Shop owners often mistake revenue growth for traffic growth when it's really from discounts that kill profitability. Fix your per-repair-order metrics first, your labor rates and ticket size. Then traffic stops mattering.
If you haven't, um, had any formal training, if you haven't been taught the financials, things like that, somewhere along the way you will, you will, uh, walk into a month where you had better gross. And, and usually if it wasn't intentional, the month where you had better gross will come from, uh, traffic. And then we start to buy into this thing, and the tribal knowledge comes from the sales side. On the sales side, uh, it is a numbers game. There they need more ups, they need more. And so a lot of times that knowledge makes its way over to the service drive and everybody thinks you just need traffic, you just need traffic and— It's never traffic. Yeah, it's a trick bag where I go advertise, I raise expenses and on those coupons are discounts. I lower my ELRs and then I do it even more times. And, you know, to your point with the Toyota stores, you, you, in that scenario, you're losing in a lot of situations more. So it's not intuitive, but it truly is the case. You got to slow down to speed up. You got to do better with each RO first and hit your benchmarks in ELR and hours per RO and total dollars per ticket and then go increase those, you know, go increase those things.
It's very rare that when you fix those things, anybody talks about traffic.
