October 2019

I t’s Halloween at the end of the month. These days, people like to dress up as ghouls and go to loud parties. Then Halloween comes along and they are twice as bad! Yes, that was an attempt at humour, but the Editor keeps warning me about that. Seriously though, even Mrs P seems to get swept up in it all, perched on her chair in reception in a witch’s hat. It used to be one day a year. Now she is wearing the darn thing for the entire last week of October. She even keeps a Halloween decorations box under the counter. I had a feeling she wanted to do the place up last year as early as mid- October, until I put my foot down. Now, I have been to some of The Garage Inspector Any Savva’s seminars, and he is always warning the delegates of the dangers of a counter with regards to customer relations. It creates a barrier apparently. “Yes,” I piped up at the last session I went to, “I can see your point, but without the counter, where do we store the Halloween decorations?” I looked around to see who would support me on this. No one did for some reason. Andy tried to answer, but he seemed to be lost for words, and moved onto his next point. I think I won that round. Apart from the issue of the counter, I took on board all of his points. I know I like to play the part of the ageing dullard, but we would not be in business if we could not keep up. We use Halloween as an excuse to run “scarily good promotions” for our existing customers. Basically, it is winter checks with batwings. We email them alerting them to the looming bad weather, and invite them in for a free winter check. For loyal customers, if we find something, we will do the work with a 10% discount compared with what we might charge a new customer who just came through the door. We do it again in December, with snowmen on the email. Christmas and all that. I may have disagreed about counters, but I really took on board the importance of really working our client lists. It is amazing how much useful information you can find in there. I am really getting ahead on inviting customers for servicing. It triggers reminders for second cars and children’s cars too. Well, not children- children, adult children. We’re not servicing pedal cars just yet, although the way things are going with diesel and emissions it might be an idea to put a toe in that particular pool too. Seriously though, we have some customers whose university-attending children have some lovely classic cars that they rattle around the area in during their exceedingly long holidays. Our son, the University Student, has one himself. Do you know what is really scary? Quite how long the university “summer” break lasts for. Do you know they don’t start lectures until early October? If let things slide, Mrs P will be putting up the glow-in-the-dark skeletons in the workshop before he even goes back! SCARILY GOOD PROMOTIONS 66 AFTERMARKET OCTOBER 2019 TEABREAK: MEMOIRS OF A MOTOR MECHANIC www.aftermarketonline.net