to, you know, reach out to their local, you know, local and state resources there and check and make sure that they're handling it appropriately. Um, as far as what our you know, what our personal policy is at my shop would be very similar to what you laid out. And if I was coaching somebody, I would, I would coach them to do something very similar, um, in your processes and procedures. If you are in an area that does get inclement weather and you're not up north where it's just, you know, it's just expected that you come in because this is the 6 months of our life, uh, for those of us that it really does impact travel, Um, you need to have a weather plan. So what we did was we created a, a communication policy that's— we call it Weather 1, Weather 2, and Weather 3. So Weather 1 is a normal day. In other words, so same concept that you did as far as the text chain goes.
Matt Lofton [00:12:31]:
Um, we'll send out a text message either the day before or early that morning. And like I said, some days it is, you know, 5 AM before we're making that call just because there's, there's such a gap in, in what could actually happen like it was this last time. And so we'll do— so I'll send out a text message. Weather 1 is we're open, it's normal schedule. Weather 2 is we're working off of a 2-hour delay, uh, or we're leaving 2
Mike Allen [00:12:58]:
hours early.
Matt Lofton [00:12:58]:
Um, weather 3 is we're closed. So that just, that keeps the, the communication a little bit easier. For everybody. Um, and then we'll follow the same, same policy that you had there. If you have time available, you can take the PTO. Uh, if not, you can take it as an unpaid day. So it doesn't take it, you know, it doesn't count against your, uh, paid time that you have, uh, in the bank.
Mike Allen [00:13:22]:
Well, and I know that there were some guys who were like, boss, I'm ready to go to work. I can be at work. I'll be there at 8 o'clock. And, you know, they don't want to take PTO. They want to be at the shop and get paid, but it's like, I'm, I'm gonna have one technician, one advisor, and me, and no customers. There's not really any point in being open, um, in that situation. I was like, yeah, dude, I'm sorry, it's just not viable and feasible to
Matt Lofton [00:13:49]:
be open right now. Yeah. And so, I mean, I think that's probably, you know, honestly, that's probably a bigger conversation there as far as what do you do, because anytime we have an event like this, especially in our area— and there's other areas that are similar to what, what our climate is— where an inch or two of snow impacts 3 or 4 or 5 days. And when we have an event like we did this, this past time, um, where we got 6 inches of ice here in Roxborough, it was a 2-week impact, and then we got hit again the next week. Yeah. Um, so the real question is, is what do we do during those days? Like you said, okay, it's good enough, we close down for the one day, we open up the next day, but there's no customers. What do we do in those days after you know, we open back up when there's not a lot of action happening, um, to be— to justify everybody's time being there. And, you know, I think the important thing is, is number one, that's the, that's the time for, for us as leaders to, to make sure that we get there and set the tone, you know, for everybody, because nobody wants to be there, right? They had to wake up an hour and a half earlier just to leave an hour early to drive 5 miles an hour to get there.
Matt Lofton [00:15:02]:
Their kids are out of school, so their spouses are sitting at home frustrated with kids that have been out of school for a couple days. Yeah, you know, they want to go out and do the fun stuff with the kids in the snow and sledding and all that good stuff, and they know they're missing out on that. They know that they're going to have a limited opportunity to earn because there's going to be a limited customer— you know, limited, limited car count for some time. Every car they do touch is going to be dripping water on their head. Yeah. And, you know, keeping everything clean is going to be a pain in the butt for the next, you know, couple weeks. So I think, you know, first things first is it's important to get out in front of all that and just let them know that this is, you know, next couple weeks are going to suck. It just is what it is, right? And understand that they know that you know that it's going to suck.
Matt Lofton [00:15:48]:
And control what we can control. We can control our attitude. Right? We can make the best out of this situation, um, and then we need to manufacture urgency that normally exists from the customer. So if we take the customer out of the situation, there's zero urgency in our industry if there's no customer. When we add a customer to the mix, there's urgency there, right? And the team, especially the tech staff, they get used to that urgency. And they get, you know, they get used to being busy and they like being busy. And then you take the urgency away and now we get the complaints of, you know, everybody starts to chicken little and the sky is falling and every car that comes in sucks. And, you know, so I think it's just— I, I think the big thing there is how to, you know, making sure you have a snow day plan in place or a, you know, If you want to call it a slow day plan, you can call it a slow day plan, but just something that says, what do we do in
Mike Allen [00:16:52]:
these situations?
Matt Lofton [00:16:52]:
Um, you know you're going to have canceled appointments, so going ahead and getting ahead of those canceled appointments and calling those customers that were on the schedule for this week and go ahead and pre-booking them out for some time in the future. Um, you know, this is your great— you know, a day or two is going to be wrapped into equipment and facility maintenance and cleaning, you know, pulling in the loaner cars and getting the stuff done that you haven't been able to get done in quite some time. And, you know, whatever, you know, internal training. You know, we did, we did 2 hours of role play a day during that because we didn't have anything else to do. So we would take the front counter team and do some sales training and
Mike Allen [00:17:48]:
roleplay training. I'm just making notes.
Matt Lofton [00:17:50]:
I like
Mike Allen [00:17:58]:
this. Yep. Um, so we try to do 15 minutes of roleplay training, uh, most mornings. I mean, some mornings we have different topics. Like this morning we had a different topic. Um, but, uh, one of the things that I ran into is the guys were like— last week the guys were getting really comfortable and it started to get kind of silly, you know. And, uh, I'm bringing in my 1972 Peugeot, you know. And, you know, just kind of chuckle-fucking their way around the, the conversation.
Mike Allen [00:18:28]:
Um, and I had to be like, hey guys, I get it. I'm the first to come up with a silly joke every now and then, but this is practice and we are trying to get better at what we do. Um, and so I, I like the idea of if it's slow, you know, let's roleplay this sales call before we actually make the call because God knows we got time. Yep.
Matt Lofton [00:18:50]:
You know? And so what I talk to them about is, again, getting back to controlling the controllables. I— my averages shouldn't change. Right? So like, if my car count goes down, my, my ARO, my AWRO, all of those should technically go
Mike Allen [00:19:08]:
up, right?
Matt Lofton [00:19:08]:
Um, I— but they, they should never go down, right? If, if car count goes up, then it stresses the process a little bit, and we might see ARO drop down a little bit, we might see AWRO drop down a little bit. But anytime that I know that we're going to be slow, I want to make sure that I'm looking at the averages and not necessarily the cumulative totals, because I— if I can't force car count to happen, then I have to live with what I have for car count, and I have to make the most out of it, right? Which is one of the reasons that I'm a believer in trying to push car count as much as we can from time to time, because if we get slow and we have a low car— a really low car count model and we slow down, there's nothing I can do because my ARO is already as high as it can be, my AWRO is already as high as it can be, and we just have to live with what we have. Whereas if I'm pushing car count consistently and I slow down, then I can always go in and say, hey guys, instead of a $500 ARO this week, we're looking for a $700 ARO because we don't have as many cars.
Mike Allen [00:20:10]:
So I was having a conversation this weekend with, um, a guy who's got some shops in Arkansas, and his big shop, uh, has broken 600K in a month. So it's, it's a pretty big shop, right?, and they do it with a $400 average repair order. So it's just mad car count, right? Yep. And I was kind of, I was kind of like, well, you know, this guy's got $1,000. I was— we're talking about my advisor team. This guy's got $1,000 ARO, this guy's $800, this guy's, you know, $600, this guy's $450. What I— what can I do to get this guy who's at $450 back up to, you know, kind of the, the mean? And he's like, $450 would be a rockstar for me. You know, uh, I said, well, maybe, but we're doing 7 cars a day, you know, 6 cars a day per advisor, right? Um, and he was like, I don't know, I mean, trying to go and hunt an advisor who's gonna just walk in with a $700 or $800 ARO in a general repair shop is not a thing.
Mike Allen [00:21:11]:
Uh, not an easy thing, right? So why not just feed the monster with car count? Um, but I guess— and it's, you
Matt Lofton [00:21:22]:
know, I'm not attacking any— all models work, right? High car count models work, low car count models work. Um, I think that, you know, my personal opinion on that is I like to stress— I like to stress the system with car count every now and again, um, because it does, it does find holes in the process and in the system, and it finds constraints and barriers. Because there's only two real ways to grow. We either sell more to the customers that we already have or we get more customers.
Mike Allen [00:21:55]:
Yeah.
Matt Lofton [00:21:55]:
And once you start topping out at that $700+ ARO, how do you sell more to what you already have, right?
Mike Allen [00:22:04]:
You know, you're, you're trying to limit the amount of opportunity, uh, in a
Matt Lofton [00:22:07]:
general repair shop before you start killing cars.
Mike Allen [00:22:12]:
Yeah.
Matt Lofton [00:22:12]:
And so you know, there, there is a, you know, there is a limit to how much you can, you know, how much you can push ARO, and there is a limit to, um, you know, how far you can push your pricing to, you know, to inflate an ARO. So I mean, it, you know, it just comes down to what is the, you know, what is the, what is the next way to grow. The next way to grow is car count, and the struggle with car count is, is it breaks everything in the shop, right? It makes everything else harder. You know, you're going to go through that time period where AWR drops, ARO drops, everybody feels all stressed out. And all that means is, is that your process in some way, shape, or form is broken. Yeah, right. It's just not— it's just not feasible to handle that level of car count yet. So every now and again, I like to go push a, you know, 100-car week out just to see what happens.
Matt Lofton [00:23:04]:
And I mean, I know it's going to— I know it's going to make the numbers look bad, but it always brings up a lot of good coaching opportunities, you know, with the team. So that was kind of our— that was kind of our conversation coming off the snow was how do we, you know, how do we push 80 to 100 cars over the next couple of weeks knowing that, you know, because what we really lost, we didn't really lose sales in those days that were closed. We lost sales potential because we— there was no discovery. So the funnel is what winds up getting depleted, right? Because you still had work in progress that was sitting in the, sitting in the shop or sitting in the parking lot when, when the store closed. So when the technicians come back in, they still have work to do in those, you know, after those 2 or 3 days that you were closed. But now there's no work to do a week from now, right? Because we weren't bringing cars in for 2 days, so we lost 14 cars at $2,000 of discovery per car, that's $28,000 of sales potential, right? Um, and in our model, I lost 28 pre-scheduled appointments, right?
Mike Allen [00:24:10]:
So I lost— it's 28 oil changes and also 28 state inspections, right? So I'm— that is something I want to talk about is, is pre-scheduled appointments, is I'm, I'm trying to push hard and touch on it every day to create new habits But I mean, it's reasonable that every vehicle that comes through that lives in your marketplace— it's not like getting service while they're on a road trip or something, you know— should be two pre-booked appointments, right? The next oil change and the next state inspection. I think that's pretty standard for North Carolina vehicles. Um, for those of our listeners that are outside of the state, North Carolina has an annual, uh, safety and emissions inspection.
Mike Allen [00:24:51]:
That has to be done. Hey, it's me, Mike's kid. Wanna tell us your wild shop stories? Or maybe you just think my dad's totally wrong. Call us at 704-CONFESS and leave a message. You can tell us we're awesome, or you can tell us we're idiots. We're cool either way. That's 704-CONFESS. Just don't make it too weird.
Mike Allen [00:25:10]:
So I mean, last week we did 146 cars across the stores, and I'm like, you know, that's I would think at least 200 pre-booked appointments for their next oil change and their next— well, even if they're not in for an oil change, we can look at the sticker or the oil life monitor and extrapolate what that should be. So, you know, call it one pre-booked appointment per car, you know, 150, let's say, is what I would like to have seen. And, and we saw, you know, like 13 pre-booked appointments. Um, and so that's a little bit frustrating on trying to establish the new standard. And I'll be honest, like, a little confession for me, I'm typically kind of a, hey, let's do this, guys, come on, yay, rah rah rah. And, um, to the degree possible, I guess I kind of did a little ass chewing this morning. I was like, guys, it's been 5 or 6 weeks we've been talking about that. That's enough time to create a new habit if you're actually doing it.
Mike Allen [00:26:11]:
Yep. You know, I think the illusion that— or the, the comparison that I drew was a conversation I had with my kids not long ago, was I'd really like to be physically fit and strong and flexible, but clearly I don't want that as much as I want bojangles, right? And so I know what I need to do and I'm not doing it. That means I don't want it. Well guys, you know what you need to do and you also want to get You know, the— our high-tier pay bonus, but you're not doing what you need to do to do it because that's what removes the peaks and valleys out of car count, uh, is to pre-book. And then you can kind of, like you've talked about before, if you know how many pre-books you have, you know you're going to have some no-shows out of that. But if you've planted the seed and educated your customers, after a couple of cycles of, of the pre-booking game, they get used to it. And you can project car count times ARO, you can project your revenue with a high degree of accuracy. Yeah.
Mike Allen [00:27:12]:
Um, and I just can't get the buy-in right now, and I don't know effectively how to dick and, and like, just fucking do it, you know?
Matt Lofton [00:27:20]:
So let's talk about a little bit of that. So number one, do they have a script for how to have that conversation?
Mike Allen [00:27:28]:
Yes. Okay, it's at checkout, it's, hey, Miss Jones, you know, part of my job here is to be your car guy. You know, if you have any issues with anything that has wheels, I want you to think, I'm going to call Mike, right? So you don't need to worry about remembering when your oil change is due or when your state inspection is due because I've set reminders and I'm going to call you when it's due so that we can set an appointment to get that done. And then we set a— we have a specific color in our TechMetric scheduler that, uh, it's purple for us. So if you go in the calendar and you see purple, that's somebody who needs to be called and converted to a confirmed appointment. Um, and so we try to push all the state inspection pre-books to the first of the month so we can call them and say, hey, your inspection's due this month, and, you know, pick a day that's good. But oil changes, the date, you know, just 6 months out from the day we did it.
Matt Lofton [00:28:16]:
So a couple different things there. Number one, um, everybody— I don't know how other shop management systems work, but your lovely TechMetric shirt that you have there. Um, I do know how TechMetric works. Um, in TechMetric, if you pre-book that appointment, it has the service advisor's name that booked the appointment on it, right? So start by gamifying it a little bit. And you're— you know, if we're gonna— if we're gonna use carrots and sticks, carrots work better than sticks. Yeah. Um, And my personal belief is for this, I like it to be something smaller than bigger. Like I've tried to do big, you know, big bonuses for stuff like this before.
Matt Lofton [00:29:03]:
And for whatever reason, it's, it's too small of an act for them and it's too repetitive of an act for them to, um, to stay. But if I give you a dollar every time you do it, It's not a real big monetary reward, but it is a— it's a reminder that you did something right, right? So if I'm teaching a dog to sit, I don't give them a bowl of food, I give them one piece of kibble, right, every time. And it's just marking the behavior that I liked. So same concept with this. And then you can have a— if you want to have a competition at the end of it and have like a, you know, a dinner out at, you know, a nice restaurant kind of deal. You know, a dinner for two is the grand prize for the, you know, for the whole month. Um, we've done stuff like that before in the past when we're trying to rep a new behavior, you know, or build in a new habit, and that, that tends to work pretty well. But the big one that I'll do when I first try to implement this with clients is I give the advisor a reason to have the conversation.
Matt Lofton [00:30:10]:
And because the biggest reason that they don't do it is because they feel weird bringing it up to the customer, right? In their mind, the customer doesn't want this, and we're getting— and, and we're getting ready to shove up— shove them in an awkward situation that they're going to have to skillfully maneuver through with this customer. And so they, they don't want to do it. So Things that we've done is, um, you can do a BOGO offer where if they schedule the next oil change right now and prepay for it, then they get the next— then they get a second oil change for free. And the only caveat is they have to, um, they have to show up, they have to pre-schedule both appointments, and they have to make the— they have to make the first appointment. Right? So the reason that I like that is two reasons. Number one, it's easy for the salespeople— like, something to sell, like they like a gimmick in their mind because they think it's a cheat code to make it easy for them to sell. It's really not any easier in the end, but it just gets them in the habit of having the conversation about it, um, and getting used to the fact that, oh, I'm not going to get punched in the face when you know, we go to schedule this. The other thing is, if I can sell the pre— if I can sell the, the BOGO, I'm getting my, my money on the front end, and they
Mike Allen [00:31:41]:
have
Matt Lofton [00:31:43]:
to show up to the next one. So before it has any loss for me to be a loss leader, they had to have shown up twice, right? So they're in today. So I got 3 appointments out of one free oil change. I got today's appointment, two more pre-scheduled, and eventually when you get good at that, we're going to pre— we're going to start doing those halfway stops that we talked about, and you're going to get four pre-scheduled appointments out of a BOGO.
Mike Allen [00:32:15]:
So do you have that process in writing somewhere? I do. And if I ask you to, uh, send that to me And then ask all of our followers to not email Matt and ask him to send it to you also. Uh, he ain't got time for that shit. Um, maybe you can bug me and, and I'll, and I'll share it with you.
Matt Lofton [00:32:35]:
But, uh, you can always email Matt and I'm happy to talk to each one of you about it.
Mike Allen [00:32:39]:
Um, and about being an Elite client,
Matt Lofton [00:32:41]:
and about being an Elite client and how we can help you with this. Um, but yeah, I like to— and, and again, if you find this is something that works forever, then you can leave it, leave it in as something that works forever if it works for you. Um, but I usually like to run it as something, hey, we're going to do this for 90 days, right? And because what it does is it gives the service advisors a reason to have that conversation with the customer that they feel good about, because now they feel like they're giving the customer something and not, not taking something from them that they don't want. And they get into the habit of having that good good exit conversation. And, and again, from a, from a cash flow standpoint, it winds up being a good thing because you're going to get prepaid for an oil change on the front end, um, and then we're going to pre-book out these appointments. And it just, it helps us create the snowball of
Mike Allen [00:33:34]:
the habits, right? Yeah, I, yeah, I've got to do something different. And so, and I agree, I'm of the same mindset that the carrot works better than the stick. Um, so, you know, you, you alluded a little bit to a small spiff and a big reward, and I'm working on a couple of different spiff programs right now. Um, one of the things that I've realized in our audits of late is that we've really fallen off on, um, selling maintenance. Um, we've become a shop that you bring your broken shit to and we fix your broken shit. Um, you know, we're not doing kind of the low-hanging fruit that should be the easiest stuff to identify and convert. Um, you know, everybody knows that you change your oil to make your vehicle last longer and live longer, right? Well, all of the fluids will break down in some capacity eventually and need service to some degree, and there's a wide degree of variability, uh, based on the type of fluid in the vehicle and the service life and that kind of thing. But, um, we've just effectively stopped doing any, uh, fluid maintenance beyond oil services, um, and trying to pick back up on that.
Mike Allen [00:34:58]:
Um, and so I think about, you know, $600, $700, $800 ARO without any maintenance services, it's really not that hard to get to $1,000, um, if we pick up the maintenance also. So I'm looking at, um, a quarterly SPIF program with our, uh, you know, fluid service, uh, chemical provider. Um, but, you know, do you have any experience with things of that nature with programs like that, and how have you formatted them?
Matt Lofton [00:35:28]:
So we run a— we do have a SPIFF program that's weekly for the advisors, uh, on those things. Um, but I think, honestly, I would love to tell you that the SPIFF program will fix everything. It will not. Um, it's more of a reminder for me to know that we didn't hit our goal every week. So they've got a minimum number of services that we're supposed to sell, and it's based off our car count and the averages, you know, you know, we kind of average it out and say, you know, we should do 20% of our car count should need an alignment, you know. And so we said, hey, we're going to sell 50% of the ones that we present. So that's 10, you know, winds up being around 10% of the overall car count, you know, kind of deals with. So we have different targets for those things, and I'll have a spiff for them, uh, in their pay plan.
Matt Lofton [00:36:17]:
But again, really the way that I look at that is it's more of a It's more of— it opens the door for the conversation of, hey, we've got 3 weeks in a row where we haven't met our spiff goal for, you know, we haven't met our target goal for, uh, BG services. You know, what's going on with that? So what I have found, and we're in a traditionally challenging market for preventative maintenance, you know, it's a, it's a rural community, so trying to tell somebody with a 12-year-old car that they need to do a brake flush is, is a bit of a challenge. Um, but what I found is the easiest way to sell that is through the pre-books, because what I can do at that point in time is on, on the original oil change service, you know, before we pre-book, we're going to recommend a brake flush, right? We're going to have a low probability of selling that, um, but I can pre-book the next oil change with the brake flush in our system. And that way when I call the customer to pre-book, we can have that conversation again about the brake flush that we recommended last time. And then when they come in, we can go through the list of deferred services and what we had there for a repair plan, uh, in place and priorities and all that. So that makes the— as far as being able to sell those things on visit number one Um, I, I don't know that I have any silver bullets to load in and help you with that.
Mike Allen [00:37:47]:
Um, I think maintenance services are purchased by people who know, like, and trust you, right?
Matt Lofton [00:37:52]:
Sure. And so that's— and you're 100% right. And so the real trick is how do we get the same people in the door, you know, because the average, the average vehicle goes to a shop 1.2 times per year, and that's by AAA. Um, that number was put out, so— if you look at it and say there's, you know, we talked about there's two different ways to grow a business, um, is either to sell more to customers that you already have or to get more customers, right? Well, one of the ways that you can sell more to customers that you already have is get those same customers to patronize you more than 1.2 times per year. Yeah. So we push for 3 visits a year. That's what we really push for. Um, and and then like you said, by that second, third visit of the same conversation happening multiple times, we're finally able to get them into, you know, in, into that mode of thinking and,
Mike Allen [00:38:46]:
you know,
Matt Lofton [00:38:48]:
we've, we've won them over. Um, as far as the little, you know, the— when I say the smaller air filters, wiper blades, um, those kind of things. So I really love selling all that stuff. Um, and it's the easiest way to sell those things is just work this into your sales process and your inspection process, especially for waiters. Take it off, take it out into the waiting room. So I like to try to do this in our pre-inspection process, not when the technician gets to it. So this is part of our check-in process from the advisor. Um, so we're gonna flip the wiper blade up, tug on each corner just a little bit just to make sure it's not dry right and torn.
Matt Lofton [00:39:32]:
We're not grabbing a pair of needle nose pliers and yanking it across so we're not breaking people's wiper blades. And we, we go through a lot of conversation about how to do this correctly, but you know, if you tug on the corner a little bit and it starts to tear, we're going to take the wiper blade off and we're going to walk inside and I'm going to say, hey, Mr. Allen, I just wanted to show you, this is your wiper blade. 'Um, this is a bad one. Do you want me to put the bad one back on, or would you like me to replace it with a good one?'
Mike Allen [00:39:59]:
Right?
Matt Lofton [00:39:59]:
Versus if you just walk in there and say, 'Hey, I noticed that you need wiper blades. You want us to go ahead and put wiper blades on it?' If I ask you, 'Do you want me to put the bad one back on, or do you want me to go ahead and put a new one on for you?' Um, that's worked really, really well every time we can be consistent with doing that. Um, it's probably— so I'm a great one-day service advisor.
Mike Allen [00:40:25]:
If you've listened to this podcast for more than 5 minutes, you already know my favorite way to learn is to watch someone else screw it up first. That's the whole point of Tectonic 2026. It's not a conference where everybody pretends everything is perfect. It's owners, advisors, and techs getting in the same room to talk about what worked, what didn't, and what they'd do differently if they could rewind the tape. Because the painful truth is, most of the stuff holding a shop back isn't some secret trick. It's the basics we avoid: training, consistency, communication, accountability, inspections, workflow, hiring— all the boring stuff that actually makes you the money. Presented by Techmetric, Tectonic is happening April 9th through 11th in Houston. Tickets are on sale, and our listeners get $500 off standard pricing.
Mike Allen [00:41:13]:
With code Confessions500. Go to techmetric.com/tectonic— that's T-E-K-T-O-N-I-C— or tap
Matt Lofton [00:41:20]:
the link in the show notes. I despise the position for more than one day just because of all of the organizational skills that it takes to do it. I love the people interaction side of it, but I hate everything else. So it stresses me out, it stresses me out to no end. So I've got a tremendous amount of respect for advisors, but about the only thing that really changes in my store on a positive when I go in and I work the front counter for more than one day is we sell the heck out of wiper blades and air filters. And it's just because I'll walk in, I'll do that on every single car that comes in. I'll walk in, miraculously the majority of them say yes. Same thing with air filters, right? You get the air filter that's clogged, I bring it in and I say, hey, this is your air filter, it's super, you know, it's super dirty and clogged, do you want me to put this one back in or do you want me to go ahead and put a new one back in? And then same exterior light bulbs.
Matt Lofton [00:42:16]:
Yeah, same exterior light bulbs. Hey, this exterior light bulb is blown. Would you want me— you want me to put the bad one back in, or do you want me to go and put a good one back in? All of those little things like that, it works really, really well. In their mind, it's already off, right? And so if, if you leave it on, in their mind, they're paying for you to take it off and put a new one back on. So for whatever reason, they think it's half— it's half the job's already been done.
Mike Allen [00:42:45]:
Yeah.
Matt Lofton [00:42:46]:
So they might as well just go ahead and
Mike Allen [00:42:51]:
put a good one in. Um, so we got Vision coming up, uh, soon.
Matt Lofton [00:42:57]:
Are— is Elite going to be at Vision this year? So Elite will have some contingency there at Vision. I know Tom Amaro is going to be, uh, our director of operations. He's going to be there speaking at Vision. I'm sure Darren will be there. Um, they're, they're leaving me on the sidelines.
Mike Allen [00:43:12]:
I didn't, I didn't make the vision cut. You got benched. I'm excited about Tectonic coming up because of the coaches panel, uh, that I'm gonna be, uh, moderating, which should be a good time. It looks like there's gonna be representatives from like 7 different coaching organizations on stage. It'll be like a presidential debate with everybody has a lectern and a microphone. I've been told that potentially there will be, uh, a timer, and if they go over on time, their microphone's getting turned off, which I think will be epic. Um, and, uh, I've got, uh, you know, TechMetric runs a pretty, uh, a pretty tight ship and a very professional organization. So I imagine some of my natural childish tendencies will be reined in a little bit, but I'm still looking forward to doing that.
Mike Allen [00:44:03]:
I know that Darren's going to be on that panel, I believe. That's pretty cool. That'll be good. Um, that it— by the way, it's April 9th through 11th, um, in Houston, Texas. techmetric.com/tectonic. It's T-E-K-T-O-N-I-C. If you want to go, you can sign up, use code Confessions500, and you get $500 off the ticket, uh, just for being an awesome listener of our show. So there you go.
Mike Allen [00:44:32]:
Um, So there's Vision coming up, and then there's, uh, Tectonic, and then there's Summer, right? Uh, and I think we've got Tools, uh, I'll be at, and then obviously ASTA Expo is going to be awesome. There's a lot of good stuff this year, so should be a good year for that. Um, what else do you think we should talk about today, man? I mean, uh, we covered a lot of ground.
Matt Lofton [00:44:56]:
I've got a lot of homework. Yeah, I mean, what I would like to see is, you know, I'd like to see you try to fill in the gaps on, on the pre-booking. I think that's going to solve a lot of, you know, I think it's going to solve a lot more problems for you than you think, than you give it credit for, and that the team gives it credit for. Um, you know, one of the things, and I'm sure that you probably did this, but one of the things that helps to get buy-in on this is I always ask them, like, this, this time of year, and, you know, The fourth— end of the fourth quarter is always, you know, a bit of a slow time industry-wise for most of us. Not all of us, but for most of us. And, you know, the— what really, what really got our team bought into it was, you know, saying, listen, let's do this for 90— you know, let's do this for 90 days. And then when we started this, it was 2 years ago in July, right? So I said, hey, what is 6 months from today? You know, and they're like, do December and January?
Mike Allen [00:45:54]:
I'm like, yeah.
Matt Lofton [00:45:54]:
And I was like, what are— are we normally really busy in December? No, it's normally really bad. And I was like, okay, well imagine if we could make that better, right? Because we're busy, you know, our slow months are typically 6 months away from our, our busy months, right? So if we could take our, our high action and we could raise the floor of our slow months, and then when we raise the floor of our slow months and we pre-book out in those, it makes our busy months even big— even bigger, right? And so it really does build momentum, um, but the challenge there is they have to commit to it for a minimum of 90 days before you're going to see any lift out of it, right?
Mike Allen [00:46:32]:
So it's a plan a tree a day.
Matt Lofton [00:46:35]:
I got to, you know. Yeah, and, and there is going to be an element of that, you know, the, the carrot— the carrot side of things, you know. You need to have that reminder out there for them for the carrot just so they get something. Um, something that you're doing on a daily basis where you're counting it and giving something. Again, it doesn't have to be a big monetary reward, just something that's a reminder that we just want to mark the behavior that we did a good job. Uh, and then being really, really consistent on your end of, you know, we were supposed to get 12 appointments today and we only got 10. What's the deal, guys? You know, what do we got to
Mike Allen [00:47:06]:
do to
Matt Lofton [00:47:08]:
get those other 2? Um, the other thing is the 2 that they make them go back and book the appointments. And you will get some weird emails and text messages from the customer that say, hey, I just got a notification saying that I booked this appointment, I didn't book an appointment. Just work through that and make them work through that.
Mike Allen [00:47:33]:
Yeah.
Matt Lofton [00:47:33]:
Um, but I like, you know, the, the trick to building good habits is make it more difficult to do the wrong thing than it is to do the right thing.. And so, you know, if, if I look at the end of the day and we only had 10 preschedules and we were supposed to have 12, I find the 2 that we were missing and they have to, they have to pre-book them. I mean, and knowing that one of those customers is going to call and
Mike Allen [00:47:58]:
say, what the hell is this? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can start doing that for sure. So, yeah. Should be an interesting week for us. I've got, uh, at the big store, I've got 2 of the 4 advisors off this week because they both had things that I could not shift that were very— that were— so I'm having to work for a living.
Matt Lofton [00:48:21]:
It sucks. So it's a good opportunity to, to be the change that you want to
Mike Allen [00:48:25]:
see in the shop. Lead by example. All right, dude, well, thanks very much for the time. Um, I appreciate it.
Matt Lofton [00:48:34]:
And I will talk to you again shortly.
Mike Allen [00:48:37]:
All right, sounds good. Thanks for listening to Confessions of a Shop Owner, where we lay it all out— the good, the bad, and sometimes the super messed up. I'm your host, Mike Allen, here to remind you that even the pros screw it up sometimes. So why not laugh a little bit, learn a little bit, and maybe have another drink? You got a confession of your own or a topic you'd like me to cover, or do you just want to let me know what an idiot I am? Email mike@confessionsofashopowner.com or or call and leave a message. The number is 704-CONFESS. That's 704-266-3377. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, or follow. Join us on this crazy journey that is shop ownership.
Mike Allen [00:49:14]:
I'll
Matt Lofton [00:49:33]:
see you on the next episode. Ah, you know I said Jess. Uh, uh, you know I said Jess.