Critical Automotive Workshop Procedures

So let's jump into that first one, this idea that you're going to need hundreds of systems to systemize your shop. And I remember where I heard from the founder of Netflix, his name's Reed Hastings, and he was talking about when they started to systemize their business and they tried to systemize every single aspect of their business, you know, down to an inch of its life, and they said their whole goal was to try and dummy proof Netflix. And then he said what ended up happening was they were only able to hire dummies because they dummy proofed it. It didn't kind of give the space for really smart people who would want to come in and do some of the thinking and still have space to do their work. So that's kind of what can happen if you over optimize. And sometimes people think like that when we talk about systems and processes, they think, oh, we need a systemized like McDonald's. But McDonald's is a hamburger business that's been in business for 60 years that trains 15 year old kids how to make a Big Mac. And it might make sense for them to create systems to that level, but you've got a different business and you've got, you know, mechanics who know what it is that they're doing or, and you've got certain team members that we don't need to tell them how to suck eggs. But then you've got other team members that might need the right training. So it's finding the right balance between, well, how much systemisation do we need to do here and what is the minimum number of systems you need to put in place? Because you'll find that, you know, going back to what the gentleman said right at the start, he wants to put systems in place to scale. Well, simple scales, complex fails. So we want to look for, how can we not overcomplicate things, how can we respect the fact that you guys are going to hire great staff, but what we want to give them is a framework and enough for them to do their best work without over optimizing this. So it's, it's really a matter of focusing on the 80, 20 we need to find, well, what are the 20% of the systems that are really delivering the 80%? The bulk of the result here. And this really speaks to and answers the question that most people ask when they start thinking about this, their business and where they should systemize. They think, what systems should I create first? That's usually the first question someone asks. They've already decided that they're going to systemize. And that's really because there's probably infinite. Like there's hundreds of systems in your business that you could be systemizing. How do we focus in on just the 10 to 15 systems that you should start with? And that's really. Again, I'll reference some of the tools inside the systemology book and we'll get you a copy of this. So if you haven't already got that. But the first exercise we go through is this method called the critical client flow. And every business should go through this exercise of going, well, who's my target audience? What is my primary product or service? And then you want to map the linear journey from grabbing someone's attention all the way through to handling an inquiry. How do you onboard them? How do you get them into the shop and get the car ready to have it servicing? How do you get it servicing done? And then once that's done, how do you hand it back? And what you want to do is identify that? And then inside there, we can actually identify what's broken and where is the pain inside your shop. Some shop owners here might go, ah, it's frustrating. You know, if we got 10 times as many clients, the lady at the front counter wouldn't be able to take those inquiries and handle them and get them into the system. Others might say, look, my shop's already at capacity. I'm not going to be able to schedule them in for months. So we. What we try and look at once we identify this is where is the bottleneck and where are the parts where your business currently struggles. And then that is oftentimes where we start systemizing first. So we're going to. And I can see there. Richard, I think you've gone and sat next to our. Our volunteer. Yep.

We're already here with Aaron. She's like, I'm not doing this by myself.

There we go. Erin and Mike, lovely to meet you both. Maybe just to start. And there's a good chance that maybe some of the others in the room are familiar with your business. But do you want to just tell me a little bit about your business, the size of team and the type of work that you do.

Like auto repair maintenance, Just like. Sorry, auto repair maintenance. Just like most of the people in the room, the shop. We have four staff in the shop, and then I am out of the shop. And that's why Mike is here to. To be able to go through this process, because I can speak to the top portion and he could speak to the rest. I guess that's it.

How many years have you guys been in business? Perfect. Very good. Excellent. All right, well, let's jump in. I'm going to share the screen. And I mean, everybody at some point will get a chance to do this for their own business. But if we work with Erin and Mike, I think most of the room will be able to kind of follow along and then think about it in terms of their own business. And if you've got a little bit of paper handy and you want to do this on an A4 bit of paper as well for everybody else. There we go. And as well, we'll walk through this process together. And again, the whole purpose here is to answer the question, if we're going to systemize your shop, where do we start? What are the first few systems? Now, the way that we do this is we start off thinking about our target client. So that's the dream client. And oftentimes an easy way to think about that is just think of one of your clients that you enjoy working with that pays your advertised prices, doesn't, you know, quibble over the, you know, what it is that you're doing. They let you do your good work. They refer friends and family. They keep coming back. Like, think of that person and maybe if you can tell me a little bit about that person, how would you sort of describe that, that target client?

That person is educated, typically, and also knows that they don't know everything and they want to rely on a professional to be able to tell them what they need done with their vehicle and they're willing to pay the price.

Is there a particular vehicle that they drive? And like, are they a family person? Are they married? Have they got kids?

It's typically women. It is a female owned shop. I do a lot of marketing that doesn't necessarily highlight as a female owned shop, but it is very obvious. I do all of the marketing. It's also LGBTQ inclusive and I make sure to make. Make that very obvious. So, yeah, I guess in terms of.

That, Sorry, I want you to just think about just one person because there's a whole range of people here that you could say. But if we think of one is, yeah, so let's say that she's a woman, she's educated. Yep. How old is she?

5 to 45.

So let's. I'll put. I'll just pop 45. So for the sake of the exercise, we'll try. And it's almost like you want to narrow it in on one person. So I'll pop her as 45. And is she married or kids? Sure. Have you got someone in your mind do actually, yeah. Tell me a little bit about her.

She works at the casino as an accountant.

Perfect. Excellent.

And the reason of maintaining her vehicle.

Perfect. And the reason you do this is, I mean, this is classic sort of when we think about systems, oftentimes there's a lot of different variables that we can go after. But if you, like always think, if ever you get stuck as you're creating your systems, you just go back to who this target client is and you go, what would work best for them? And it just makes it easier to solve some of the questions that you've got. And yes, obviously we're going to have different clients and they're all going to be a little bit different. And it's not like we turn away clients that don't meet this match. But if we focus everything in on making a great experience for this person, it also means we're more likely to attract those people into the business. So if we think about what, what might be the first product or service, we'll call it a service, potentially that if, if you were first going to meet this lady, what is one of the first things that she might do with you? Is it a car service or would she come in for accident repair or how, how would she become sort of introduced to your world?

Likely it would be, it could be anything, honestly, a breakdown or let's say, let's call it let's. Or an oil change. Some sort of like maintenance service.

Yeah. And then if, like you said, it could be a few things, a good way to do it is, is to almost go back to her, that dream client that we talked about and think about what did she come in for? Do you remember that by any chance.

She came in for, I think, a suspension noise and she was done with the dealership.

Perfect. So that's another way, if you get stuck, I'll do maintenance service because I think it's going to fit everybody in the room. But this might be a good exercise to go back and have a little bit of a look at, to think for everybody else. It's like, what is that gateway product or service to the rest of your world? And you start off there. So let's say the maintenance service. So now the next thing that we do is you want to think in terms of. We capture what we're currently doing, not what we would like to be doing. Oftentimes people, when they think about systems, especially if you're a business owner and you're, you know, a Creative type person. You might want to design things the way that you would like them to be, but especially in Erin's situation here, her shop is up and running. It's been going for 12 years. It's already working. Some of the biggest wins that Erin is going to get is by capturing what everybody's already doing and bringing everybody up to that standard and then we can improve upon that a little bit later. But let's just capture what we're currently doing and we're going to go through this exercise to think about how do we. And the purpose here is just to identify the systems. It's not to go into any great detail. So we'll just put a few words in each one of these boxes and we'll look at how the business is currently running. So how do you get the attention of the target audience at the moment? What sort are you doing? Referrals. You probably get some referrals, I imagine.

Yep. Word of mouth referral. I do TV commercials.

Yeah.

Google Ads, Facebook.

Perfect. And then move down the next one. Here is when the inquiry comes in, how does it generally come in? Or does it come in in a few ways? I'm imagining phone call or are they filling out a form or phone call?

Email form.

Yeah.

Facebook messenger, unfortunately, sometimes.

Yeah. All right. And then generally speaking. And the. The template here, because it fits a wide range of businesses, you'll notice there are some little prompts along the side here, some of these for like. That's more of a guide. We don't have to kind of follow it because your sales process and even when you take money is going to be a bit different. I know oftentimes for a lot of shops, you get the money at the end. It's not like you invoice half up front or get them to pay up front. So when we think of kind of working through this from the shop, once that inquiry comes in and there's probably some qualification, you know, you're double checking it's a real person or you're calling back. What's generally like the, the sales process here? Do you chat with them on the phone? Do you get them to come in? What. What happens next?

The.

The.

The person who does that. One moment.

Yeah. So it. Once, once they've contacted the shop and we. We've through whatever method they've chosen, we generally will do a phone call. If they're a new client, if I haven't dealt with them before, we do want to talk to them on the phone. We want to find out some things. About them, obviously, what they drive, what their current concerns are, what they want out of their vehicle, how important that is to them, do they have other vehicles, that kind of thing. And we just kind of qualify where, you know, where they're at with what they want from their vehicle. You know, are they. And they're going to be, you know, our target client.

Yes. And then if they're a good fit, what generally happens after the call? Do you invite them into the shop.

Or on that call? We would, we would typically book an appointment for them to either begin to address their concerns, whether they're general or specific. And we would get them into our system, we would have them entered and get their information and give them some, I call them, housekeeping items about how our processes work, what our appointments look like, how to get there for those things, how we're going to communicate with them between now and that appointment. And then of course go through how we're going to communicate with them the day of the appointment as well.

Perfect. So I've broken this into two because it's almost like the first little bit and it might all happen on the same call by the sounds of things. But the first part of the call is to kind of qualify them. And then if all is looking good and you go, yep, you kind of progress them to this booking in of the appointment where you get them into the system and you let them know how you're going to communicate with them and those sorts of things, then what happens? We kind of take. Skip a couple of steps here. I'm imagining because we're not taking the money up front, you've probably got some reminder system like you said, to let them know that they've got to come into the appointment and then what happens like on the the day like they drive their car in and then. Yeah, how do tell me a little bit about that.

Sure. There's two ways generally that they can get to their appointment with us. They can drop the vehicle off themselves as we give them an arrival time. Generally all of our appointments are drop off in the morning and leave with us. So we don't book specific times. So they arrive in the morning, they're there and ready to go for when our shop opens. We don't, sorry, we do offer a pickup drop off service as well. So for those clients that can't get there on their own, we'll go pick up that vehicle. And that happens between a certain period in the morning and drop off happens between a certain period at night.

Perfect. So a couple of things I Like about this is there are some different variations and whenever variations pops up because the business is already kind of running and just because we don't systemize something doesn't mean it's going to magically stop happening. So we, we identify what is the most probable and what is the most likely thing to happen and we start there first. So Mike mentioned that the vehicle drop off is the most common method. So we'll start off by kind of optimizing and systemizing for that particular method first. So the vehicle drop off comes off and then they obviously go off and do their thing and, and then there's obviously you doing the work, like the maintenance that or whatever the job is that happens in the shop. And I know underneath that there's going to be a range of different things and again we just keep this really high level on this document. The actual detail comes out a little bit later. But there might be a whole bunch of milestones under here. You know, maybe there's just the first basic checks, you know, filling the windscreen wiper fluid, pumping up the tyres, doing all those sorts of things. You know, probably at the other end there's the wash and vacuum before we hand it back. Maybe there's something in the job here in the middle and that these milestones will come out later. Just for now we map it like this. And then at the end after the maintenance, there's obviously the vehicle pickup as well. So that's probably when they come back into the shop. So is that kind of, you know, like it's, it's actually there's probably vehicle pickup and then you've probably got underneath there and we could probably even separate it. You. There's probably the payment as well as. Well, I'd probably separate that one out. Is there anything else in here? Like is that roughly the flow? You've got word of mouth, tv, Google Ads, Facebook to get people's attention. The inquiry comes in usually phone, email form, Facebook. There's some sort of phone call that might be two parts to the phone call. If they look like they're a good fit, we'll book them in for an appointment. We then get them to do a vehicle drop off Again. Underneath each one of these there's probably a range of things that happen. Then there's the maintenance, then we're going to collect some form of payment and then the client, you know, at the same time is going to come and do the pickup as well. Are there any other key areas that I might have missed there?

There's two that I Would probably include here as important. So at that maintenance, maybe it's the sub. Maybe it's one of the sub pair categories under maintenance. But go through and we look at the vehicle, we do a courtesy inspection, and obviously if there's a diagnosis that they requested and then there's the communication of what we found, and then we go through that. So we communicate our findings through a number of different ways. We do digital inspections, so they get a report sent to them. There will be a conversation through either email, text, or on the phone about what we've seen, Pricing options, timeline, prioritization. Yeah, you know, got a big list of things that they need, so that would kind of fit in there. And then approval from them to move forward or not. So I guess the sales process, you want to formalize that?

Yep, Love that. And I think the key here, oftentimes the most complex part of this for most businesses is this bit, the maintenance bit, because there. There's oftentimes quite a few different steps. It's going to vary from business to business. It has potential to vary also from job to job. So generally we start off to keep it really simple and high level. Just like you kind of mentioned there, Mike. These almost become like these milestones. It's high level. And we create this as almost like subsystems underneath this maintenance one. But first we just figure out high level, hey, here are the five stages we go through. There's, you know, initially taking the car into the shop. There's the initial inspection. There's the report. There's the approval. So you're starting to think along the right lines here. Perfect. Now, Erin, is there anything else in there? Oh, sorry, Mike. You go.

Oh, yeah, I got one more. I would put it between payment and pickup. And that is always the goal is to book the next appointment for the client. Much like going to a dentist office. We want to book that next appointment so they're still in the family, so to speak. Well said, Mike. Well said.

There we go. Preaching to the converted there. Love it. So is there anything else as well for you, Aaron?

No.

Perfect. All right. So as everybody else will kind of follow along as well and then create their own critical client flow, this tool becomes useful in a variety of different ways. Obviously, it helps us identify where are we going to get started and which systems do we create first. But it also help you to introduce to your team. Like, it's good for your whole team to have an understanding of the way that the business works, even though they might not have, you know, intricate understanding of each of the different steps. But if they can look at this and go, ah, that's where I fit in, that's the work that I do. This is what happens before me, this is what happens after me. It kind of starts to help them really think about the work that they're doing. But Erin, if we look at this and Mike as well, is there any area in here, like if I said to you you're going to have 10 times the amount of clients than you normally have, is there a particular area in here that you think breaks first? What or what would you struggle with? Is it getting the clients? Is it booking them in? Is it just doing the work? Is it. Where does that bottleneck appear?

I would say is ensuring every time that the client makes the appointment they get touch points. They get three touch points like every single time. And still we do see it's not all the time, but if it breaks, that's where it breaks.

Yeah. So it's this bit here.

It is.

Showing up for, ah, it's actually showing up for the appointment. So it's almost like around this, the vehicle drop off part.

That would be the, the majority of times I see that it breaks down is in that, in that area. I don't see any breakdowns with communication for the most part or booking. Nothing else really. That usually is the only thing that screws up the day.

Yeah, perfect. So as everybody else does this and they think about their own shops and you think about where is it that you're weakest? Because all problems that you have in your business are really systems related problems. And it's a really great frame to think about is yes, if, if you don't have enough leads. Well, that's a lead generation problem. If you're having trouble booking those appointments or making people show up. We try and think in terms of that's a system based problem. And what are some tweaks that we can make to the system to then reduce that as an error? So for example, we used to have a challenge in the digital agency to getting people to pay on time. And it was like they'd have an invoice that was 30 days and you know, some of them wouldn't be paying for 90 days. And we continue doing work and we started making some changes where we set up automatic reminders in our software, kind of like myob where we had payment reminders. But that wasn't working, they were ignoring it. And then we ended up making a real change to the root of the system which was we ended up requiring the Payment upfront. And we, we said at the start of the month, you month you pay and then we start working. And that was a way to work at the system level and completely change the way that we're doing. Then we stopped having issues of people paying late because we weren't doing any work unless they paid. And not that that works necessarily for you guys because you know, the payment example anyway, you kind of have to do the work and figure out what needs to be done before you can invoice them. But, but the takeaway here is that's the way that you want to always think about things. You go, what is the process that we're following and how do we fix it at the system level? So what that gives you an idea of where you would go to work first would be to think about what, what happens just in the lead up to getting vehicle drop off and what are the steps and what are the follow up reminders and how else might we make an adjustment to that system or changes. Some people that are sitting in here don't have any system or process. Like I can already tell, you've been in business for 12 years. You're a, you've got a partnership where one of you is looking after the shop, the other one's looking after the front end because one's probably more administrative, one's more on the tools. So you've got that magical combination. Not everybody in the room is going to have that. And probably because of that, Aaron, you're bringing some systems and process to what you're doing. So you, you might be more advanced than some in the room. And then there will be others that might be a little bit earlier, but there'll probably be also other shop owners in here as well who've kind of moved through the stage that you're at. But you're kind of probably at that point now where you kind of already have a bit of a process. Some like even when we just walked through that right there, it was clear enough in your head. Sometimes someone might do this and they'll go, oh, you know what, I don't even really have a script or what I ask when I'm booking in on the appointment or they don't know what are all of the different ways that the inquiries are coming in. So everybody is in a different place and it's just a matter of first figuring out. Because the critical client flow helps you determine, well, how does the business make money and how can we make sure that that happens without key person dependency. So every client is going to be a little bit different. They'll have different needs, but there are a whole range of things that will be the same for everybody. The way that you take the call, the way that you follow them up before they come in to do the vehicle drop off to make sure that they show up. You know, the way that you have the handover afterwards when they pick up the car and you book them in for the next appointment, there's a whole bunch of that stuff that just needs to happen and that's really where everybody wants to focus is they want to think about what is currently working in their business and how can we make it happen more consistently. So firstly, a big thank you for you, Erin and Mike as well for being our volunteer. Hopefully that I can send that through to Richard and then you can kind of keep reworking your own critical client flow and then use that as a way to narrow into, well, what systems do you go to work on first?