Transparency builds trust. Trust builds business featuring Mike Collins of Collins Auto Care in Houston, Texas.
It’s easy for most auto shops, myself included, to mimic what other shops are doing. Asking other shop owners questions like, "Hey, how do you do this?" or “What do your customers like?” I definitely started off that route, and although we were growing, it was a slow growth.
When I began implementing newer, more modern strategies, my shop’s growth really took off. I first implemented a digital vehicle inspection (DVI) system with Tekmetric when I had about four team members in 2017. We were doing about 100 cars a month.
It was an adjustment. There were a couple of things I had a hard time with at the beginning.
Essentially, I tried to run our shop’s physical systems—like our whiteboard—the exact same way as the DVI software.
What I didn’t realize was I needed to make two changes. One being that I needed to make the full switch to the new, modern-day auto repair shop software. The second being that I needed to adapt our physical systems to the software’s programs, or completely move them from physical to digital.
Once we did the full switch to the auto repair shop software, we were ready to rock n’ roll.
I loved when we first switched. Matter of fact, I had a five-year-loyal customer that had never bought anything but oil changes with us. For five years, we’d tell him he had a bad oil leak. Fast forward to using DVIs for the first time, I asked him if he would be the guinea pig for our new DVI system through Tekmetric.
Once we did the full inspection on his vehicle—with all of the pictures, findings, and pricings—we sent it to him via text message. He was sitting on the couch, and he's reading it. He looked up at me and goes, "Wow. Do it all!"
My jaw hit the ground, and I'm thinking to myself, “You've got to be kidding me.” We had tried everything with this customer—a show and tell, we've brought him out to his car to show him the leak—but for some reason, once he saw it there on his cell phone and with no hesitation said, "do it all".
Once I knew the influence digital vehicle maintenance software had on my shop’s customers, I didn’t hesitate keeping it and bringing it into our additional locations.
The say “yes” mentality, being there for the team so they could be there for our customers, and using shop maintenance software are all a huge piece to the puzzle.
Visit https://collinsautocare.com/ for more info.
