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KUKUI

ONE LESS TASK CREATES OPPORTUNITIES FOR MORE

MARTY ROSS USES KUKUI TO HELP AUTOMATE HIS SHOP (AND KEEP CUSTOMERS ROLLING THROUGH HIS DOORS)

What do you do when a local Ford Motor Co. dealership sues you for copyright infringement for being known as “The Ford Guy?”

You remain The Ford Guy and change your name. No matter what you call it, quality work endures.

That’s part of the story of Marty Ross and TFG Automotive, Ross’ Ford-focused repair shop outside Nashville, TN. Though Ross also works primarily with Lincoln, Nissan, Honda, Kia, Hyundai and Saturn vehicles, his commitment to quality began with Ford and the same holds true today. Trained at a dealership in California and soon striking out on his own, Ross is a veteran and self-described machinist by trade and analytical thinker who sees, “All six sides of the cube; two sides of the coin never tells the whole story.”

To help him see all six sides of his business, his clients, and his goals, he relies upon KUKUI and its suite of communication services.

“Everyone still calls us the Ford Guys,” Ross reflects on his decade-plus experience as a business owner and Ford certified master technician.

“Being my own boss suits me,” he says. “The way the dealership I worked at treated customers was not anything with which I wanted my name associated. (After taking his talent with him, the dealership had to fire three other employees it couldn’t afford to keep without Ross’ skills and efficiency.) Today, TFG Automotive sits on two acres, roughly 5,500 square feet, six bays and enjoys a robust and loyal clientele.

Ross knows his market and is focused on getting the shop to run seamlessly. He says he faces the same challenges all owners face, and though he’s not interested in expansion, he is interested in maximum efficiency. To help achieve those goals, he started working with KUKUI in 2013 and hasn’t looked back.

“My main focus was to fill in the gap in our CRM software,” he says, “and we weren’t getting the one-on-one attention we needed. KUKUI designed and built our website and I was using them as our primary customer retention tool, mostly focusing on reviews at the time.”

As time went on, Ross became more comfortable with the suite of options and started using them as both a marketing platform to solicit new customers and to strengthen relationships with old ones. He sent postcards around the holidays, and as more data (and customers) became available, he was able to see and manipulate the shop marketing numbers more and more.

“I’m a data guy; I like to see the numbers, and KUKUI was very customizable for what we needed,” he says. “We eventually got into DVI; I had used it more for internal training to see where I needed help in my own assessment abilities, and we’ll continue to use more of its features as we become more familiar with it.”

Automate for Simple Solutions

Since the onset of the pandemic, Ross has utilized KUKUI’s texting features more and more. “It’s such a new way of communicating as an owner that I’m taking it cautiously and don’t want to go too fast and make mistakes,” he says.

To help further avoid mistakes, Ross speaks with his dedicated KUKUI account manager fairly regularly. “I like having an account manager who assists me,” he says, “and I like that anyone can go to my site and set appointments. It integrates well with our other shop software, auto populating all the right fields and keeping us on pace for the day.”

Ross says that as an owner, any tool that reliably eliminates steps is a tool he can get behind. “I also like the ease of approving customers’ appointments with optional times for them if the primary one doesn’t work,” he continues. “Automated rating asks are also great; as an owner, that’s one less thing to worry about.”

Ross knows his customers receive automatic appointment reminders and gentle nudges inquiring about regular maintenance appointments, “and that’s been effective,” he says.

“Overall, KUKUI is hands-down doing what we expect them to do and even a little more,” he says. This year, Ross expects to make a little more as well— his shop is on pace to make 2021 their best ever.

Since I use them for retention marketing, my customers are getting the emails and the “haven’t seen you in a while” notes, and that’s been effective. Right now, KUKUI is hands-down doing what we expect them to do and a little bit more.

A little bit more is a great mantra for TFG Automotive, and Ross plans to add an additional employee and continue to familiarize himself with KUKUI’s tools. “Utilizing the text platform will greatly increase our communication with customers and is faster than leaving a message,” he says, “and we embrace anything that makes our lives easier.”

LEADS NEAR ME

MAXIMUM MARKETING. MINIMAL MANAGING.

ACHIEVE SUPERIOR SHOP EXPOSURE WITH LEADS NEAR ME

As a shop owner, Ryan Bennett walks about twelve miles per day. From the desk to the bays to the lot of United Auto Care and back again, Bennett is as busy as they come. He took over from his father in 2015 and the company’s best year up until then had been about $294,000.

“If I don’t do that in two months, I’m ready to pull my hair out,” he says. Success is stressful. Averaging about $2 million revenue per year with four technicians and a pair of service advisors, Bennett is bursting with work and hungry for more. But it wasn’t always that way—his hectic schedule is a result of good work coupled with incredible marketing. To that end, he credits Leads Near Me.

Local Focus for Maximum Exposure

Leads Near Me is not your typical marketing company. They don’t just cast a digital net and troll the easiest SEO waters hoping for bites; rather, they focus on one client per category per area.

“We’ve turned down other shops in the area to focus on Ryan Bennett,” says Ryan Burton, founder and CEO of Leads Near Me. “It’s not a perfect system but we do our best to focus on one per area.”

“Overall, we deal with hundreds of shops in 37 states and two countries,” he says. Burton is a media and marketing veteran of 30+ years and uses his extensive knowledge to help the best of the best, focusing mostly on Google ads, local SEO and shop website integration. In his words, “we are the people who make the phone ring from Google.”

And ring it does. It wasn’t always as robust, though—when Bennett took over, the shop was on its last legs.

“My old man is really old school and believed in word-of-mouth,” Bennett says, “and that’s how things were done and that’s how it went. I knew there had to be a better way.”

Bennett describes just how much Leads Near Me was able to help his business. They rebuilt the website and then suggested more websites and three different company brands. Bennett now has three side-by-side shops— general auto, Euro and diesel—with ad campaigns targeting each specific market. United Auto Care enjoys great success with all.

“Leads Near Me and Burton’s team built my phenomenal websites, manage my Google Ads, SEO, call tracking and analytics, and they do my social media. We meet regularly and have very indepth discussions about where our business is coming from and we adjust as needed. Over the past four or five years, I’ve seen a direct 20 percent gain from working with LNM. It’s a factual difference I can see with my own eyes.”

Burton says it is critical for Leads Near Me that clients get great service and communication. Bennett can track his ad spend and ROI “dollar for dollar, customer for customer,” and see how they’re spending. He says it took about three months to really see a difference, but by the second quarter with Leads Near Me he could see where things were going.

“And by year’s end we were dialed in,” Bennett says.

“Every shop around me is slow while I’m on a three-week backlog. Looking ahead, we have beyond busted capacity. We’re full. We would love to hire more technicians but we have no more bays to put them in and the average car count is insane.”

Thankfully, Bennett’s lot has space to build and that’s exactly his plan. He sees no end to how busy his shop is and he accounts for that growth directly to Leads Near Me.

“I trust them so much with my advertising that I call monthly and ask, ‘Do I need to up my spend?’ It’s their job to generate leads—and they’re extremely effective at it—and then the onus is on us to repair the vehicles and get them back in the shop. This business marriage is amazing; Leads Near Me does an amazing job getting visibility and we do our job to make sure our customers never go anywhere else.”

Bennett was at first skeptical. He says he had seen the dog and pony show from other companies before, but everything about his experience with Leads Near Me has no precedent.

“I can remember Ryan Burton’s words the first time I talked to him—he said, word for word verbatim, ‘your troubles are over. You’ve called the right place.’ As a business owner, I thought that was crazy. We kept them on a really short leash but soon handed the complete marketing over to Leads Near Me.

“They take care of literally everything. I can focus on running my business.”

To see how Leads Near Me can galvanize your marketing and let you focus on your business, check out LeadsNearMe.com.

MITCHELL 1

CUSTOMIZE, CATEGORIZE & REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR SHOP SOFTWARE

THE MITCHELL 1 SUITE OF TOOLS ENABLES SWIFT ACCESS AND 100% RO TRANSPARENCY

Q: What does a top three finisher in the World Skills Olympics in diagnosis do with his spare time?

A: Open a repair shop, of course.

“I need a ton of stimulation,” says Fred Gestwicki, Jr., owner of Fix It With Fred (Canton, OH), “like, mindblown stimulation.” Fortunately, there’s no end to that in the automotive aftermarket and repair industries. Before owning his own shop, Gestwicki worked at a Hyundai dealership and became bored when he had reached the top of his craft.

“I didn’t want to work as somebody’s employee,” he says, “I wanted more. I wanted to control the business myself, and I really like helping people; that’s my motivator, and you can only help so many as a technician at a dealer. As a shop owner, you can help a lot more.”

And despite the pandemic, Gestwicki is expanding; his shop set an all-time sales record in April and expects to break it again this May. So much stimulation (ie, business) requires a way to control and manage the chaos.

To that end, he relies upon the Manager SE shop management system from Mitchell 1.

Welcome to Mitchell 1 Land

“Mitchell is one of my main tools in the shop,” he says. Gestwicki has been using Mitchell 1 software for over ten years—a technological eternity for today’s shop owner.

“The nice thing about Mitchell is the many spots to categorize customers; what that means is instead of just your basic info as a customer, I can put you in groups, use remarks, jot down notes, mark items with flags—I can do whatever I need to do so that when I intersect with you I know who I’m dealing with.”

Gestwicki cites vehicle memos as a favorite example. The memos automatically appear on the repair order, so when the shop has the vehicle history from another shop or notes from in-person encounters, “It’s all there,” Gestwicki says, “so after I see your car once, everything auto-populates on the RO for me. That helps give a personalized experience for the customer. If the customer tells me this car is how they haul their kids, that’s good to know. That way my SA, for example, can mention that and help the customer keep the car safe.”

He also enjoys the inventorying aspects of Manager SE. He has it set up for many of the shop’s most common vehicular component sales: oil filters, wipers, etc. When any sales reps show up, it’s the work of a few seconds to see what he needs.

“Other POS systems I’ve used lacked in inventory, service procedures, estimators and parts catalogs, and Mitchell is the most rounded product in the automotive service industry.”

He also enjoys the searchability of vehicle history. “Two customers have brought the same VIN numbers and vehicles for ten years, for example; they still own the same car from when I opened. When they come in, I know instantly when I repaired the brakes last; I know they lasted 65,000 miles; and knowing the history of the car, I can recommend better service.”

“We also use reporting a lot,” he continues. “I don’t mean reports in general; there’s a specific database tool that no one knows is there (the far left tab). You can set up criteria for what you want to know, and it will spit out a huge CSV file for you to analyze. I’m a data junkie and I need to know; how many new customers last month, last three months, last six, last twelve; in a recent update they added Favorites, and now I know where those reports are and I can easily train staff to get the data I need.”

Gestwicki also cites the customer service as top notch. “When you call Mitchell, you’re getting a fix right now. It’s a very organized company. The software is also dependable— you go in and it’s never broke. I love working with Mitchell; if there’s a problem or a question, you just make a phone call. If something does break in Mitchell Land, they change their voicemail to let clients know that something is down. They’re very proactive.”

“Huge, huge fan,” he says, en route to another sales record. To learn how Mitchell 1 can help you succeed, check out bit.ly/M1_ShopGoods.

OEC

OEM PART INFORMATION AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

SPEED UP EFFICIENCY IN YOUR SHOP BY UTILIZING THE FREE, EASY-TO-USE PARTS ORDERING SYSTEM, REPAIRLINK SHOP

When it comes to ordering OEM parts, access to accurate information is everything. Having a way to view correct OEM part diagrams and details can mean the difference between a vehicle leaving a shop in a timely manner, or not.

RepairLink Shop, from OEC, is an all-in-one online parts ordering system that allows independent repair shop owners access to not only a quick and easy way to order OEM parts, but also the needed illustrations and diagrams to do so accurately.

Dwayne Myers, CEO of Dynamic Automotive in west Maryland, says they were early adopters of RepairLink Shop, and the online parts ordering system is now a staple in his business.

“I definitely attribute part of our growth to RepairLink Shop because of our ability to get the information we need, and then to actually get the right part in a timely manner,” he says. “All of those things help us get better, and when we get better, we get faster and are able to more efficiently get cars in and out of the shop.”

Vast and Complete Part Selection

Because of availability and reliability, around 40 percent of the parts used at Dynamic Automotive are OEM. And for Myers and his business, the fastest, most reliable and cost-effective way to obtain those parts is through RepairLink Shop.

“The selection of parts through the system is so broad and across so many different makes—it’s not just one supply chain,” he says.

The all-encompassing catalog is easily accessible to all members of the Dynamic Automotive staff who may need to locate parts, aiding in each team getting vehicles back on the road as quickly as possible. RepairLink Shop also supplies information on specific part numbers and quantity of parts in stock at customer-specific pricing.

“Not only is the system easy to click through to get to what we need,” Myers explains, “what it provides us is beyond valuable to help us fix these cars.”

The free parts ordering system is accessible on computers, tablets, as well as smartphones, putting RepairLink Shop in every technician and staff member’s hands.

Access to Comprehensive Diagrams

“One of the features we enjoy most about RepairLink Shop is the ability to pull part diagrams right from the OEMs,” Myers explains. “The diagrams allow technicians to pick and choose exactly what parts they need for the repair.”

The illustrations are filed within the parts ordering system and are quickly searchable, making it easy to access for any parts manager or technician.

“The nice thing about the part diagrams is that we’re able to download them and then print them out,” Myers says. “We can then go to the technician with the papers, and they are able to circle which parts they need and the corresponding numbers.”

Overall, the detailed diagrams guarantee efficiency by ensuring accuracy—taking away any guessing that could result in part errors and lengthened repair times.

“When you have a diagram, there’s a higher percentage that you’re going to be able to get the car fixed the first time without delays of additional parts ordering,” he says, “which definitely increases the efficiency and productivity of our team.”

The technical illustrations also save time by removing steps of potential phone calls and excessive communication between the shop and the dealership, which is especially important with busy businesses like Dynamic Automotive.

Close Company Connection

Throughout the five years that Dynamic Automotive has been using RepairLink Shop, Myers and his staff have formed a great relationship with the team at OEC.

“If there’s an update on something or a new feature or function, they’re always open to input and trying to give us what we’re looking for,” he says.

The parts ordering system is simple to use for all members of the shop, Myers explains, but if there are ever any questions, someone at OEC is easy to get in contact with and happy to help.

“I would definitely recommend RepairLink Shop to all shops,” he says. “If someone has never tried it, I think they’ll be surprisingly amazed at the quality of the information available on the system, and how easy it is to access.” For more information on RepairLink Shop, visit RepairLinkShop.com.