Silver Bullets or Process Communication:;Meunier on Management

A silver bullet is what we call that one tip or trick that we believe will make all of the difference in our business.

Everyone is looking for that silver bullet and as a result we spend copious amounts of time and effort looking through magazines, reading training manuals and listening for those silver bullets at seminars, we can use in our shops. Often we find lots of good ideas. However, while many sound good at the time, they just really don’t fit with the way we run our shops, or the economics of our location.

If there is something that we can call a silver bullet in this industry it would have to be the idea of process communications and change. Simply, if we want to move forward and be successful, we need to change. And to bring about that change, we also need effective communications or process communications to ensure that everyone, from the owner of the shop down to the technician and service writer, are all moving in the same direction. If there isn’t good communications amongst everyone, or a lack of buyin for the changes needed by all the staff, then problems will inevitably happen.

Here is an example of what I mean by process communications. Two shop owners, each running three-bay shops, decide that they need to improve their quality of life. One looks that silver bullet and takes a class where he learns a few tips and takes them back to the shop. However, this owner’s staff is no more interested in change than he is, so they try a few things and a year later not much has changed and the owner is in the same place he was before. He is stressed, possibly may have to lay off the staff he hired last May when he first decided to try that silver bullet and he is once again back in the bays working on cars along with everyone else at the shop.

Now, let’s look at the other shop owner. This shop owner and his staff attend regular management training programs together and take the ideas they have learned and together work to put those ideas into practice at the shop. There is buy-in from everyone and all are working and communicating together to make the changes work. The results cannot be more different for him as compared to his counterpart. A year later, this owner sees his personal income is up $115,000 over last year, has no stress and he is spending less time actually working and more time doing the things he really enjoys. And to add a little interesting tidbit of information: This shop owner actually exists and he is in a remote location in 2 bays, not 3 bays.

The first shop owner is among the majority in this industry and when the cycle outlined in his shop repeats itself over-and-over again, we see the number of shops out there diminish. Often we hear of the shortage of manpower in this industry. In fact, I would argue that there is really no shortage of technicians or staff. Instead, it is shortage of the right management and communication strategies that cause many shops to not be operating at the efficiency levels they are capable of achieving. If most of the shops out there had technicians with 90 per cent productivity, our manpower shortage would be almost gone and we would have fewer shop owners opting out of this industry.

So how do we start making more shops operate like the very real shop I mentioned earlier? The first thing that has to be done is to stop pretending there is some magical silver bullet out there that will fix everything. Instead, what every shop owner has to do is evaluate their business, discuss and

develop the processes that have to be put into place to get the shop to be more efficient, productive and profitable, and then to get everyone in the shop onboard to make it happen.

One way to get going on this is to start taking an ongoing consultative style of training session that uses process communication to help the shop owner understand what has to be done and then how to go about doing it. While there are well over 30 groups across Canada doing this kind of training, it seems the shop owners that could benefit from such courses are too caught up in the time it takes to attend the class and the $295 it costs to attend. But that excuse just does not wash. The average shop owner attending a process communication session on a regular basis will increases their gross sales by $11,000.00 per month and their gross profit will be in excess of $7,000 per month. So why quibble about an afternoon per month and a $295 session fee when the bottom line goes up some $6,700?