December 2020

buffer to address any issue that comes up. Your customer is happy they get to pay in instalments. Inaction Maybe you have a personal project car that hasn’t seen the light of day in a year. Maybe a customer stopped responding to calls and simply left their car with you. Either of these cars unfortunately doesn’t represent a lot of value to your business. They do, however, represent a cost. They are costing you space and costing you time. As property becomes more expensive and there are more and more demands on your time, having an extra dead car on site starts to add up your losses. It’s understandable, however, to see the pain of pulling out the car and dealing with it as greater than the pain of leaving it in place. Eventually, however, the pain of letting it sit will grow and you will work on the car. Don’t let it get to that point. It’s still costing you in the meantime. If your labour rate is £60 per hour and the dead car in the corner takes up 10 minutes of your time per day (in blockage, moving cars, and searching around it for parts), it’s costing you roughly £2,500 per year, D usty car covers. Puddles of antifreeze left on the ground. Cars stacked up against the back wall. Blown engines stuffed into the corner next to the old exhaust. A yard full of non-runners. These are symptoms of a common problem that faces independent garage owners. Especially those that work on long-term projects. When you open your garage in the morning, do you spend the first 10 minutes moving cars outside? Are your customers and staff not guaranteed to have somewhere to park? Are you held up by your cars blocking each other from moving around the workshop? Do you then repeat the morning procedure at closing time and second-guess yourself when you think you’ve got all the cars behind the locking door? There are a number of reasons that could explain why your garage is too full. At Driven Performance Advisors, this is one of the first issues we often need to address with frustrated garage owners. A clean workspace is an efficient workspace. Organization and cleanliness are viewed as professionalism. Customers equate professionalism with quality. Quality leads to higher prices. You’ll save time moving cars, you’ll know where your tools are, and you’ll have easy access to spares and storage. More profits for less frustration. Here are some of the common reasons why your garage is too full and some ways you can fix it. Prioritisation If your garage handles both short and long-term projects, long-term projects have a tendency to move slower, no matter what mitigating measures you put in place. If you do engine swaps and services, your engine swap cars won’t always move out the door as quickly. Your techs are likely to get pulled onto the short-term jobs to make the quick money, while long- term cars collect dust. A full air suspension replacement may sit on 20 AFTERMARKET DECEMBER/JANUARY 2021 BUSINESS www.aftermarketonline.net IS YOUR GARAGE TOO FULL? Organising your workspace more effectively might be the key to productivity and profitability the ramp for weeks with a half- finished shock absorber while oil is changed and brake pads get fitted day after day. Long-term jobs require a certain amount of comfort to say “no, I don’t need immediate cash flow today and I can focus on the big job.” Don’t have that comfort? Push through anyways and make time for the big jobs. One strategy to push the big jobs through quickly is to make deadlines with your customers and set up a payment plan. Rather than just taking an upfront deposit and then the balance on collection, set up a big job with your customer like this: Customer drops off the car and pays for the materials you’ll need to complete the job You agree with the customer that the car will be picked up in two weeks’ time. This gives you plenty of time to repair the car and fix any imperfections and troubleshoot all the running issues The customer agrees to pay you half of the balance after one week and the remaining balance upon collection. This structure keeps the cash coming in and holds you to a deadline, while also leaving you a BY Arun Coumar, founder and MD, Driven Performance Advisors