Auto shop owners need a trusted partner who will help steer business in the right direction.
While auto repair shop employees are plugging along each workday, there’s potential business literally driving in circles around them. And Ryan Burton, the CEO of Leads Near Me, knows how to flag it down and generate calls.
“Our focus is on blowing up the phones of auto repair shops and increasing car count,” he states. To do this, Leads Near Me hones in on what Burton calls “Local SEO,” Google ads, and beautiful websites to be found at the top of Google search results.
While Burton’s strategy might work for any local business, he has learned over his 32 years in media and marketing how to make it work especially well for auto repair shops, which have become a focus of Leads Near Me.
Burton founded Leads Near Me in 2016 in Atlanta, and the company has always had a customer-first philosophy. “We’ve never had a revenue goal,” states Burton. “Our sales goals are of zero interest to our customers. We focus on what is important to them.”
As a fail-safe against ever forgetting who comes first in the business equation, Leads Near Me adopted the acronym: C.A.R.E., that Burton and his team live by. “C” is for car count; “A” for attentive; “R” for results in every area; and “E” for enthusiasm.
It’s a recipe that resonates with Leads Near Me’s longest standing customers. In fact, the company still counts its first repair shops among its current partners.
Ken Stafford, owner of Next Auto Care in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, is Leads Near Me’s shop No. 1 and has been working with the company since 2015. He says, “Leads Near Me has really turned on the leads and they keep coming straight toward us.
They have rebuilt our website and have been a great partner to get more people in the front door, and more calls.” Stafford adds, “Leads Near Me is a great resource for helping your company grow.”
The functions that Leads Near Me handles for Next Auto Care include Google ads, local SEO, the website, and even weekly Facebook posts.
Stafford says when he brought on Leads Near Me his auto shop’s business began to pick up, and since then he has seen his business grow through word of mouth, as well.
Burton notes that to be a good business partner to his customers, like Stafford, he and his team must do much more than simply order-taking. “This is critical: You have to be a partner by having difficult conversations with clients to help their businesses grow, not just fluff talk. This is valuable to a long-term relationship.”
Expertise, he adds, is obviously critical in helping auto shop clients reach and exceed their goals. But experts must also communicate well with their clients. “Expertise is defined by being able to explain something in a way that people understand. Experts can do this.”
In relationships, though, your partner will almost always make a mistake, it’s human to do so. “So, look for great execution from your marketing company and accept mistakes once in a while,” Burton says of the give-and-take business formula that has propelled his auto shop owner clients to become raving fans.
Another important element of success for Leads Near Me is a culture that Burton has learned to foster over time. He has maintained his rigorous focus on people first: his auto shop customers— their success and wellbeing—and his own employees. “I’ve worked for other companies that wanted to deliver [for] shareholders and didn’t seem to care as much about their people. But I’ve found that relationships are what matter. We care about our clients and our employees.”
Another admirable component of Burton’s approach is simplicity. “We offer simple pricing for everything. No deals, no discounts, just fair pricing all the time. That’s how we do business.”
For the Leads Near Me team, part of caring for its customers is going the distance to help them and being attuned to what they need, first and foremost. And that can be displayed in something as simple as a website change. As Burton says, “We make all basic website changes within 24 hours.”
He adds, “Whatever the right thing is, we’ll do it, and that’s what makes us different.”
