NOLN ’S KPI HANDBOOK 24
THE NUMBERS YOU NEED TO MEASURE SUCCESS
(AND HOW TO CALCULATE THEM) B Y M AT T H U D S O N
Each year, NOLN asks in its Operator Survey whether owners are answering questions based on memory or by going through their records for reference. More often, operators are working from memory—55 percent said this, according to the 2019 survey. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It reflects the level of attention and recordkeeping that’s increasing in the industry. What shop numbers can you recall right now? If you ask Jimmy Grant, a 32-year industry veteran who runs East Ridge Fast Lube in Chattanooga, Tenn., there’s one performance metric that all operators need to know like the back of their hands. “My big thing is my cost of goods,” Grant says. “This is something every owner should know.” There are lots of different numbers to track in the quick lube business. But the bottom line is that operators who track their key performance indicators closely tend to have more success than those who don’t. This was the theme in Steve Good’s case study last month in the magazine (“No Number Too Small”), when a renewed focus on KPIs turned a struggling shop into a profitable one. When you know where the numbers are going, at different levels of the operation, you know better which levers to pull when a change is needed. Just ask Chris Cotton, an automotive business consultant and former shop owner with more than 25 years of experience. “Every KPI will have a cause and effect for why it’s great and why it’s bad,” Cotton says. “It’s one thing to track them but it’s another thing to actually go to each one and look and say, ‘This is what’s causing that.’” NOLN is proud to launch this KPI handbook, which should highlight the basic areas of attention and show you how to keep the books on top performance numbers for quick lubes.
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6/23/20 8:24 PM
