In the journey to rebuilding his shop's revenue, Ryan Hillenbrand, owner of Urbs Garage and Collision Center, began following Aaron Stokes “teeter totter” method. Hillenbrand describes the method as focusing on one specific part of your business before focusing on another, and then switching back forth, but never both at the same time. He says that if you are working on two things at once, like car count and your staff’s ability to do work, you’ll never quite fix either issue.
As part of the method, Hillenbrand began focusing on training his advisors on how to properly estimate and sell complete jobs. To add to the effort, he began having his employees perform full inspections on the cars coming into his shop. But this wasn’t completely done to generate extra revenue.
“The reason we started doing them [inspections], wasn't because we thought, ‘dang we need to make money off of these',” says Hillenbrand.
But instead, the inspections became a way to “cover their own butts.”
“We would have customers come in and we would fix a tire, or a water pump for them,” explains Hillenbrand. “We would then walk around to the back of their car and they’d look underneath it and say, ‘my spring is broken, it wasn't broken before I brought it in,’ obviously it was but people do those kind of things.”
While ensuring safety and protection, Urbs Garage and Collision Center also started seeing a higher ARO and a rise in their revenue.
